Air Force Turns 747 Into Holster for Giant Laser (washingtonp ost.com)

Trei, Peter ptrei at rsasecurity.com
Mon Jul 23 10:18:10 PDT 2001


With high-powered lasers, one of the important destructive mechanisms is
blast - the outer layer of the illuminated object vaporizes, and flies away
from
the rest of the target. The reactive force of this gives the target a hell
of a kick.
Kicking off strict alignment with it's flight path, or putting a big dent
(or even 
better a hole) in the side of a missile under several G's of stress
traveling at 
a high Mach number is not healthy for the missile.

Laser's have problems though - as they heat the air the refractive index
changes,
leading to 'blooming' or beam expansion. At too high a power density they
can
also ionize the air, which makes it effectively opaque. Dust, haze, and
clouds
are also problems.

Using *very* short pulses eliminates many of these problems.

Peter Trei



> ----------
> From: 	Steve Schear[SMTP:schear at lvcm.com]
> Sent: 	Monday, July 23, 2001 1:34 AM
> To: 	cypherpunks at lne.com
> Subject: 	Re: Air Force Turns 747 Into Holster for Giant Laser
> (washingtonpost.com)
> 
> At 09:14 AM 7/22/2001 -0500, you wrote:
> >Point this baby at the ground...
> >
> >http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27248-2001Jul20.html
> 
> I wonder what the destructive mechanism is for this system?  Heat by 
> radiant absorption seems an obvious but impractical method.  If it is,
> then 
> as the article mentions there may be some inexpensive and practical 
> countermeasures to such a system, such as making the exterior of the 
> missile body into a multi-faceted mirror able to reflect both IR and radar
> 
> energy (although doing the same for the nose cone might prove more 
> difficult due to aerodynamics).
> 
> steve





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