Laser beams being aimed at airliners?

"Colin W Kingsbury" wrote

I've seen pictures of Humvees with lasers mounted on top- seems the idea
was
to use them to detonate unexploded ordnance (by heating it up) at a
distance
and that sort of thing. Since UXO doesn't move it wasn't a big deal if it
needed a few seconds to reach critical temperature.

I also saw somewhere that there was some design work done to mount a
tactical laser weapon in a turret on the Joint Strike Fighter. The big
issue
was what to do with the excess heat. Seems the types of lasers they were
looking at were about 10% efficient, so for every 1,000 watts of light
output, you'd have 9,000 watts of heat. Given the size lasers they were
talking about, they needed a way to pull that heat off or the laser would
melt itself. So of course the engineers thought to use the airplane's fuel
supply as a heat sink. I sure would have loved to been in the room when
they
suggested that to the test pilots. "Sure, we'll just cool the 100,000 watt
laser by pouring jet fuel all over it."

A 1 Kw laser is tremendously powerful. 10% efficency is pretty good. 9 Kw
of heat to sink is no big deal. Several times that would be feasible since
it's only used for very short periods of time. Not sure what it would be
good for though.

moo




-cwk.

"Happy Dog" wrote in message
. ..
"Slip'er" wrote in message


I also heard a rumor that we tested a weapon like this once. A giant
LASER
with a mirror for high speed aiming powered by a huge diesel generator
was
driven out onto the battle field and blinded a bunch of the enemy in
desert
storm...so the story goes. But this source says they existed and were
never
used....

Visible light lasers wouldn't work since the targets can just close their
eyes or look away. UV would be more effective since it would fry retinas
before the victims could react. Also, UV lasers are available in
extremely
high power ratings.

moo