Hilariously full of cope article from an irrelevant former power.
According to Grant Shapps, the weapon could have "huge ramifications" for the conflict in Europe.
Press X to Doubt.
The laser was originally expected to be operational by 2032… ….the defence secretary told reporters while on a visit to Porton Down military research centre near Salisbury that he wanted to speed this up even further. "Let's say that it didn't have to be 100% perfect in order for Ukrainians perhaps to get their hands on it," he said.
Very funny assessment of the readiness and efficacy of this Wunderwaffe.
Any suggestion that UK lasers could be sent to Ukraine to take out Russian drones is optimistic.
Ahh the admission in the article that the whole notion of uk made laser weapons being used in Ukraine is just a nato fantasy.
In the same vain I’m looking forward to future BBC articles about how the uk is sending a battle ready gundam to Ukraine next week
Laser weapons require some significant advances in materials science to take place, so the only country I think can do it is China. Like, you could build one that blinds drones, or that blows up exposed explosives or catches flammable stuff on fire, but there's no way
of all countries fields the first laser weapon.
They actually have ones that can burn a hole through a commercial drone. I believe the bigger defense contractors already sell them, look it up.
But the problem is they're bulky, look ridiculously obvious, require weather ideal conditions, needs the targeting system to work well in those ideal conditions, needs to stay on target for a while and have dumb power requirements that Ukraine can't exactly supply. It's like the West™ wants Ukraine to lose, lmao
I feel like I'm a broken record, but I don't actually post about this very often:
Lasers will work in weather conditions that aircraft can't fly in. If the weather is too bad for lasers, it's way too bad for aircraft/drones/missiles. Like, maybe if an ICBM's target has bad weather it'll still work if it's got a large conventional or any size nuclear warhead, as you don't really have to worry too much about accuracy/getting blown off course, but any weapon that relies on atmospheric maneuvering will be grounded/crash before conditions get bad enough that you can't operate a laser.
The biggest issue is still laser power at the target. I absolutely do not have knowledge about classified laser weapons development (and I wouldn't share it here because we don't have a c/WarThunder comm), but they were only able to maybe blind UAV sensors and burn basically stationary objects at a distance a few years back. If the materials-science has progressed to the point where a stationary, ground-based system can burn a hole in a basic UAV at a distance (as demonstrated in a couple of three year old videos published by the weapons contractors, meaning performed under ideal conditions) than I wouldn't consider it a significant improvement.
https://www.dote.osd.mil/Annual-Reports/2023-Annual-Report/
DOT&E, the Department of Defense's Director of Test & Evaluation, has no reports to congress on any laser weapon system as of the end of last FY. This means they are nowhere even close to fielding any lasers, and are still in extremely early phases of development.
I was thinking more along the lines of dust/rain, it's not that it won't work but it won't be as effective, won't it?
All laser weapons used on Earth will operate in one of two bands, one in the visible green spectrum and one in the near IR spectrum, which have the lowest atmospheric impedance. This largely negates all but extreme weather.
Will dust storms impede lasers? Absolutely, but the density of dust in the air that would meaningfully attenuate a real, capable laser weapon would also effect radar and visibility, and implies wind conditions that would impede flight capabilities. Dust storms don't happen without wind.
If it's raining, and you can see an object, you can hit it with a laser. If the rain is dense enough that you can't see an incoming aircraft, the aircraft can't fly.
Now, if we're solely talking about the contemporary systems that the MIC ghouls are hawking as "laser weapons," then yeah, that Lockheed or Raytheon laser that shot down a drone in ideal conditions won't be able to.
China and I think also Russia have mobile lasers that are used for logging. It’s really cool how they can eliminate most of the danger by using those.
You got a link to somewhere I can read about those logging lasers? That sounds sick
I love lasers. There's times where I think I should have focused more on that and landed a job in the field. Also I'd love to have a laser harp!
I'll be honest with you, working on lasers is tedious as fuck. Maybe the research side is cool, but the industrial side is really tedious.
I can respect that. The grass is always greener.
i really think china is going to be the nation that makes huge breakthroughs with actual DEWs and coilguns.
stuff like that needs large, state managed projects to truly develop. each is like an Apollo program equivalent and we know the west just can't pull that off because the military industrial grift complex-vortex is just too strong now and the event horizon has been crossed.
china is going to: start a thorium-fission economy, possibly crack commercial fusion, and i bet even start mass production of solid state batteries before anyone else comes close
The main thing with those is just that there's not really a reason to use them over conventional firearms. Like gunpowder is ridiculously easy to mass produce and an extremely energy dense propellant to the point it doesn't really make sense to switch to less energy-dense batteries to launch slugs electromagnetically.
Railguns on the other hand seem to offer the potential to get projectiles moving at much higher velocities than the expansion of gunpowder would allow, if given enough power. The problem is that that would require a huge store of rapidly usable power and also getting velocities that a normal cannon can't do causes friction/arcing and oxidation of the rails after just a few rounds, meaning actually firing it totals the barrel in short order. So they have this theoretical "maybe this could replace over-the-horizon missiles for some tasks, if it could be worked out" but there's not much motivation to do that because the missiles are still cheaper and more accurate than a railgun would be and despite being a logistics hassle they're less of a logistics hassle than "this is the gun you get to fire like once and then replace the whole thing, we've got a few spares for that" would be.
Both the UK and the US have them already
They have prototypes, no fieldable weapons systems.
https://www.dote.osd.mil/Annual-Reports/2023-Annual-Report/
DOT&E, the Department of Defense's Director of Test & Evaluation, has no reports to congress on any laser weapon system as of the end of last FY. This means they are nowhere even close to fielding any lasers, and are still in extremely early phases of development.