15 replies to this topic

[Vellron2005]

So, people finally figured out that "no ammo weapon" trumps ammo weapons.. that Lasers vomit is better than ACs...

https://www.defensen...BE1KB8.facebook

Here's a real-life laser weapons platform..

I know people are already working on walking robots..

So actual Mechs are becoming more and more plausible..

[PhoenixFire55]

Propaganda and nothing more ...

100kW is enough to burn a whole in a stationary thin soft object at about 100m range in about 5-10 seconds. It isn't anywhere near enough to destroy an artillery shell at about same range of 100m in a tiny fraction of a second it takes to cover said 100m. This isn't a laser weapon. This isn't even a laser AMS. What it does is blind cameras, PSDs or other tracking devices on guilded missiles and drones in hopes it'll be enough for them to miss (which they won't because when blinded they simply home in on the last known target position). Needless to say the whole thing is powered by a helicopter engine, which obviously burns good ole kerosine or smth like it. Not exactly space tech either ... lol

British navy adevetised something similar a couple months ago - Dragonfire Laser Directed Energy Weapon (LDEW), except it was even more laughable at 50kW. Now don't take me wrong, an actual 50kW laser is an achievement in its own right, just nowhere near enough for it to be a weapon of any sort.

[Nesutizale]

In atmo laser aren't that good, bet these are for the space navy

[LordNothing]

i dont think lasers will ever be viable weapons. efficiency of lasers is terrible, you could get a lot better use of the power by pumping it into a railgun slug. when lasers start to get really powerful, then the potential of collateral damage goes way up. you wouldnt want to be within a klick of a weapon or target without safety goggles. its certainly going to be banned by the geneva convention for use against personnel, though its anti-missile role might be ok.

much of the rest of the battletech weaponry is totally viable though. missile work, guns work. even ppcs have potential of working someday (see project marauder, results were so good that all research was immediately classified, and that was back in the 90s).

[Anomalocaris]

Lasers have great potential (although particle weapons, in theory, are probably better for military apps). But the key is the power supply. Functional laser AMS systems (capable of shooting down mortars and artillery as well) have already been demonstrated by several countries. But the footprint and power supply makes them ineffective for anything but static emplacement defense, even if the systems are touted as mobile (multiple trucks which must be stationary and connected to actually work).

When we have mobile fusion reactors, then we can have better laser weapons. Otherwise they'll be limited to blinders and maybe AMS unless they're on board something with its own reactor like a naval ship.

[Snowhawk]

As far I know the Military is more interested in Micro-wave weapons. They go trough walls and if you have the Right frequenzy you can send a shock into the human nervous System. Even the electronic-System of a tank or fighter Jet can be deaktivated by Emp-Weapons. Newer vehicles, e.g. helicopters like Eurokopter Tiger, have a protection against Emp Signals. Rumors say that they are working on weapons with Scalar-Waves (Nikolas Tesla studied them).

[LordNothing]

Anomalocaris, on 17 May 2019 - 04:22 AM, said:

Lasers have great potential (although particle weapons, in theory, are probably better for military apps). But the key is the power supply. Functional laser AMS systems (capable of shooting down mortars and artillery as well) have already been demonstrated by several countries. But the footprint and power supply makes them ineffective for anything but static emplacement defense, even if the systems are touted as mobile (multiple trucks which must be stationary and connected to actually work).

When we have mobile fusion reactors, then we can have better laser weapons. Otherwise they'll be limited to blinders and maybe AMS unless they're on board something with its own reactor like a naval ship.

there are hard physics limits to how small you can make your fusion reactor. at least on any reactor that requires magnetic fields to control ions. the polywell seems like the only one you can really scale down well, mostly by virtue of plasma being in the form of a sphere rather than a toroid. even thats going to be 3 meters across, before you slap on your direct conversion grids and vacuum chamber and any x-ray capture/thermal recovery equipment you have. add a couple meters for that stuff. its still something you can stick on a truck but its not small.

iter and the skunkworks machine ended up getting supersized. of course the problem with fusion is you always need a bigger machine. the always 20 years away cliche is always because 20 years is about how long it takes to fund, build and run a new fusion machine, just to find out you need a bigger one. laser machines will never work because you need more than scientific breakeven, you need engineering breakeven, and lasers are bloody inefficient.

Edited by LordNothing, 17 May 2019 - 12:33 PM.

[Shadowomega1]

LordNothing, on 17 May 2019 - 03:58 AM, said:

you wouldnt want to be within a klick of a weapon or target without safety goggles.

I remember years ago when the show Future Weapons was ongoing and the episode they covered the THEL, the interviewee had people other people ask about safety goggles, and he laughed and stated the Goggles won't do anything if you are in the line of fire, and if your not then you wouldn't see the laser anyway.

[Mystere]

Lasers? Pfft!

I prefer Project Marauder.

[Y E O N N E]

Nesutizale, on 17 May 2019 - 03:57 AM, said:

In atmo laser aren't that good, bet these are for the space navy

Not true. That part has already been solved; it's one of the reasons why lasers intended to be weapons have been in the infrared frequency ranges instead of more potent higher frequencies (e.g. green).

LordNothing, on 17 May 2019 - 03:58 AM, said:

i dont think lasers will ever be viable weapons. efficiency of lasers is terrible, you could get a lot better use of the power by pumping it into a railgun slug.

Lasers are more efficient than previously thought. At one point, the theoretical maximum was something like 20%, if I recall. However, we have already exceeded that with some examples reaching 65% to 70% electro-optical efficiency and we have things in the works to take us higher.

The issues we face today are getting the power from the source and into a collimated, high-quality beam in a portable package because of material limitations and physical limitations in the techniques currently being used to combine beams.

A railgun is also horrendously inefficient. Not only do you have the losses getting the electricity from the source to the gun, which I suppose we can discount since those also apply to the laser, but the railgun relies on extremely high currents to generate enough force to slam that round out at velocities that make it desirable over a conventional chemical weapon, which means a lot of losses through resistance and other effects due to the close proximity of the rails over an air gap. And that velocity imparts extraordinary attrition on the rails themselves, meaning you get so very few shots at power compared to something like a conventional 16" gun.

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when lasers start to get really powerful, then the potential of collateral damage goes way up. you wouldnt want to be within a klick of a weapon or target without safety goggles. its certainly going to be banned by the geneva convention for use against personnel, though its anti-missile role might be ok.

This part is true. Incidental reflections from particles in the air could be permanently blinding without adequate eye protection.

I have this fiction I've been writing off and on for more than a decade, now. One of the main events is a pair of wars between a power that is only around late-Victorian in technological capabilities and another power which has access to technologies far more advanced, including lasers. Incidental reflections from laser blasts would regularly blind personnel and it became a trademark of the wars, though by the end of the first one darkly tinted goggles had become a regularly issued field item. Being difficult to see, especially at night, made many soldiers discard them to their own peril since the countermeasures against the use of lasers only dramatically increased the amount of reflections you might encounter.

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much of the rest of the battletech weaponry is totally viable though. missile work, guns work. even ppcs have potential of working someday (see project marauder, results were so good that all research was immediately classified, and that was back in the 90s).

Project MARAUDER is not a PPC, it would be a plasma rifle. It's basically a railgun, shaped like a coax connector rather than a pair of tracks, using a plasma armature without a projectile to be pushed by it...which is not as exotic as it sounds.

The Large Hadron Collider undergoing a quench is a PPC.

[Burning2nd]

thats a couple of years old.. the tech is already implemented in the feild

follow raytheon, boeing, lockheed on fb and instagram.... get this info b4 it hits the main stream

[Feral Clown]

Right now and for the foreseeable future, physics preclude 100 ton robots running around. No current materials existing would take the stress, especially in the form of vibration that such a machine would generate. So no, giant mechs are nowhere on the horizon and there's good reason we use wheels and tracks. Possibly smaller machines around the size of Bobcats may sometime appear, but even that is way far off.

[Dee Eight]

You guys don't seem to understand how lasers work beyond the science fiction...but keep on discussing stuff you pulled from a google search or wikipedia... its amusing to read. The 30kW laser that was tested on the USS Ponce five years ago proved capable of killing small drones in flight, as well as burning thru and detonating the warheads of rockets from several miles away.

[Shadowomega1]

Dee Eight, on 17 May 2019 - 05:13 PM, said:

You guys don't seem to understand how lasers work beyond the science fiction...but keep on discussing stuff you pulled from a google search or wikipedia... its amusing to read. The 30kW laser that was tested on the USS Ponce five years ago proved capable of killing small drones in flight, as well as burning thru and detonating the warheads of rockets from several miles away.

The successor to the THEL system, last I heard this system was undergoing some upgrades for range and target tracking to make it viable to act as an Anti-Ballistic Missile system.

[Koniving]

Dee's post
Also plugging in BattleTechnology's weapon stats for a couple of lasers into a laser drill calculator such as the Synrad process calculator, the ******* calculator of Lenox Laser, etc., (personally using this one) and you'll find that while the "0.1 second" laser beams couldn't do jack with the power output they have, if you fired them several times you cut some good holes into 1980s tanks (specifically the side armor thickness of the M60A2 Patton of approximately 4 inches of steel, there's no option for the composite armor fused with silica glass for comparison sadly) in a matter of seconds provided you hit the same spot repeatedly with those 0.1 second beams, even with a second or two in between each repeated application of the laser (in fact it appears that if you deliberately do a 0.1 second application of the laser and hold for half a second and repeat this several times it seems just as effective as a continuous beam of 7% more power consumption held for a full 2 seconds.)

Those listed in BT also go to 2 seconds in length with significantly more overall power, and those lasers are quite powerful according to the same calculator due to the sustained beam time.

Which I think is reasonably impressive considering that its written in 1987..and confirmed in modern laser drilling calculators as viable against the same kind of armor , even if these probably couldn't do enough in 3025 if you consider the space magic metals that BT uses...

Even the infantry carried lasers were reasonably deadly, considering what they too could do to steel.
The lasers were listed in KW and MW, not to be confused with mW. Multi-second lasers seem to generally have closer to 1 or 1.5 MW in BT, while lasers that have much shorter beam times such as 0.1 or 0.2 seconds are in KW. What's interesting is in order to make the KW lasers even remotely comparable to the MW lasers, they'd have to fire a lot..
....this is interesting because issue "202" is written before Pulse Lasers are in Battletech...yet in a drill calculator, if you "pulse" these lasers several times in a few seconds, they can compete with sustained 0.5 MW lasers in the same laser family (small, medium) easily.

Granted, these are of pretty substantial power compared to real life lasers, which are more than pretty sufficient in their application in use against small ships.
This display is meant to showcase accuracy more than anything else.


And for fun, this is a conspiracy video that I thought was funny... Some of the images I recognize have nothing to do with lasers, but one of the vehicles shown makes for a very interesting claim of the laser being used against land targets.

I can't hear this video, and I wouldn't take much stock in whatever it's actually saying, but a couple of images give interesting thoughts as to what laser damage might look like. The text makes a good read, as despite being a conspiracy video it is actually spouting a small number of military released facts such as the 30 second kill time against military grade patrol boats.

(Though this said, BT TechManual stating that battlemech armor handles heat exceptionally well by diffusing it across its entire surface...makes me wonder how lasers work against mechs at all, as laser weapons like laser drills rely on creating heat to burn through substances).

[LordNothing]

Shadowomega1, on 17 May 2019 - 01:27 PM, said:

I remember years ago when the show Future Weapons was ongoing and the episode they covered the THEL, the interviewee had people other people ask about safety goggles, and he laughed and stated the Goggles won't do anything if you are in the line of fire, and if your not then you wouldn't see the laser anyway.

of course im talking about next gen lasers where were up another order of magnitude or two in laser power over current military lasers. also depends on usage. using it against cruise missiles is one thing but surface combat is another.

Edited by LordNothing, 17 May 2019 - 10:24 PM.