Actually the laser does not actually have to burn through the missile body to have an effect. A powerful laser pulse hitting the missile body will promote outgassing of the surface material and would act as a jet to throw the missile off course. A missile travelling at a high rate of speed could not recover quickly enough to re-acquire the target and would miss the ship. It would be like a thruster had fired and changed the course of travel of the missile.
Discussing future and (im)possible carrier technology
- Thread starter Kurt
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Actually the laser does not actually have to burn through the missile body to have an effect. A powerful laser pulse hitting the missile body will promote outgassing of the surface material and would act as a jet to throw the missile off course. A missile travelling at a high rate of speed could not recover quickly enough to re-acquire the target and would miss the ship. It would be like a thruster had fired and changed the course of travel of the missile.
Are you referring to laser ablation? The gassing of surface material will physically damage the projectile but I don't think it will do much to "push" the projectile out of the way. The missile will disintegrate before enough material has been ablated to act as miniature thrusters.
Actually light itself can push an object. An ultra powerful, short pulse of light or series of pulses could deflect an incoming missile off the target. It wouldn't take much. Just a very powerful pulse to cause the missile to miss the ship. Light itself can exert a pressure
The thinking is the opposite of the laser tractor beams being researched now. Instead of pull they would push or repel
Laser Light Can Lift Tiny Objects | Wired Science | Wired.com
1873 James Clerk Maxwell used electromagnetic theory to show that light reflecting off a surface or absorbing into it would create pressure.
1900 Russian physicist Pyotr Lebedev announces at a meeting in Paris that he had measured the pressure of light on a solid body.
Remember we are talking about a very powerful pulse impinging on the surface of an incoming missile. This would be used as a close in defense to deflect the missile away from the target ship.
The thinking is the opposite of the laser tractor beams being researched now. Instead of pull they would push or repel
Laser Light Can Lift Tiny Objects | Wired Science | Wired.com
1873 James Clerk Maxwell used electromagnetic theory to show that light reflecting off a surface or absorbing into it would create pressure.
1900 Russian physicist Pyotr Lebedev announces at a meeting in Paris that he had measured the pressure of light on a solid body.
Remember we are talking about a very powerful pulse impinging on the surface of an incoming missile. This would be used as a close in defense to deflect the missile away from the target ship.
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Yes I am aware of the fact that light itself could exert pressure. I just don't think that the pressure or the reactive force generated from ablative heating of something as small as a missile's surface could generate significant thrust within the terrestrial atmosphere. Ablative heating of the missile will damage the aerodynamics of the missile and cause it to disintegrate before it could be "shoved" out of its trajectory. In that case the "shoving" won't be needed since the job had already been done via the destruction of the missile.
More on the pressure of light to move objects. In a defensive system what you want to do is deflect the incoming missile to where it hits the water and not the ship. This would work very good against supersonic missiles of the anti-ship type where their seekers have to maintain a lock on during terminal approach. Any disruption of the flight path would not allow time for the missile to regain lock on to the target again
The research to weaponize this concept is just now being explored and the results are promising
The research to weaponize this concept is just now being explored and the results are promising
To refine my response to you a little better, the idea of laser ablation is cruder than what is being looked at now to deflect incoming missiles moving very quickly towards the target ship. Since you understand the principle of the pressure of light you can see where this is an interesting line to follow for a defensive system
Bingo...you are the winner. She was a beautiful aircraft...tragically, there was one fatal crash which killed three Vough personnel, a pilot, co-pilot and test engineer. My Dad, after World War II, worked at Vought for 48 years. I worked there for about four years in the 1970s.
Kurt
Junior Member
Have you seen a light mill/Crookes radiometer? They turn in the wrong direction despite being pushed by light in vacuum. Well, the push through photons is insignificant in comparison to the push of air from a heated surface. Things get really interesting if you put the light mill into a freezer (not fridge), it changes direction.
So I'm not convinced laser can do that because any wavelength suitable for such a reflection won't go far in the air without staggering loss of energy.
Taking a second look at the laser energy transport problem, weaponized lasers might be more complex than laserpointers. The key differense could be to use a suitable wavelength to create a vaccum "tube" in the air and send any suitable wavelength or combination of wavelengths through this tube. Such a laser system could adapt frequency for penetrating all barriers and storing enough energy within the targeted missile to cause a malfunction. The technology has been tried and tested for decades, but is mostly associated with helping particle beam weapons achieve range through the air.
"Soft kill" lasers can be less demanding by just creating a sensor dazzling ray and hope that it will help to target more countermeasures.
I've been thinking about the technological problems of VTOL aircrafts with long range and speed.
What if you have an aircraft with high wings for subsonic cruising slightly behind the center of gravity, but angled forward, and add low tiltwing canards with turbofans/fenestron () rotors in front of them.
I would power this with a central engine that combines the usual turbine engine in aircrafts with a Diesel/Wankel engine to achieve higher energy efficiency during cruising and to power the compressor, especially for power output bursts. To this end you can add all the car tuning knowledge like NOX for the Diesel/Wankel engine.
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I think it was brought up in an earlier post that lasers may be a source of viable point defence on future carriers. If you don't think they are relevant I can move the posts to the Space Warfare section.