I know they have sucessfuly tested an airborn Anti-missile laser. But what is the current state of Laser weapony, in size and power?

How soon before we have portable or semi-portable laser weapons?

Depends on what you consider a weapon, a small compact laser can be made to blind permanently so that the person MAY die indirectly from that.

A small 2 stroke 2KW generator and 10 watt CO2 laser could be portable and cause good burns, but again, indirect death.

I heard something about a 30% eff. fiber optic laser, but nothing more. If its pulsed and can pop hole in metal without focusing, then it could cause death and be portable and as big as a big super soaker.

I give it 20-30 years before the public gets 30% eff. "fiber" lasers and unless computers go optical and need high wattage pulsed and CW laser diodes, the public will not get the cool stuff.

If true 100-200nm UV laser diodes at 5-10 watts are "invented" then a death ray using high voltage could be made. The UV can make a path for high voltage.

I am probly thinking more of pysical damage on par with some moderan firearms.

I have a 150-300 watt "Sorry estimated dont have a laser power meter" flowing gas CO2 laser that run on 120v ac that can get up to around 6000 degree's C. But it does have over heating issues and needs a cool down after around 10 min of running..

it is 30 inches long with a 1 inch boar. with a 3 inch water jacket.

given enough time it can burn though most things easy enough.

WOW, now thats cool! Does it have a water jacket or cooling fins?
Do you have any other lasers?

water jacket so its not man portable it does have its one inclosed water system so it does not have to be mounted to a tap to work.

google shiva star. youll find a great detail on lasers

There are a myriad of pages dedicated to high energy lasers online - I recommend searches for COIL (Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser), MIRACL (Mid Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser), ABL (Airborne Laser), THEL (Tactical High Energy Laser), and MTHEL (Mobile THEL) if you are interested in some basic details of high energy chemical lasers. To date, these kinds of devices are only "transportable". They can be moved, but only if you really have to.
Solid state lasers are generally considered more portable, but are not at the power levels required for missile defense missions. IPG Photonics is advertising a multi-kW continuous wave fiber laser based system. I think it is intended for research and industrial uses like welding.
The use of laser weaponry on the battlefield for effects like blinding or disabling enemy is banned by the international law. Anyways, what does a bullet cost? a few cents? Conventional guns are far more cost-effective than lasers.

To answer the author's question, we have quite a long way to go before we see anything resembeling lasers in the field. The U.S. Army is however particularly focusing its research on CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) Lasers, I think, because they are one of the most powerful types of lasers out there, and one of the only lasers that are ACTUALLY capable of doing any REAL damage to material and non-material targets. The only problem is that for lasers like the CO2 laser, Mercury Gas laser and so on, is that they require a tremendous amount of power to even burn things at short range, so you can imagine what sort of power supply lasers need! Also, most laser systems nowaday are far too unearthly and large to be used by soldiers or even mounted on to vehicles, mainly because to make a very powerful laser, you need and amplification and focusing system or lasers that are all mirrored into a single energy source, and these machines that actually do this are HUGE, as somebody mentioned, they were thinking of mounted a laser system on a 747 !!!

This was one of the main problems with STARWARS if you remember, the U.S.'s Strategic Nuclear Defense Program. They wanted to mount lasers on to satellites that are powerful enough to destroy incoming ICBM's from a distance of 8000 miles, THROUGH AN ATMOSPHERE!!! This would literally require a powerplant for the satellite to do this, and that would be very hard to put up into space and use! I think the main focus of STARWARS now is develop Laser Cannons, that shoot down Nuclear Missiles from the ground as it would be easier to power them that way, but of course STARWARS has yet to show any REAL results!

On a final note, I remember reading something about a weapon called the "STINGRAY", it was a portable laser gun, powered by a Ni-CAD battery pack mounted on the user's back. The gun itself looked like a machine gun, and the whole thing weighed about 10Kg's! Apparently from what I remember, two of these were shipped off to Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War for ACTUAL COMBAT but never saw any action, due to the fact that these were barely finished prototype weapons, and there was problems with the power supply as it could only last for about 20 minutes of use! I'll try to find a link!

To answer the author's question, we have quite a long way to go before we see anything resembeling lasers in the field. The U.S. Army is however particularly focusing its research on CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) Lasers, I think, because they are one of the most powerful types of lasers out there, and one of the only lasers that are ACTUALLY capable of doing any REAL damage to material and non-material targets. The only problem is that for lasers like the CO2 laser, Mercury Gas laser and so on, is that they require a tremendous amount of power to even burn things at short range, so you can imagine what sort of power supply lasers need! Also, most laser systems nowaday are far too unearthly and large to be used by soldiers or even mounted on to vehicles, mainly because to make a very powerful laser, you need and amplification and focusing system or lasers that are all mirrored into a single energy source, and these machines that actually do this are HUGE, as somebody mentioned, they were thinking of mounted a laser system on a 747 !!!

This was one of the main problems with STARWARS if you remember, the U.S.'s Strategic Nuclear Defense Program. They wanted to mount lasers on to satellites that are powerful enough to destroy incoming ICBM's from a distance of 8000 miles, THROUGH AN ATMOSPHERE!!! This would literally require a powerplant for the satellite to do this, and that would be very hard to put up into space and use! I think the main focus of STARWARS now is develop Laser Cannons, that shoot down Nuclear Missiles from the ground as it would be easier to power them that way, but of course STARWARS has yet to show any REAL results!

On a final note, I remember reading something about a weapon called the "STINGRAY", it was a portable laser gun, powered by a Ni-CAD battery pack mounted on the user's back. The gun itself looked like a machine gun, and the whole thing weighed about 10Kg's! Apparently from what I remember, two of these were shipped off to Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War for ACTUAL COMBAT but never saw any action, due to the fact that these were barely finished prototype weapons, and there was problems with the power supply as it could only last for about 20 minutes of use! I'll try to find a link!


-Omar

man, batteries have come a long way since then, i bet with nimh they could make some killer lasers, and with lithium polymer if they could make the cells stable enough they could make something really killer.

Oops, sorry posted twice, my mistake, !

Naval ships have the size to house a large powerhungry laser, I read they want to give naval ships hybrid propulsion, propel them on the electricity from fuel cells and hypercapacitors. ]

The fuel cell will allow for temporal enormous burst of electricity for laser use, while the fuell cell gradually could be restored by the diesel engines .

Good as a anti-missile system.

In few decades the borders of the u.s. might be patroled by huge laserblimps and oversized boeings to catch missiles in the terminal phase.

[edit on 22-2-2005 by Countermeasures]

hey, follow my link i posted in Popular mechanics, and you can read about just how effective the army laser is...go on, read it, you know you want to!

Thanks intelgirl for that link, is really worth the read. cheers.

[edit on 22-2-2005 by MadGrimbo]

I agree - a nice overview of DE work - wish I had read that before I posted.

In addition to the popular mechanics article, JHPSSL was also profiled in Laser Focus World, Sept. 04 I believe. In addition to that, the Directed Energy Professional Society (www.deps.org) produces a scientific journal called the "Journal of Directed Energy" that publishes detailed articles related to directed energy technology. The articles are slightly less technical, however, than the ones found in the high tech journals like IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics, and AIAA Journal.

Directed energy weapons have come a long way (note the lazer pointers in the pilots eye's aat some airports. They will never reach their potential until some one develops a one shot reliable high energy sorce. No I don't know what that might be. But maybe a pezio explosive device that used a small explosive charge to smash a large crystal and produce enough juce to ffire a high energy solid state laser. (Read David Drake's "Hammer's Slammers Series).

The future of laser weaponry, I believe, lies in Free Electron Lasers. The great advantage that they have over other lasers is that they can tune the wavelength of the beam to whatever works best. The navy is particularly interested in FELs. They are trying to scale it up to 100kw. BTW, CO2 lasers have a bleak future in the military. It's all about solid state lasers.& FELS. The chemical laser will still have a use because of ease of scalability.

As far as man portable laser weaponry goes, dream on. Even with HED capacitors that can store 4 joule+ of energy per cubic centimeter, a man will simply not be able to carry the energy source for such a weapon. Also, it would be easily thwarted. the weapon, if ever concieved, would be a gas dynamic laser. It would operate at a fixed wavelength which is very baddd. For instance, CO2 lasers have been used for cutting and welding for years. However, due to their fixed wavelength they have trouble cutting through certain materials. 1/16 inch copper plating is enough to give a 2Kw laser a workout, and thats with high pressure oxygen that facilitates the cutting. A thin copper plating would be "body armor" verse this class of lasers.