Most powerful PORTABLE LASER weapon ever created ? Game changer ?

I want one of these in a pen.

Then I could sign my name on a cloud, or boil the seas, or just zap that Apollo stuff left on the moon. Great for the hobbyist.

reply to post by 727Sky


At least they are starting from the right place, in building whatever they can on a scale which makes it practical for one person to use. What I want to see is a man portable laser which can punch a hole in a standard domestic wall, with a single sub second pulse, not burst balloons (as cool as that is), light matches, and burn a couple of layers of paint on a door or wall.

I love seeing what people have been up to, what they have achieved with parts from Blue Ray players, and PS3s and so on, but I would much prefer to see someone actually get hold of a couple of purpose purchased parts, and see how big they could go. I would do it, but I have no money to throw at it, but I know there are hobbyists out there who could do it, and for some reason they do not!

So frustrating!

reply to post by andy06shake


I don't think they ever will, they have to stay on the target for an extended period to be effective. It works by heating up the missiles explosive charge causing it to destroy itself prematurely.

It would be next to impossible for a human being to track and hold that laser on a missile in flight in the same spot so that it heats up enough to explode, a large portion of that truck is all the computer power required to track the missile, focus and refocus the laser for range to keep it just right for the missile, and track and predict the trajectory of the missile to aim the laser.

TrueBrit
reply to post by 727Sky

 

When they start making one man portable laser platforms, that will be the day I pay attention to laser weapons. Until then, it will always be some tedious box on wheels with a big old battery.

Cool none the less, but yeah. Proper man portability, or nothing for me thanks!

My thinking is the same even though I get asked to build cumbersome things sometimes. When we did the weapon back in the late 80's the amount of hardware to make it "portable" was ridiculous. The device was mounted on it's own trailer and used a semi full of capacitors and a generator to produce about 3 million watts PRF. Kind of hard to hide on a battlefield. Plus it had limited range because of atmospheric attenuation, but at the time we were limited to 850nm semiconductor lasers as the array would have been too large using multiple 16 to 20 foot long chemical lasers made from glass (and a bit easily breakable). Now they have nice 450nm to 300nm UV lasers which have much greater effective distance and in some cases can actually "reach" down through a fair bit of water.

A man-portable device should be coming soon since supercapacitor technology is advancing at an accelerated rate using porous nanostructured semiconductor films. It is conceivable that we could get an energy density ratio, by comparison to best-present-commercial-technology, of 40,000:1 or greater, dependent on the process used. I'd say it is less than 2 years away for military applications and 10 to 15 years for commercial applications. I've seen some of the technology working (supercapacitors) 15 years ago in material sciences labs in universities and it was very impressive even then but as I said slotted for military apps.

Cheers - Dave

This would make a great anti icbm defense.Once the bugs are worked out and deployed at multiple locations.

reply to post by Hijinx


Buddy when I said man portable I was thinking more along the lines of one soldier who carry's the power source and tripod and another who carry's the laser and fire and control system. Connect the two together on relatively flat area of ground, turn it on and let the computer take over! Kind of similar to the machine gun teams in both world wars

I have always thought lasers a stupid idea, And the reason why is very well explained in this yahoo answers....

Can a mirror reflect a laser beam

727Sky
There has always been problems with beam dispersant due to (rain and fog) atmospheric conditions; not to mention power supply and bulk of previous systems.. Evidently this system has over come some of the limitations with regards to bulk and power supply ?

Nah, but it sounds good for an article. It's not the world's highest power laser, either.

But what it is, is a really nice fieldable demo of an electric laser with some ass to it. We've had much more powerful chemical and gas dynamic lasers. But electrically powered lasers have typically had low power, or low firing rates, or both, due to difficulties in cooling. ThinZAG and HELLADS are improvements over that. But there are typically limits to the power outputs of individual modules, and combining them has been inefficient. The big whoop here is that spectral combiner.