Tesla's Death Ray: Now A Reality?

Wrabbit2000
What is the range on these things? Specifically...if they miss ...

The beamspread will generally eliminate any chance of it punching a hole through a satellite (not enough power anyway), BUT, it's enough to wreak havoc with an imager.

CSB: We knew someone who was doing IR laser development. Used to tune the high power jobs by pointing them straight up and letting fly whilst he got the thing peaked out. One day he got a visit. Seems he blinded a KH satellite.

As a general question to OP, why would you think this had anything whatever to do with Tesla, anyway? Tesla didn't know squat about lasers.

EA006
reply to post by Snarl

 

They've been testing this for at least 3 years in Israel. The earlier version wasn't mounted on a truck. It was called the MTHEL and it's some piece of tech. Youtube vids are available.

MTHEL is a dead duck. What they don't show you in the "our stuff is pretty" pictures are the six 18 wheelers full of fuel and reagents that you need to fire one a dozen times. THEL is a chemical laser. This one's not.

Snarl
The source article lacks a description of how an artillery round is destroyed in-flight ... but it can be assumed destruction occurs abruptly (at 10,000 watts).

You paint the target for a few seconds. When it heats up to about 270C it will deflagrate, end of missile.

reply to post by Bedlam

CSB: We knew someone who was doing IR laser development. Used to tune the high power jobs by pointing them straight up and letting fly whilst he got the thing peaked out. One day he got a visit. Seems he blinded a KH satellite.

Thanks, that does go a bit further in explaining how very possible damage to orbital platforms is. Literally destroying them in the physical sense is just one question, but you answer the other well there for viability. If his IR Laser blinded a military intelligence satellite purely by accident? Well.. I'm assuming he didn't have a 10kw, let alone 100kw weapons grade laser, so skys the limit to finding out what raising power scale by orders of magnitude would do.

Something tells me we won't have to wait long at all, if these see major deployment in a hot war. Mistakes will happen, overshoots will occur and something far far past the visible target will get slapped eventually. It should be interesting to watch.

* By the way.... What happens if they lower elevation on this thing, the way A.A. guns were sometimes adapted for use in WW II for? I wonder what 100,000 watts of military laser power would do to an organic target within short range? ..then again, I'm cooking lunch. Maybe better I not imagine right now.

The weapon is amazing no doubt. BUT.. that multi million dollar piece of machinery can be rendered completely useless by a well placed .35 cent bullet.

Wrabbit2000
reply to post by Bedlam

 

Well.. I'm assuming he didn't have a 10kw, let alone 100kw weapons grade laser, so skys the limit to finding out what raising power scale by orders of magnitude would do.

Actually, IIRC it was about 10kW, it was a pretty husky setup. Occasionally the COE will run yet another CO2 laser vs water hyacinth/duckweed/nutria experiment. It's a mess, but it's always fun. I got to participate in one of the first as a deckhand on a laser barge when I was working for the Corps in high school. Big lasers don't do a lot to water hyacinths. But they're a lot of fun otherwise, you can break windows a quarter mile off with a water reflection. Yipe!

* By the way.... What happens if they lower elevation on this thing, the way A.A. guns were sometimes adapted for use in WW II for? I wonder what 100,000 watts of military laser power would do to an organic target within short range? ..then again, I'm cooking lunch. Maybe better I not imagine right now.

Silly wrabbit, of COURSE you can do this. But this isn't the likely source. They're working on a drone mounted anti-personnel laser. A few weeks ago Zaph and I thought we'd found a new project to pitch until I felt out the boss and found that we were a few years late. It's a SOCOM project. Fly that puppy over your target country, find a nice outdoor political stump speech going on and fry someone's face off. Makes for a new sort of diplomacy, I guess.

Start here...

Wrabbit2000
reply to post by sirhumperdink

 

A pen laser? That's a totally ridiculous comparison. It's like comparing a 155mm Artillery Piece to a BB gun. Two RADICALLY different levels of power and impact with, I'm sure, two VERY different levels of potential harm to overshoots.

Now, a man can stand here on Earth and bounce a laser off the reflectors on the moon. You don't have to be NASA and you don't need billion dollar equipment to do that. You also don't need a 100kw Laser as this mentioned as being part of the future packages. A little goes quite a way with a laser.

To give an idea of the level of comparison here..one of the most powerful consumer lasers in the world today is the Spyder 3 (AKA The Lightsaber, as coined in the press) and it's related products, found Here. It's $300 and set records not that long ago when it first hit the market. It first released with 1 Watt effective power. As you can see, what is there now is up to 2 Watts.

What they fired for this story was 10,000 watts and what they intend to have the production model mounting, according to the story, is 100,000 watts. So..I do think a question about range is relevant, as it so happens.

edit on 13-12-2013 by Wrabbit2000 because: (no reason given)

Still...it's surprisingly low power, even at 100KW for the future version (probably up to Giga watts by now in reality)..100KW is only about the combined power output of about two medium to large sized motorbikes.

Not much really is it...but seems to be effective nonetheless.

Bedlam
As a general question to OP, why would you think this had anything whatever to do with Tesla, anyway? Tesla didn't know squat about lasers.

You're right. I wasn't being fair to Tesla.

Thanks for adding your expert knowledge and experience to this thread.

MysterX

Wrabbit2000
reply to post by sirhumperdink

 

A pen laser? That's a totally ridiculous comparison. It's like comparing a 155mm Artillery Piece to a BB gun. Two RADICALLY different levels of power and impact with, I'm sure, two VERY different levels of potential harm to overshoots.

Now, a man can stand here on Earth and bounce a laser off the reflectors on the moon. You don't have to be NASA and you don't need billion dollar equipment to do that. You also don't need a 100kw Laser as this mentioned as being part of the future packages. A little goes quite a way with a laser.

To give an idea of the level of comparison here..one of the most powerful consumer lasers in the world today is the Spyder 3 (AKA The Lightsaber, as coined in the press) and it's related products, found Here. It's $300 and set records not that long ago when it first hit the market. It first released with 1 Watt effective power. As you can see, what is there now is up to 2 Watts.

What they fired for this story was 10,000 watts and what they intend to have the production model mounting, according to the story, is 100,000 watts. So..I do think a question about range is relevant, as it so happens.

edit on 13-12-2013 by Wrabbit2000 because: (no reason given)

Still...it's surprisingly low power, even at 100KW for the future version (probably up to Giga watts by now in reality)..100KW is only about the combined power output of about two medium to large sized motorbikes.

Not much really is it...but seems to be effective nonetheless.

I am curious about the technology behind what powers the weapons aspect of this platform. More interesting are the detection and acquisition systems behind the zap. I've seen field testing of a system similar to this (short video with date stamp):It eradicated a mosquito population around a very large lake in just three days. You'll note the laser knocks the wings off the bug ... and I'll tell you that it is the wings which are specifically targeted. I'll also say it moves very quickly from one target to the next and over-ranging is a problem (if you consider killing mosquitos in the woods a problem). Again, detection and acquisition ...

The military is interested in targets at least as small as .50 cal. and they're moving a lot faster than a skeeter. I'd guess 10kW would be sufficient to take out an artillery round. I'm not sure what level of energy would be required to disrupt the ballistic trajectory of a non-eplosive projectile, but I doubt 100kW would do it, all things considered.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


You might also check out Linda Moulton Howe's reports of an energy beam being tested in Somalia . . .

reportedly zapped a basketball sized hole through 10 FEET of SOLID CONCRETE.

www.earthfiles.com...

It's likely in the archives behind her subscriber wall.

The man reporting to Linda asserted that he was told that it could go through the entire globe to a target on the other side. That's a bit mystifying to this layman but he was quite serious.

It was carried on a large truck bed . . . roughly the size of a couple of truck mounted large generators, IIRC.

Just to clarify Tesla worked on a Scalas device not a laser. I wonder how it attinuates weather?

reply to post by BO XIAN


I wish I could laugh and say...Bahhhh, he was just off his rocker! Wow..how I wish I could argue what he reported seeing.

I don't know of any such system existing, but then, libraries could be filled with what the public doesn't know about. So it wouldn't shock me. I don't know about the claims of power and impact?

Do we have any MIT or Cal-Tech types here that could answer that? Would a laser with, say, megawatt power output and somehow able to sustain the beam for any period of time, be able to do anything like the damage described?

It reminds me of Real Genius in a non-fiction weapons system.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


OH, I forgot to mention . . . it put the basketball sized tunnel through 10 feet of solid concrete from a 10 mile distance. And, IIRC, it did it ZAP--there wasn't a long tunneling through process.

It wasn't a laser. It was something well beyond a laser.

reply to post by BO XIAN


In trying to understand this, why are you certain it is 'beyond' a laser? Something more than you've shared or just assuming by what we've publicly seen of laser technology, it cannot scale up to be that focused and destructive?

I'm asking more so I don't waste any time looking more into that, if you've eliminated lasers through a definite factor of what this did or didn't do?

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


I don't recall the specifics that were shared but it was somehow different.

I don't know if MASER was used or something different.

It was just orders of magnitude advanced from what folks think of vis a vis a laser.

I certainly don't know such physics well.

But it seems to me that a light based laser would not go through the whole globe unfettered and do damage on the other side of the planet to the target aimed at.

reply to post by BO XIAN


Ahh! Thanks for the clarification. I wasn't understanding the difference for what, other than Laser, that would have been. You're context helps quite a bit for seeing what you mean and gives me a direction to wander off in, if I get that stuff called Free Time to play one of these days.

It's a fascinating report though, and who knows these days? I think we're so far advanced in some black areas, we may literally meet the truth with open disbelief if they just plop some things down for MSM to report at face value.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


IIRC, Linda MH had 2 reports of some sort of particle beam weapon. She posted the first one on her site.

Then the bloke reporting this one emailed her or phoned her. He reportedly drove one of the trucks involved.

I forget what the first report was about. And I need to renew my subscription so I can't check before I do that.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


Boeing's ABL chemical laser was a megawatt class laser and the Navy is working to get a megawatt class FEL.
Their 14 kilowatt test laser could reportedly could stay on 24/7 for up to a month and their eventual megawatt laser is supposed to burn through "20 FEET of steal per second". I'm still having a hard time wrapping my head around that one.

www.wired.co.uk...

www.popsci.com...

reply to post by Sammamishman


Hmmmmmm

THAT would fry quite a number of "cookies!"

and plenty of hotdogs! Sheesh.

Man is so clever and so ignorant.