Directed-Energy Weapons | EM, Laser, Sonic, Microwave, Particle-beam etc |

kvs wrote:

The-thing-next-door wrote:Could anyone maybe explain the mount for the ground based "laser" that was unveiled recently it does not seem to make any sense.

Why would it need more than just horizontal traverse and vertical elevation?

It looks like it is designed to cover hemispheres.    The laser seems to be designed as a last and best defense against any air attack for ground
based systems.    The S-400/500 can cover over the horizon incoming threats.    But a laser system with enough power is guaranteed to
take out anything that manages to get through.   Including hypersonic missiles.  

The-thing-next-door wrote:
That still does not answer the question of why it has such a wierd mount.

kvs wrote:  But a laser system with enough power is guaranteed to
take out anything that manages to get through.   Including hypersonic missiles.  

GarryB wrote:

Why would it need more than just horizontal traverse and vertical elevation?

What are you talking about?

The roof slides back and the system can spin in the horizontal axis 360 degrees and can elevate vertically from what appears to be pointing straight down (presumably  when not in use) to pointing straight up... what more would you need?

GarryB wrote:

Then power issue is interesting - hypersonic missile flies in thousands degrees hot plasma . Not sure how plasma physics works if you apply laser to it? is going though or just warm sup the whole plasma cloud?

That reentry vehicle was design to operate at temperatures for a certain number of seconds or minutes in the atmosphere... applying a laser beam to add temperature to just one part of it rapidly is rather likely to cause problems... look at what happened to the space shuttle when one heat tile was damaged/removed.

It does not need to blow the munition completely to pieces... just creating a hairline weakness or crack would be enough for the environment it is in to destroy it rapidly...

Here is a screen shot... Axis A spins around horizontally and Axis B aims the laser up and down... in other words the same traverse elevation options any self propelled gun uses to aim at targets coming from any direction at any elevation.

GarryB wrote:

What are you talking about? It has two axis of movement... 360 degrees around so it can point in any direction of the compass, and up and down so it can point up and down at targets coming from different angles...

Here is a screen shot... Axis A spins around horizontally and Axis B aims the laser up and down... in other words the same traverse elevation options any self propelled gun uses to aim at targets coming from any direction at any elevation.

The-thing-next-door wrote:Well then could you explain how it would elevate or depress its main weapon when pointing sideways?

I really cannot believe that you came up with that anyone can see that you cannot have the traverse after the elevation.

flamming_python wrote:

The-thing-next-door wrote:Well then could you explain how it would elevate or depress its main weapon when pointing sideways?

I really cannot believe that you came up with that anyone can see that you cannot have the traverse after the elevation.

That big mount it's on will turn to the side, and then the articulation connecting the mount to the the actual laser installation can rotate clockwise or counter-clockwise in order to depress or elevate the laser as needed.

GarryB wrote:Each has different roles and therefore are not really comparable.

As pointed out the ground based system is likely designed to defend ground targets so it makes sense for it to be ground based... it will likely operate with other air defence systems including short and long range missiles and perhaps even guns...

GarryB wrote:

And it flies 20mach...

The moon moves faster yet I can keep a camera pointed at it easily enough...

did you make those arrows? ugly handwrite

Would normally have used photoshop and made it pretty for you, but as I have ditched windows and I am using Mint Linux I had to use GIMP, which I am not really that familiar with yet.

A large team of Russian researchers from Rosatom, joined by three MIPT physicists, has modeled the impact of a nuclear explosion on an Earth-threatening asteroid. They manufactured miniature asteroids and blasted them with a laser. The modeling technique developed in this study is a way of experimentally evaluating asteroid destruction criteria such as the explosion energy needed to eliminate a dangerous object on a collision course with Earth. The English translation of the paper reporting the results will appear in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics.

Asteroids are celestial bodies consisting of carbon, silicon, metal, and sometimes ice. Scientists usually classify objects larger than 1 meter as asteroids, although this lower limit is disputed. On the other end of the scale, asteroids get as big as 900 kilometers across. Traveling at 20 kilometers per second, such giants pose a threat of obliterating all life on Earth.

There are two basic options when it comes to protecting the planet from a collision with an asteroid: It either has to be deflected or blown into pieces most of which will miss us or burn up in the atmosphere. The authors of the paper explored the second option by modeling the effects of a powerful shock wave released by a nuclear explosion on the asteroid surface. The research team showed that a brief laser pulse aimed at a miniature replica of an asteroid produces destructive effects similar to those of a nuclear explosion on an actual space rock. The distributions of heat and pressure predicted for the real event generally matched those measured in the scaled-down experiment.

For their laser model to be accurate, the researchers made sure the density and rigidity of the small-scale asteroid -- and even its shape -- mimicked the real thing, and controlled the shock-wave pressures. Thanks to this precise correspondence, the researchers had a way of directly calculating the required energy of a nuclear explosion on the actual asteroid from the energy of a laser pulse destroying its miniature replica. Thus, for example, to eliminate a 200-meter asteroid, the bomb needs to deliver the energy equivalent of 3 megatons of TNT. This was calculated once the team measured that it took a 500-joule laser pulse to destroy a model 8-10 millimeters in diameter. For the sake of comparison, the most powerful explosive ever detonated -- Tsar Bomba, or "king of bombs," built by the Soviet Union in 1961 -- had an energy output of about 58.6 megatons, though accounts vary.

The research team came up with a technology for manufacturing artificial asteroid material. Its composition corresponds to that of the chondrite (stony) meteorites, which account for about 90 percent of asteroid remains reaching the surface of the Earth. The properties of the model asteroid, including its chemical composition, density, porosity, and rigidity, were adjusted during manufacturing. The replicas were made using the data on the chondrite meteorite recovered from the bottom of Lake Chebarkul. It is the largest fragment of the asteroid that entered the Earth's atmosphere in February 2013, exploding over Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia. The asteroid material was manufactured using a combination of sedimentation, compression, and heating, imitating the natural formation process. Out of cylinder-shaped samples, imitation asteroids of various shapes were made, among them spherical, ellipsoidal, and cubical ones.

To confirm that their laser modeling fits in with reality, the researchers also did compressible flow calculations. They showed that a lab asteroid 14-15 orders of magnitude less massive than its space prototype requires almost twice as much energy per unit mass to be completely disrupted.

The experiments made use of three laser devices: Iskra-5, Luch, and Saturn. The laser beam was first amplified to a predetermined power and then directed at the asteroid replica fixed in a vacuum chamber. Model destruction was monitored from behind as well as from the side, and fragmentation dynamics were registered. The laser affected model asteroids for 0.5-30 nanoseconds.

To estimate asteroid destruction criteria, researchers analyzed the data available from the Chelyabinsk meteorite. It entered the Earth's atmosphere as a 20-meter asteroid and fractured into small fragments that caused no catastrophic damage. It therefore makes sense to say that a 200-meter asteroid has been eliminated if it is fractured into pieces with a diameter 10 times smaller and a mass 1,000 times smaller than the Earth-threatening rock itself. For obvious reasons, this conclusion only holds for a 200-meter asteroid entering the atmosphere at a similar angle and for fragments traveling along trajectories similar to that of the Chelyabinsk meteor.

The researchers were also interested in whether the explosion effect is cumulative -- that is, can one powerful explosion be replaced by a succession of smaller ones? They found that multiple weaker laser pulses provide no significant advantage over a single pulse combining their power in terms of the general destruction criterion. This holds for simultaneous as well as consecutive pulses.

In some of the experiments, the laser was targeted at a cavity made in the miniature asteroids ahead of time. By exploiting the cavity, the researchers spent less energy -- namely, 500 instead of 650 joules per gram. Similarly, the effect of a buried nuclear bomb is expected to be more pronounced.

Calculations accounting for the scaling effects indicate that it takes a 3-megaton bomb to eliminate an Earth-threatening nonmetallic asteroid measuring 200 meters across. The research team now plans to expand the study by experimenting with asteroid replicas of different composition, including those containing iron, nickel, and ice. They also intend to identify more precisely how the shape of the asteroid and the presence of cavities on its surface affect the general destruction criterion.

"By accumulating coefficients and dependencies for asteroids of different types, we enable rapid modeling of the explosion so that the destruction criteria can be calculated promptly. At the moment, there are no asteroid threats, so our team has the time to perfect this technique for use later in preventing a planetary disaster," says study co-author Vladimir Yufa, an associate professor at the departments of Applied Physics and Laser Systems and Structured Materials, MIPT. "We're also looking into the possibility of deflecting an asteroid without destroying it and hope for international engagement."

The paper reporting the results of the study was published in the Russian edition of the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics by a team of researchers from Rosatom -- a Russian atomic power state corporation -- as well as from MIPT and the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The two Rosatom institutes involved in the study are the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics and the Troitsk Institute for Innovation and Fusion Research.

kvs wrote:Silly journalists never gave us the scaling relation.   What would it take to destroy a 2000 m metorite?    Looks like something much bigger
than Tsar Bomba will be needed.     Nuclear devices in this class are very poorly researched.   Tsar Bomba failed its predicted yield by over
40%.   Who says military development is bad: we need more development of nukes in the 100s of megatons sizes.    Being able to build
a 1 teraton device would be rather worthwhile.  

Not only do you get to wipe out some exceptionalist cancer afflicting the planet in one stroke, you also can save the planet from an extinction
class meteorite.  

kvs wrote:Silly journalists never gave us the scaling relation.   What would it take to destroy a 2000 m metorite?    Looks like something much bigger
than Tsar Bomba will be needed.     Nuclear devices in this class are very poorly researched.   Tsar Bomba failed its predicted yield by over
40%.   Who says military development is bad: we need more development of nukes in the 100s of megatons sizes.    Being able to build
a 1 teraton device would be rather worthwhile.  

Not only do you get to wipe out some exceptionalist cancer afflicting the planet in one stroke, you also can save the planet from an extinction
class meteorite.  

The-thing-next-door wrote:
The RDS-220 was modified in order to reduce its blast yeal form 100 megatons to 50 in order for the pilotys that dropped it to survive.

kvs wrote:Tsar Bomba failed its predicted yield by over 40%.  

Big_Gazza wrote:

kvs wrote:Tsar Bomba failed its predicted yield by over 40%.  

Not true.  The Tsar Bomb was a 3-stage weapon, and for test purposes, the 3rd stage uranium tamper was replaced with lead.  They wanted to reduce the blast by approx half so that the aircraft dropping the weapons would survive the blast, and to prevent excessive fallout on Soviet territory.  If they tested with the full deal, it would have reached the 100mT level.

GarryB wrote:
A target moving at that speed will not be jumping around like a gymnast... it will largely be moving in a straight line with the potential for slight deviations... cameras can auto track targets already so it is not like someone has to manually track these things... computers can be fast and very precise...

 just admit it, it's ugly

Your just a bully...

I am overweight too... so my doctor tells me... 122kgs isn't that bad is it?

Later on such technology could be used for mining... have a vehicle dig through the surface and find minerals and material inside to see if it has any value... then launch it at a speed to land on the moon... with the right calculation you might even be able to launch an orbital spacecraft to intercept and catch it... it might take 5 years for it to arrive...

Regarding explosives it really depends on the shape and spin and composition of the target... a warhead embedded in one side a few hundred metres deep could vapourise and blow off enough material in one direction to change the trajectory of the rest of the asteroid so that it misses this time... but unless the change is radical or makes it fly into the sun or jupiter or some other object then it will just come around again... whether it is in 50 years or 50,000 years...

MOSCOW, March 22 (Itar-Tass) - RIA Novosti. Russian scientists have advantages over the United States in developing new laser weapons, Yuri Borisov, Deputy Defense Minister, said.


Borisov said that the US has samples of laser weapons that can hit lightly armored vehicles and live force, but the development of scientists from Russia surpass them.

Borisov also recalled the latest Russian weapons systems, which Vladimir Putin mentioned. According to him, the president did not talk about them with the aim of "beating arms" or launch another arms race.

"This warning to the world that it is simply impossible to achieve a one-sided advantage in modern conditions and dominate such a dangerous matter as armament is impossible." Kontrzyzov will always be invited for some new challenges, "the Defense Ministry spokesman said.

On March 1, the president in his message to the Federal Assembly presented the latest types of Russian weapons, which have no analogues in the world. We are talking about the Sarmat missile system, underwater drones, a cruise missile with a nuclear power plant, the Dzhazin aerial missile system, and laser weapons.

At the same time, the head of state stressed that Russia does not threaten anyone and is not going to attack anyone, and new developments are called upon to "ensure the country's security."