| ▲ | condensedcrab 15 hours ago |
| From Rafael’s site: https://www.rafael.co.il/system/iron-beam/ 100kW laser is nothing to joke about, but seems a good application for anti drone tasks. Fiber lasers are pretty snazzy. |
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| ▲ | breppp 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| The re-edited title frames this as an anti-drone system but this was foremost developed as an anti-rocket system. Hamas and Hezbollah MO since the 1990s was based on bombing Israeli towns with statistical rockets and this system is supposed to reverse the cost equation (cheaper than those cheap rockets) Today this is also used for drones though |
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| ▲ | upcoming-sesame 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| from what I understand, problem with drones is first of all detection |
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| ▲ | cogman10 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's quiet the power requirement. I wonder how long it has to focus on a drone to eliminate it. Like how long is this thing consuming 100kW? |
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| ▲ | cenamus 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Good question, probably depends a lot on how much energy actually makes it to the target some distance away. And then how much is actually absorbed. Probably depends more on the power density then, rather than total power? Can't imagine they get a very small spot at multiple km unless they use gigantic lenses or multiple independent laser focused on the same spot | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Maybe it involves multiple converging beams to reduce transmission losses? | | | |
| ▲ | condensedcrab 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Even small divergence angles add up if they’re trying to intercept at visual ranges outside of traditional munitions. That being said, probably ~10kW/m^2 is enough to overheat or disable a UAV | | |
| ▲ | chmod775 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It'll get a lot of time to react at that energy as it's not going to "instantly" fry anything*. That's probably less energy/m2 than consumer heat guns, especially if consider that these drones are likely going to get sprayed in reflective paint. Easy defense for the drone would be just: get into a spin to get roasted evenly -> shut off -> fall for a few hundred meters, cooling using air that rushes by to counteract the laser further -> catch itself once it lost the laser. That would force these laser systems to point each drone until it either visibly goes up in flames or impacts the ground (which means you also need to be able to track them all the way down), otherwise you can't be sure it won't just snap back to life once you started engaging the next drone. I don't feel like 10kw/m2 would be anywhere near useful. It's gotta be more than that. * Stadium floodlights aren't going to instantly grill any bird that flies in front of them either, and they reach that ballpark. |
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| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Huh, to what degree is this technology gatekept by battery advances? A few decades ago lasers were dismissed because they involved chemical reagents for high power and explosive capacitors for even low-power applications. | | |
| ▲ | cogman10 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Huh, to what degree is this technology gatekept by battery advances? Not too much. The power delivery was doable even 15 years ago. It would have just been more expensive and heavier. The bigger issue I believe would have been the lens and tracking capabilities. For the tracking to work you need some pretty good cameras, pretty fast computers, and pretty good object recognition. We are talking about using high speed cameras and doing object detection each frame | | |
| ▲ | Animats 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > The power delivery was doable even 15 years ago. Not really. It took a long time for solid state lasers to make it to 100KW. That's the power level military people have wanted for two decades. Megawatt chemical lasers are possible, and have been built. But the ground based one was three semitrailers, and the airborne one needed a 747. Plus you ran out of chemicals fairly fast. | | |
| ▲ | serf 39 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I took 'power delivery' to mean the systems that facilitate driving the energy into the weapon, not the beam itself -- although now under consideration of the technology I think we should probably avoid the use of the phrase 'power delivery', without a projectile being involved that's essentially the entire concept. |
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| ▲ | galkk 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Wouldn’t they be able to just use radars? |
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| ▲ | wolfi1 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I guess they are using it in pulsed mode, continuous mode would be a little bit much power | |
| ▲ | jstummbillig 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Hm, you think longer than the laser is firing? Could there be windup? | | |
| ▲ | cogman10 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | I imagine there's some sort of storage system, like a huge bank of ultra-capacitors, that are constantly kept charged. The wind up would be if that bank is depleted and they need to recharge. Delivering 100kW for a short period of time is definitely a feat. | | |
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| ▲ | tguvot 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | few seconds. it (lower power version) was deployed during war with hezbollah and intercepted 40 drones (big one, not fpv). there is footage of intercepts out there. was released about half an year ago |
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| ▲ | someNameIG 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They say it's first operational system in it's class, but it seems very similar to the Australian Apollo system, with Apollo being able to go up to 150kW https://eos-aus.com/defence/high-energy-laser-weapon/apollo/ |
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| ▲ | 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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