Fiber Lasers are set to make laser weapons practical | Hacker News Reader

Fiber Lasers are set to make laser weapons practical

spectrum.ieee.org

126 pointssohkamyung123 comments

I have a 4kw IPG laser. It cuts through 1/4 steel plate with ease, unless there is a piece of tape or spray paint on the metal. It can't cut that! it has to do with how the wavelength of the light couples with the material. (I am not a laser engineer, I am the customer)

The 4kw power supply only is $128,000 if you want a cost reference,(just the power supply - motion control, cutting head and chiller are extra). It is an 8 module unit of 500 watts each, that can be powered down to 50w each if wanted, with full frequency and duty cycle control of the beam. It is about 48"x48"x18" and plugs into a 460v 30A 3Ph circuit. There is a chiller the size of a refrigerator to keep it cool.

100kw like in the article would cost roughly $3.2M for the light source only.

There were 20 kw lasers mounted to 7 axis ABB robot arms when I visited the IPG factory in November, being used for welding. The fiber optic cable was the size of a garden hose and terminated at the end of the robot arm in a tool changer mount. It could tool change from cutting laser head to welding head.

Why... do you have that?

Because of his second amendment rights.

The right to bear robot arms with lasers?

That's the one. John Hancock used one to burn his big bold signature onto the sheepskin

From your parent's comment and their profile, I'd wager $1 that it's an industrial laser, likely used for welding and cutting.

For evil purposes.

Or for cutting steel and making auto parts.

This comment is a perfect example of why I love hn. Article about thing that I know a small amount about but have mild interest in? Go to comments and find guy with big ass laser!

Reddit used to be like that; it was the main reason I switched from Digg ~10 years ago.

It still is, in some subs, just not the overly popular or poorly moderated

r/linux was recently having some laissez-faire experiment where there was minimal to no moderation for one week. Everyone was like "hey, nobody discovered major vulnerabilities in one week, moderation has no function!"

No moderation on anonymous forums certainly seem to attract the brightest and shiniest individuals together. Cough.

So... we can protect tanks and planes from laser weapons by putting scotch tape on them??

Or spray paint! Guess the glorious days of bare brushed metal tanks are over. :(

Banksy will save us all!

First active armour plates, then scotch tape.

Or mirroring, shiney tanks....

4KW power supply for $128k?

I understand a lot of engineering went into making that & needs to be recouped, but it still sounds on the high side. I wonder how hard it'd be to build one, if required.

Might depend on what he means by "power supply". For a purely electrical thing it does sound expensive unless there is a stringent low-noise requirement (which would surprise me in an industrial laser).

The lasers I've heard of work by amplifying light along a fibre that has been energised by some other light source -- and that light source is sometimes also a laser. So in this case the "power supply" might actually be thing that produces 10-20kW of light (of which only some is converted into laser light along the fibre).

It's the current regulation and all the snazzy PWM.

Even so, 128k is a bit excessive. They're definitely charging the enterprise/business markup for that power.

Not really given the highly integrated nature of laser manufacturers where they bundle the table, drives, CNC, material handling, power supply, and (often) SLA together. Additionally there is a lower run-rate of consumables in comparison to other industrial cutting technologies so the life-time cost is more comparable to competing technologies.

So why not always use laser? They have far higher upfront costs as their business model is not consumable-driven. Further they are limited in material thickness and finish they can handle. They are great at cutting sheet and thin (<= 1/4") metals, when the surface is clean and uniform as mentioned above, but if your shop needs the ability to cut thicker materials or the up-front cost is too high then plasma, oxy-fuel, or (possibly) waterjet are better options.

OP here. by power supply, I was talking about the metal box that the bright light comes out of. The thing making the 4kw of laser juice. Not just a transformer.

This reminds me of all I could think about watching the new star wars films. Why don’t all the storm troopers get to have the shiny mirrored suits. Those pesky rebels and their lasers blasters would just bounce off. check mate empire.

The thing that gets me is they have holographic displays but they can't figure out that it's a bad idea putting the pilot of a military ship right at the front with their head sticking out.

Or they can build robots that are clearly sentient but they don't bother giving them a voice.

Do you ever downvote comments or collapse threads? Maybe R2 units are just constantly incoherent, off-topic, or abusive.

In fairness, we have no idea what the IP licensing schemes are like for text-to-speech technology in that galaxy.

Actually the treatment of sentient droids in those movies is one of the sour points for me, rewatching it now. Somehow it's OK to just wipe a droid's memories, or dismantle it, when it's just as much a 'person' as any of the organic characters. Blah.

In Sci-Fi terms the Star Wars approach to AI is nonsensical. You have sentient droids that are treated as possesions/slaves/butlers but there's no AI except for the droids, no spaceships that fly themselves or superintelligent AI minds or anything. And the aforementioned lack of voice for some droids.

But in cinematic terms the R2D2/C3PO double-act does make for some funny exchanges, so I guess that's what they were going for. So its kindof tropes first, world-building afterwards as an afterthought.

> it's just as much a 'person' as any of the organic characters.

The organic ones aren't treated that well either.

The novelization of the first Star Wars movie alluded to controversies over "droid rights", but that was a theme that never developed as the series progressed.

Dude, this was "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." Obviously we've gotten smarter.

> Those pesky rebels and their lasers blasters would just bounce off.

They're not meant to be lasers in Star Wars (: They're packets of ionized gas (a gas Lando and friends mine at Cloud City).

In the movies I never heard them being called laser blasters but only blasters (and in fact they don't behave as laser at all), though almost everybody I know consider them laser weapons. I don't know if this is a general issue or simply due to the fact that in my country "lightsabers" were translated as "laser swords".

There are lasers in fact , but are less common and bigger weapons. Death Star's weapon is the prime example of course, but there are also others (right now I remember a laser weapon looking like a rhasadar being used by the rebels during the battle of Hoth).

This bothered you? and not WWII style bombing run using inexplicably slow and unmaneuverable crafts? or space ships slowing down after fuel runs out?!?!?! :o how about small unmanned shuttle hitting lightspeed into the destroyer? too obvious I guess.

The ship might not be slowing down, every ship in both fleets is accelerating so you are in an accelerating reference frame. Stop accelerating and you will not keep up.

A larger issue is the empire has light speed travel so they can easily get on the other side.

The larger issue is that you can somehow kill an entire fleet by sacrificing a single ship and yet nobody had the idea to build hyperdrive torpedos.

Depends on relative costs of an engine and how random the destruction.

I think the bigger issue is simply how close the ships where to each other. If that's standard then hyperdrive weapons are a big deal, if it's a mistake then at best you take down a ship some % of the time.

Yep KKW, kinetic kill weapons, basicaly large cannon balls moving at close to light speed.

What about the devastation a couple of buckets of playpen sand would cause when accelerated to relativistic speeds, hypervelocity buckshot gun..

Hypervelocity ballistic weapons have been researched in the real world, and found wanting. It turns out that mass and volume matter more than speed in terms of the damage inflicted. A projectile that is too fast and small may simply pass all the way through the target, retaining most of its energy, while a wider but slower projectile will impact the target and pass more/all of its energy into the target, causing significantly more damage (i.e., like hollow-point bullets).

So really, it's not that nobody had the idea to build hyperdrive torpedoes. It's that they knew they would be fairly useless, and nobody would expect your enemy to kamikaze their sole remaining flagship into yours at hyperdrive speeds when they could accomplish far more damage to the target by simply crashing into it at normal speeds, as has happened nearly a dozen times in the SW movies. Holdo's act wasn't an act of strategy; it was an act of desperation, and worked far better than she expected it to.

Even if torpedos are ineffective because they pass right through the object (which I doubt, at relativistic speeds), you might want to consider sacrificing a flagship in case someone builds an attack station the size of a moon.

This is space fantasy, physics conforms to the plot not the other way around. Just pick the right technobabble.

Perhaps it required someone with the right force sensitivity to pull off.

Perhaps shields normally block these attacks and they turned them down to conserve fuel.

Perhaps when going past light speed ships normally just pass right on through normal matter. What happened was a never before seen effect based on failing to reach light speed in some highly unlikely fashion.

Perhaps it is reproducible, but requires tuning the shield frequencies. So it only worked do to the long period in very close proximity.

PS: Perhaps it's just a giant plot hole and showed up because someone at ILM showed a cool demo and they had to work that visual into the movie somehow.

mass is less important than speed, E = mc^2

Star Wars is not sci fi. It’s set in space and in a different time period, but has little to do with science, and much to do with fiction.

>in the far future

Ehm...

“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...."

Couldn’t resist ;)

Ah you're right, updated. But whatever, point still stands, haha.

Exactly, it’s our age’s retelling of mythology.

We still expect the people in the story to act plausibly based on the rules and conventions of their setting. Suspension of disbelief has its limits.

Don't forget the fact that the bombers, in space, had to fly "over" their target to "drop" their bombs.

1) B-wing bombers have been slow and lumbering and functioned that way since the original SW trilogy...

2) Star Wars has always worked that way. Having the ships continue coasting would violate rules established in the original Trilogy. See, e.g., ESB, where disabled Destroyers promptly lost stationkeeping.

3) The Resistance's largest ship barely damaged the Third Order flagship; a portion was split off but the flagship itself was still functional. It was the massive amount of debris from the Resistance ship breaking apart on impact that caused most of the damage to the remainder of the TO fleet. This strategy simply doesn't scale.

Mostly I hate how they act like children.

The Cohen Brothers' adaptation didn't perform well in focus groups.

>Why don’t all the storm troopers get to have the shiny mirrored suits. Those pesky rebels and their lasers blasters would just bounce off. check mate empire.

Firstly, it would look ridiculous, and they would no longer seem menacing.

Second, and most important, so Phasma's toys sell better.

If you want a canon-consistent reason, umm... because most stormtroopers are grunts and the Empire doesn't really care about them.

>Firstly, it would look ridiculous, and they would no longer seem menacing.

Cylons beg to disagree.

The original cylons looked pretty daft. The updated non-human versions were a lot less shiny, though.

They are not lasers, they are blaster bolts of plasma. Not a beam of light, but rather individual shots of super heated gas.

So carbon ablation foam armor then. Easy as toast.

Like this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMSyGOoesfM

if you want some fun there's https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=laser+rust+remo...

That rust removal is amazing. Thanks for sharing!!

real iron man

Yes, same power unit, but I have the IPG motion control and machine, not a Prima. The Prima was more than double the total cost of mine. That machine in the video can hit $1,000,000 with options. Also it is super cool.

That's one sweet rig. What do you make with it?

couldn't you just switch frequency?

My read is that this will be great for commercial applications (e.g. welding, lighting), but a weapon that doesn't work in a smokey/foggy environment is going to be fairly easy to circumvent. Environments where something is being hit with a high power laser tend to end up being smokey/foggy.

That won't make it useless, but it will definitely reduce utility and adoption. 100kW really is not that much, unless you can focus it to a fairly small diameter, which just is not possible at long distances.

My personal favorite for a "ray gun", and far more difficult to make work, is the Laser-Induced Plasma Channel.

What we really need is an energetically advantageous way to produce high energy neutral particle beams. That would start to look more like the ray guns of science fiction than lasers ever will. It’s not just the weather either, when you hit a target that has a bit of appropriate ablative armor, you’ll be dealing with another source of bloom.

LIPC tech is good too, and might be closer than you’d think. You can exploit the interaction of ultrashort laser pulses to create and modulate plasma, and then do neat things like send a bunch of volts down the channel.

Lightning!

Or just use the plasma directly - https://youtu.be/ML79u9zPZu4?t=2m47s

Something like a Godiva device (pulsed nuclear reactor)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godiva_device

They have a risk of creating a small nuclear explosion though.

Also, I get from Ian Banks' SF, mirrors are a defense. And indeed, blowback offense.

Mirror shields in the Culture series use the 'field' magic that so much of the Culture's science relies on. Presumably a reflector field is both insanely reflective (99.999% or better, like dielectric mirrors) and resilient to the air the field's being projected in heating up massively from the small energy fraction which is absorbed.

Your typical "glass with metal on it" mirror will fare very poorly against a high power laser. They're only ~90% reflective, and 10% of a high power beam is more than enough to turn your mirror into a 0% reflective smoldering black lump.

Even if you build a mirror with very high reflecting factor in the wavelength of your enemy's weapon, all it takes is a smudge of dust or oil on the surface and the thing is toast.

True. But on the other hand, there are mirrors in the laser itself that don't end up as toast. And in some circumstances, I can imagine throwaway mirrors that would reflect back substantial power before destruction. More or less a variant on chaff.

If memory serves Traveller (game) mentioned aereosols (like smoke grenades) to counter lasers.

"Sandcasters". And in some incarnations of the game the clouds they produced would even be actively manoeuvred through space by some absurdly improbable application of magnetic force, to make defense an active skill (vs mindlessly pumping "more energy to shields")

Sandcasters were used for space combat. I am away from my library so I cannot check but I seem to remember smoke/aereosols to be used for ground combat to reduce laser effectiveness.

  there are mirrors in the laser itself that
  don't end up as toast.

Someone showed an industrial laser cutter to me once. He told me that:

1. The internal mirrors were about 5cm diameter, and water cooled.

2. The laser is only brought fully into focus at the final lens, just before the cutting point. So the beam at the mirror might have a 2cm diameter, before being focused down to a 0.5mm diameter at the cutting point.

Point 2 was also a key part of the safety system; the safety barriers could actually be quite thin, as the laser would be out of focus at that distance no matter how far wrong the optics went :)

Also isn't it trivial to reflect the laser back to its origin? And if the laser is powerful enough to take down a missile, I'd thought the reflection of the beam on smoke may be harmful to humans too.

Reflect it away perhaps, back to origin would require a lot of control or luck. The other thing to keep in mind is that a "reflective" surface is not a perfect reflector so some energy transfer will occur and if that transfer damages the reflective surface it leads to more energy transfer, etc.

It will be hard to hit the gun itself but what about reflecting it to the ship carrying the gun?

The exterior of a potential target could be covered in corner reflectors[1]. Such a surface reflects most of the light directly back to its source.

Corner reflecting is the reason vehicle reflectors appear so bright under illumination.

I wonder how good such a counter measure would be?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_reflector

Reflecting the ray in the general direction of the laser, yes.

Reflecting it so that it could do any damage, hardly. You'd have to have a high-precision reflector to keep the reflected beam narrow, especially at a long distance. The reflection will likely have an order of magnitude larger area, and thus lower power density. A ship firing the laser is likely much sturdier and more massive than a missile it tries to gun down with the laser beam.

I think this is more a point defence (aa) weapon you could imagine one mounted in a second turret on a MBT to counter missiles / rpg's

It would also if equipped with image recognition help protect the tank against enemy infantry - might not be to popular with you own grunts though.

Probably okay for targetted drone assassinations though

Tinfoil hats, back in style.

Is targeted drone warfare still a tinfoil hat topic? I read I don’t know how many articles about Bush and Obama expanding a targeted drone program and the public seems to have just kinda shrugged.

Edit: dead comment below points out I might be missing a joke: tinfoil is for blocking the lasers. D’oh

No tinfoil necessary when it's a well-documented fact.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-tru...

Would the laser not burn a passage through any particulates, yes it would intialy attenuate tbe beam, but would then burn through

Wouldn't that depend heavily on the reflectivity of the particles?

Also depends on whether particles are being freshly generated by the target. An aircraft could "smoke" itself - i.e. emit a particulate cloud from a grid of pores in its skin - in response to being targeted or fired upon by directed energy weapons.

I just spent two years experimenting with laser ablation of various metals with a high powered fiber laser that can concentrate its output into picosecond pulses (MOPA). I do think that something like silver plating would make a target vastly harder to destroy. That said, it's one more thing that needs to be added to a weapon that likely also needs to be hard to lock onto with conventional countermeasures, survive high speeds in atmosphere, handle high heat of engines and launch systems, etc. Rain might largely dissipate the laser over any distance. The wavelength of these lasers tends to be in the infrared. Having a second laser of a different wavelength would drastically reduce the number of materials that could be used to reflect it. Use of some kind of flak to dirty up the target could help a lot. I've found that something as simple as some pen marks on mirrored silver can make it easy to ablate. The real advantage of this tech is that it's light speed and very accurate. It could slice up a swarm of drones in a moment, or be aimed into a jet engine to avoid reflective coatings.

On the power end, some years ago I noticed that every time there was an announcement on supposedly significant progress in ultra-capacitors, said line of inquiry seemed to "disappear".

Probably not, but I started to wonder whether military/security agencies were moving in and sitting on these developments, in lieu of having an effective defense against weapons powered by them. Not just large-scale weapons, but anti-personnel weapons.

Are they small enough to mount on sharks?

You just need to breed bigger sharks.

I recall reading a thread here or on reddit about a prosumer laser pointer (the kind that people misuse against airplanes) being shined at a glass table and the reflections temporarily blinding everyone in the room. This seems like an military application worth exploring.

Blinding laser weapons are banned from use by most UN members due to the 1995 Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons. Although I guess it's only for "permanently" blinding weapons, so temporary blinding (ala a flashbang) might be permissible?

I think the Skripal assassination attempt in London proves that it's not because biological weapons are banned that they aren't developed. And if Russia does it, I doubt the US is sitting idle.

My cousin got a laser pen in Thailand, the thing say 5000mW which is probably false, but it's still way above the usual 5mW pointer. It's reaches buildings miles away with ease, and clouds too .. to the point that I got to learn that it's entirely dangerous and illegal because you can blind plane pilots.

If it was temporary, they got lucky. Reliably temporarily blinding someone with lasers is impossible.

Laser dazzlers [0] were deployed by the UK during the Falklands War [1], but actual combat use has not been confirmed. They've seen more common use in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzler_(weapon)

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-23518592

>By comparison, a laser shot from a fiber-laser weapon would cost only $1 in diesel fuel

Ugh, what a dirty power source for a shiny ray gun! I hope diesel will be phased out soon.

It's not going away anytime soon. Especially since jet fuel is pretty much just another form of diesel.

Sigh. I want every large marine vessel to have one of these installed:

https://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.ht...

Well, OK, not precisely one of these because it doesn't work yet. But something similar.

It would be fantastic if we had a reliable viable way to convert large marine vessels to clean electric, but there also a ton of other applications for diesel such as portable generators, stoves, lamps, heaters that would be hard press to switch to electric.

Coming Soon: DJI will be mounting these on their drones.

Fiber lasers are part of the solution, but blooming in air, and from target ablation is still a problem. What we really need for “ray guns” are phased array lasers and/or FEL’s. Just pumping more energy through conventional optics will make the problems I mentioned worse, not better.

ISTM "target ablation" might be the purpose of a ray gun? It sounds painful, anyway.

I’m having a hard time imagining what this kind of damage would be like. What would happen for instance if it were fired at a person’s head?

Blindness, 2nd and then 3rd degree burns. Think of it more like a heat ray, and you get the idea. Human heads don’t have the option of countermeasures though, such as ablative costing which dramatically increase blooming, while insulating the target. You need more than 100kw to either punch through that, or take advantage of non-linear effects.

At these energies it’s less about ablation and more about thermal effects on propellant and warhead assemblies. The problem is that coating a missile in a thin layer of something designed to ablate is a lot cheaper than building a laser to overcome those countermeasures.

Yes but all you need to do to the missile is perturb its flight or damage its steering fins causing it to miss - you don't need to blow it up.

Ballistic missiles often don't have steering fins, and are guided using thrust vectoring. Also, missile defence often has to take place in the terminal stage of flight (e.g. THAAD), where the missile is carried to its target by its momentum, as you can't station your defence system in your enemy's territory.

I was talking about PD (point defence) on the battle field where your not targeting ICBM's but RPG's, MANPADS and CPR rounds mortar's especially

Yes, to me these problem with laser weapons seem fundamental.

The thing which makes light interesting and useful is that it interacts so strongly with matter. So strongly in fact that they can be hugely affected by such things are air-density variations, fine particles in the air etc. So it seems the makers of anti-laser defences will always have options.

Bullets and bombs on the other hand have the "nice" property that they interact strongly with solid matter but fairly weakly with gasses. (Yes, it's more complicated than that).

Blooming could be partially compensated by using probing lasers and adaptive focusing optics such as in big astro telescopes.

Basically one uses a standard laser to determine air interference and then use rams to reform a semi-flexible mirror to compensate.

80's tecno-fashion and glitterball stuff, here we go again!. Weeee!!

Honest question. Would a jacket with embedded small mirrors make our children invisible to police helicopter scanners and safe against ray guns?

>A clever configuration of industrial lasers is set to finally make laser weapons practical

Finally? Really? Why is this a good thing? Because star wars manchildren want to roleplay? We're looking at terrible burns and very high chances of being blinded. These weapons should be banned from use on humans.

The first use that came to mind for me was easily deployed and reusable missile defense systems. Not every country can spend billions on disposable anti-ballistic missiles, but lasers could eventually become affordable for most countries.

Lasers can never replace anti-missile systems completely, simply because fog or rain will stop them. Also they're completely incapable of taking on reentry vehicles. Other energy weapons might do the trick, but they're not even in protytpe phase yet (as far as we know).

The only thing lasers can do is provide low cost per shot for assymetrical warfare defence/offence. They also have other niche applications (ie sensor blinding/soft kill defense) and of course they can easily make warfare an even worse hell, with the next semi-symmetrical war leaving millions blind and hundreds of thousands rotting away from skin infections.

It's not for humans, that's practically pointless for this type of weapon. It's for taking out things moving fast with sensor packages. Also Geneva convention. A "little" .50BMG will from 1910 will practically aerosolize a human.

They are banned for use on humans. Won't necessarily stop their use, like the Russians using a drop of nerve agent in the UK.

there are banned for blinding enemy soldier, which indicently is the only use conventional cannot do. when laser do the same as conventional weapons, it won't be banned.

I’m sure the federal government will try to regulate laser firearms.

Lasers also make for horrible terror weapons. A scanner set up on some rooftop could cripple the sight of hundreds of people. Good that externalities such as cooling and power supply make that hard to achieve.

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