They are obviously getting ready to implement laser weapons which
will be first generation and at the first threshold of effective
power. In other words good enough to replace something.
The rest of the weapon suite will take a little longer if not much
longer. Yet crews will now become familiar with them and learn to
trust them.
This also suggests that they could be installed on aircraft as we
know that they have experimentally.
Obviously the power output is presently huge. It must be able to
knock something down.
Navy’s Top Geek
Says Laser Arsenal Is Just Two Years Away
By Spencer Ackerman
October 22, 2012
Never mind looming
defense cuts or residual technical challenges. The Navy’s chief
futurist is pushing up the anticipated date for when sailors can
expect to use laser weapons on the decks of their ships, and raising
expectations for robotic submarines.
“On directed
energy” — the term for the Navy’s laser cannons, “I’d say
two years,” Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, the chief of the Office of
Naval Research, told Danger Room in a Monday interview. The previous
estimate, which came from Klunder’s laser technicians earlier this
year, was that it will take four years at the earliest for
a laser gun to come aboard.
“We’re well past
physics,” Klunder said, echoing a mantra for the Office of Naval
Research’s laser specialists. Now, the questions surrounding a
weapon once thought to be purely science fiction sound almost
pedestrian. “We’re just going through the integration
efforts,” Klunder continued. “Hopefully, that tells you
we’re well mature, and we’re ready to put these on naval ships.”
Klunder isn’t
worried about the ships generating sufficient energy to fill the
laser gun’s magazine, which has been an engineering concern of the
Navy’s for years. “I’ve got the power,” said Klunder, who
spoke during the Office of Naval Research’s biennial science and
technology conference. “I just need to know on this ship,
this particular naval vessel, what are the power requirements, and
how do I integrate that directed energy system or railgun system.”
That’s a relief for
the Navy. It means that the Navy’s future ships probably won’t
have to make captains choose between maneuvering their ships and
firing their laser weapons out of fear they’d overload their
power supplies.
But shipboard testing
is underway. Klunder wouldn’t elaborate, but he said that
there have been “very successful” tests placing laser weapons on
board a ship. That’s not to say the first order of business for
naval laser weaponry will be all that taxing: In their early stages,
Pentagon officials talk about using lasers to shoot down
drones or enable better sensing. Klunder alluded to recent tests
in which the Navy’s lasers brought drones down, although he
declined to elaborate.
Then come the unmanned
submarines. Current, commercially available drone subs typically
swim for several days at a time, according to Frank Herr, an Office
of Naval Research department head who works on so-called unmanned
underwater vehicles, or UUVs. That’s way behind the capabilities
thatsuccessive Navy leaders want: crossing entire
oceans without needing to refuel. So Klunder wants to raise the
bar.
“The propulsion
systems that I think you’re going to see within a year are going to
[give] a UUV with over 30 days of endurance,” Klunder said. By
2016, a prototype drone sub for the office’s Long Duration Unmanned
Underwater Vehicle program should be able to spend 60 days
underwater at a time: “That’s ahead of schedule of what we told
the secretary of the Navy a year ago.”
That’s a challenge
for the subs’ propulsion and fuel systems. Typically, Herr
explains, the commercially available batteries built into prototype
drone subs take up a lot of the ship; but building bigger subs just
increases the need for power. The nut that the Office of Naval
Research has to crack is using more efficient fuel cells while
designing subs that don’t need as much energy to run. “We’re
thinking about power requirements for these systems as well as the
power [sources] available for them,” Herr says.
“The breakthrough,”
Klunder explains, “was really on getting past your more traditional
lead-acid battery pieces to more technically robust but also mature
lithium ion fuel cell technology and the hybrids of that.”
None of that is to say
the lasers will be actually on board by 2014 or the drone subs will
disappear beneath the waves for 60 days by 2016. That depends in part
on the Navy’s ability to afford it — and at the conference this
morning, Adm. Mark Ferguson, the Navy’s vice chief, warned that
“research and development is part of that reduction” in defense
budgets currently scheduled to take effect in January. But it might
not be long before Klunder is finally able to hand over a
battle-ready laser cannon to Big Navy.
No comments:
Post a Comment