Navy warship equipped with laser weapon
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| USS Ponce |
It’s not quite the equivalent of the lasers that you see flying through space in the movies, oh wait, yes it is! It has been announced that the Navy Warship U.S.S. Ponce, currently deployed in the Persian Gulf, has been equipped with a laser weapon known as LaWS (Laser Weapons System, cleverly), that is capable of destroying targets with a pulse of light and heat.
There are several advantages to this: One, the cost of firing the weapon is very cheap. As the article notes, the pulse will cost about $1 in electricity, as opposed to standard ordinance which can run thousands of dollars each. It’s also easier to maintain and more flexible for close-range, small targets. There are concerns as well. The biggest one of all is how it will perform in adverse weather. It has acquired 100% of its test targets so far, but weather hasn’t been incorporated in to the test plan yet. Additionally, it is a short-range weapon, and it hasn’t been proven against fast moving, more distant targets like fighter jets.
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| This is the actual laser weapon that will be deployed. |
This technology isn’t anything new. The military has been working on this kind of thing for a long time, and I can’t imagine anyone is surprised by that. As the linked article states, the plan to equip lasers on aircraft was unsuccessful, and those cost over $1 billion each, whereas this laser was developed as part of a $40 million project. Additionally, development continues on very-high powered lasers that will do severe damage to targets that are fast-moving and/or far away. It’s known as the free-electron laser, and the Navy wants you to know all about it!
Below is a brief video from CBS news about its operation.
On the conventional-weapon front, development continues on the rail-gun, which fires an inert projectile at a velocity exceeding the speed of sound, around 5,500 mph, doing massive damage to whatever it impacts. A very brief video of that is below.
The morality or potential misuse of these types of developments is beyond what I wanted to talk about here. It is clearly a concern, and I know there are people who think we shouldn’t be developing weapons of war, while others think it is a necessity. I’ll leave that up to you. It’s not the type of thing that would likely fall into enemy hands anytime soon, but it is a significant advancement in military technology. Even our robots are getting better.
A couple of other points I should make for clarification purposes: Those laser beams you see flying from spaceships in movies? You wouldn’t see them either. And laser is actually an acronym for ‘Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation,’ so technically it’s not laser, it’s LASER.
