Video: Warship lasers
A video released at the biennial aerospace convention in Farnborough, UK, today, shows a laser mounted on a warship’s gun turret obliterating a remotely piloted drone.
Built by Raytheon Missile Systems of Tuscon, Arizona, the 32-kilowatt infrared laser is shown illuminating and heating the wingtip and then the underside of what looks like a radar-seeking drone – until its remote pilot loses control and the aircraft catches fire and plummets into the ocean.
“Three similar drones were also successfully engaged at militarily significant distances by the solid-state laser” in May and June, says Mike Booen, the firm’s vice president. “It’s a world first over open sea.”
Rock ‘n’ roll
Last year, a Boeing laser mounted on a regular Humvee military truck tracked and shot down a drone. But at sea there is a unique challenge: the laser has to fire from a moving, rolling ship, with salt-laden air severely weakening its beam.
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Raytheon is not saying how it overcame the beam-weakening problem, but says it has designed its laser weapon to operate on the US navy and coastguard’s standard ship defence system, Phalanx. This includes a high-speed, high-calibre Gatling gun that counteracts the ship’s movement to track and shred any inbound drone or rocket with a fusillade of tungsten armour-piercing rounds.
Such lasers are allowed under the UN protocol on blinding laser weapons because they are not specifically designed as blinding weapons alone.
One barrier to directed-energy battleships, however, could be their energy requirements. Today’s warships already have arrays of power-hungry systems, which use so much electricity that some strategists think many more types of military ships should in future be nuclear powered.
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