Anti-aircraft laser unveiled at Farnborough Airshow

[rust]

Ah ... which ones are those with the reflecting sunglasses and the black
helicopters who abduct poor aliens and carry out cruel experiments on
them ? :?

 

[far-trader]

Ah ... which ones are those with the reflecting sunglasses and the black
helicopters who abduct poor aliens and carry out cruel experiments on
them ? :?

What? MIB? (Men In Black) No such group exists <flash>. Oh, and I was never here. <flash>

 

[Charakan]

And the infamous part III of the Official Secrets Act (UK) which is illegal to reveal to one who has not signed it.........

Now I'm intrigued, I'd never heard of that (if its not a joke).

The reference to SHADO cracked me up, I loved that show when I was a kid.

 

[justacaveman]

Sorry Rust, but the Soviet Union leadership did believe the Star Wars claims.

Why? Because the US didn't just come out and make these claims. In fact they tended to publicly release information that indicated that it was failing while apparently trying to conceal any signs of success.

To many people in the world (including experts), it looked like the US was concealing successful tests and showing only the failures. They also gave secret briefings to thousands of soldiers showing working prototypes of laser equipment along with other information that was actually true, knowing that the information was going to leak out (I was personally at one of these briefings, and it was very convincing at the time.).

This was not a haphazzard effort on the part of the US, it was a well planned and well executed plan (This actually suprises me.).

There were always detractors, but there were people who called themselves experts who didn't believe in the NSA or Stealth technology either. Things were deliberately confused in order to create doubt as what was the truth.

You need to realize that the Soviet Union couldn't afford to take the chance that the technology actually worked, because if it did their ICBMs would be useless, while the United States' ICBMs would still be effective (Quite Unacceptable) . So they had to try and find away around or duplicate a technology that didn't actually exist. They were already on the edge of financial disaster, and this pushed them over.

 

[MarkB]

Follow one of the links to earlier articles, e.g. Record power for military laser, 22 February 2007:

A laser developed for military use is a few steps away from hitting a power threshold thought necessary to turn it into a battlefield weapon.

The Solid State Heat Capacity Laser (SSHCL) has achieved 67 kilowatts (kW) of average power in the laboratory.

It could take only a further six to eight months to break the "magic" 100kW mark required for the battlefield, the project's chief scientist told the BBC.

The one demonstrated at Farnborough, according to the article of 19th July 2010, produces a 50kW beam. So much for a 100kW laser in six to eight months...

Well, they could always just fire two of them at the same target.

 

[rust]

Sorry Rust, but the Soviet Union leadership did believe the Star Wars claims.

After Hans Bethe's report from March 1984 the idea of SDI was more or
less dead almost everywhere outside of the USA. But again, I think this is
the wrong thread for this discussion.

 

[justacaveman]

Hans Bethe was a physicist. And while other physicists believed him at the time, politicians are an entirely different animal.

The Star Wars ABM technology wasn't about reality, it was about perception.

It's not hard to convince politicians that the physicists are wrong when they never really understood the arguments in the first place. Many physicists believed that it would be impossible to make an atomic bomb, and we can see what happened there. This is an example of the experts being wrong.

It's taken decades of work, but the technology that was envisioned in the Star Wars ABM program is right around the corner (No more than a decade or two.). This technology will be a certainty by the middle of the century.