DERPA Commissions $21m Laser Gun, Nerds Shudder with Joy
We all know how cool the death star was. Yes, I know it may have annihilated millions of people but for shear ingenuity, its up at the top of the great ideas list.
We’ll American military researchers have awarded a $21 million contract to Textron Defence Systems to design and develop a 150-kilowatt energy weapon that packs enough power to shoot missiles out of the sky, but is light enough for a fighter plane to carry. Death Star it ‘aint, but this still reeks of awesomeness.
Textron have agreed to “fabricate and test a Unit Cell Module for a 150 kilowatt Laser Weapon System (LWS) and develop a critical design for the 150kW LWS”.
And the small matter of the $21 million contract? Well the money comes right from the Pentagon’s DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency).
The whole idea is to have a skynet…wait, wrong movie…the whole idea is to make the agencies High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defence system have a shorter name. oh, and to make it fit on to jet fighters. At this time laser guns can only be fitted on to huge planes, because of weight and size restrictions.
The only problem DARPA saw was that these big plane-attached laser guns struggle to shoot in anything other than a straight line, so they they would struggle to engage low-flyig or surface targets unless they came in to their line of sight.
DARPA want a laser turret that would work like a massively advance Napoleonic cannon, that would bring the rain down on anybody/thing it wanted removed from this world and tackle airborne threats from below.
“The capability to shoot down tactical targets such as surface-to-air missiles and rockets will be demonstrated,” according to DARPA’s programme chief, Don Woodbury.
Textron Systems’ Dr John Boness says that the funding from DARPA will “accelerate the deployment of practical Directed Energy Weapons to the warfighter”. Textron say they will be using “proprietary ThinZag Ceramic solid-state” tech to achieve this.
DARPA want the 150kW demo module to “weigh just 750 kilograms and fit into a space about the size of a large refrigerator”. Not exactly compact, but it’s a step on from the current HELLADS system in use at present. The new guns will weigh about a third of the HELLADS weaponry.
Its another exciting step in figuring out better ways of blowing stuff up. Something every good scientist loves doing. Hopefully we’ll get some sharks with “fricken laser beams” attached to their heads soon enough.
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