any news on whether it'll need a car battery or a powerstation?

or just a solar blanket and a box of caps? (rapid fire obviously not an option..)

Could be useful against teenage louts who pester my staff and shout abusive comments at customers every school holiday.

Flame?? Obviously!!!! (Imagines ball of fire wearing Nike Trainers and 9ct gold plated "bling")

errmm... couldnt you just reflect it with a mirror?

Good.

no USB?

Loan Sharks wid frikkin lazers. Oh goody.

Never mind mirrors, primsmatic aerosols will be the next thing. Some sort of spray with tiny prismatics beads in to defract the laser. So that will be another layer of ERA on your tankss and MICVs then!

So is the next step use the laser within a chamber to superheat a gas and project magnetically contained plasma at high speed? DARPA should try reading more Sci-Fi books or play the old Traveller RPG. (That's Role Playing Game, not Rocket Propelled Grenade)

It wouldn't be 1D20 of damage either, more like 6D6 and treat as Fireball spell.

Mine's the coat that looks like TL-15 Battle dress with an FGMP-15 attached.

You could probably fit a 500KW generator set into the back of an armoured personnel carrier - the diesel engine and generator combined would weigh no more than 3 tons or so, and even commercial sets aren't much bigger than a garden shed, so with a bit of ingenuity, it's possible to pull off.

...a huge diesel engine for powering the sucker, but judging from the size of those 'thermal interface' ports, you are going to need a HUGE watercooling system to lug about on your laser tank, with a nice big radiator... which would make compelling target for an RPG methinks.

Do lasers have advantages over conventional cannon?

I often strap a laser pointer to my hard knob to freak out street prozzies.

When was the last time you saw a tank as small as a shed?

This kind of tank is for kicks - I'm sure the military can make them even bigger!!

http://www.geekologie.com/2007/07/25/tank-limo.jpg

Paris because she can blow me away anytime.

As soon as I saw:

"FIRESTRIKE™s can be linked together to get a more powerful beam, apparently."

I thought "uh-huh. Death Star".

With that name it should come with Firewire.

Telling ya Flipper is out to get us for that crappy TV show

/mines the one with Tuna Safe on the back :)

Ya know....keeping with the name + all

Windows for Warships? noooo Linux for Lasers

Don't think that'd work, either. For one thing, chrome plating by its very nature isn't very conducive to coating. Most aficionados say you need to rough it up (such as with sandpaper or acid etching) before you can paint it, and in this case, that would defeat the purpose of the chrome plating. Furthermore, anything underneath the camouflage paint could receive damage from the combustion of the paint, causing potential deformation to the reflective surface that defeat the reflection defense.

Well it all depends on what you consider a shed. Mine holds a rake, some small Garden tools, the hand mower and some flower pots. My Dad's is a quonset hut.

You would be amazed on what the military is putting together in the way of power and cooling systems. I have a lil info on some of the multi band, selective jamming systems the US uses out in the field. Very compact and powerful, covers the theatre no problem and yet still fits in a Bradly. Unfortunately you need a second Bradly to carry the power supply and cooling system. IR invisible these things are not.

Besides - Diesel? When did the military go back to rugged and reliable diesel when it has all those turbines to play with?

Anything that requires it be suspended in the air can be easily defeated by a laser. Lasers work by directing heat, and this also works in the air between weapon and target. The sudden heating of the air where the prismatics are suspended will create a sudden localized wind burst which would cause the particles to be blown out of the way. Furthermore, there aren't a lot of materials that can withstand a prolonged laser emission. Those that can't rapidly deform and become useless as reflective or refractive materials.

You'd think they'd use FC with all that laser stuff around.

Anyway, where do you buy these? The lighting and electrical area of B&Q or accessories in Halfords (alongside the chav neon lights and furry dice)?

Paris? She'd know where to get her death rays...

...produce 500kw in a relatively small package. Coincidentally, some tanks are already powered by turbines.

First off, let's talk about the power plant. The AGT 1500 (the power plant used in the M1 Abrams) produces over twice the required power, 1,120 kW. It weighs in at a bit over a metric ton, 1,134 kg and takes up about 1.3 cubic meters of space (1.629 m long X 0.991m wide X 0.807m high). So even with the extra radiator capacity and the like that you would require for such a system, you shouldn't have any trouble fitting one into an AFV (Armored Fighting Vehicle). Indeed, instead of having two power plants in the AFV, you could just uprate the vehicle's power plant and use the excess to power the laser. In an M2 Bradley chassis, for instance, you could install a power plant with the output of the AGT 1500 and you could power the laser and still have remaining the 600 hp that the Bradley uses to propel itself. Since the laser will be replacing the main armament and ammo for that main armament, this seems quite doable.

As to the kind of damage it would do, I made some assumptions about the system: that it would use a 1 micron wavelength beam (Northrup Grumman didn't specify the beam wavelength) and that these laser modules would feed into a set of steering optics 1 meter in diameter. Being a bit more pessimistic about beam quality than the spec sited at twice the diffraction limit you get a beam width of ~4.8mm (a little smaller than a NATO standard 5.56mm bullet) for a target 2km distant. I then plugged this beam diameter and the 100 kw beam power into the calculator provided at this site: http://tiny.cc/8oNrW which told me that this beam ought to chew through something on the order of 9cm of steel or 15cm of aluminum a second (the calculator assumes that the absorptivity=1, so these numbers might need downward adjustment for targets with a shiny surface).

As an added bonus, the main page of the above site has a plausible-looking artists conception of such a vehicle mounted laser, albeit one mounted on a wheeled rather than tracked chassis and operating in the green part of the visible spectrum as opposed to an IR wavelength, as I had been assuming.

So that would be about 10d4 + 10 then? (side note: seeing as the laser will probably do reasonably consistent damage, its better modelled by a large number of small dice (e.g. 5d4 = 5-20) than a small number of large dice (e.g. 1d20 = 1-20))

This sort of thing irritates me because I'm a US taxpayer. We're paying big bucks to develop and use this junk when we're hurting with budget deficits and local shortfalls of cash.

I don't want this kind of crap. Its amateurish, childish, stupid games for boys who never grew up that servers no useful purpose in our modern world.

1d20? Not quite, it's a little more complex than that...

The 15kW version (Gnomish Felblaster) is a green item reward from a quest line that starts in Duskwood at level 22 and finishes in Stranglethorn Vale at level 30, that is soloable by any player. It has 21.2 base DPS and a +4 Agility bonus making it a good weapon for hunters in that level range, especially if you've got some decent instance blues to pump the DPS up a bit. In simple terms, that would allow you to 1-shot any mob up to about a level 10. You MIGHT be able to solo Ragefire Chasm with it, but not much else.

The 100kW version (Sargeras' Demonic Blaster of Doom) is an epic item that has a 5% chance to drop from a boss in an endgame 25-man raid. It has a whopping 87.8 base DPS, and adds +16 Intellect, +12 Stamina, +20 crit rating, +50 attack power (with 12% chance to proc for +250 AP for 10 sec) and two gem slots; if gemmed well and equipped with the right T6 armour set, you could theoretically 1-shot any mob up to about level 50, or a 40 elite. With that you'd be able to easily solo Scholomance or Stratholme, or the Outland instances without much difficulty.

Now who says I need to get out more? I travel hundreds of miles across Azeroth and Outland every day! ;)

Of course the big advantage projectives have over Lasers is that they can lob shots over obstacles and horizons.

Not a major issue for Bradleys and the like but surely a disadvantage of a laser mounted on a n M1A1 compared to a conventional M1A1.

I presume tank still provide indirect fire on occasions? F

The problem with a retro-reflector is not the alignment/precision, but the size - it has to be bigger than the target, and between the target and source: that is pretty difficult to do, even on a stationary object. The success would depend a great deal on the targetting method used: on an aircraft that is likely to be radar and/or laser, which may well be confused enough by your retro-reflector to avoid being hit in the first place. A tank is likely to stick with the largely optical sights that it already has, so the biggest danger is of blinding the gunner.

On an object similar to a tank, the aim (as ever) is to make the armour thick enough to survive for long enough, not to be completely impenetrable. In this case, movement would help, as would returning fire, with a nice quick kinetic round, which requires only a second or so: try making your nice big glass lens able to survive any kind of tank round.

I think this is perhaps the best comment thread I've ever seen on el Reg.

I'm still laughing at "Blind mating interface panel"...