Don't use sharks...

Surely something like an electric eel would be more appropriate, or perhaps some sort of ray.

Mine the one with the fishy smell about it.

oblig.

I, for one, welcome our new genetically-modified mutant shark/electric eel crossbreed in-body megawatt abominations with (presumably) nasty big teeth.

That's a mighty turret....

to see and shoot at a sea-skimming missile at 100nm! Or do they use reflector balloons?

@ Magazine Unlimited >>> Seriously

Comments about torpedeos agreed, how would a laser armed ship deal with a sub. The surrounding body of water would defeat any laser system, something in the ratio of power of laser to depth sub sits at.

But here is a thought.

Mount the laser on a sub, fire through extendable barrel (think snorkle/periscope) whist sub is submerged.

Only vulnerability is the exposed above water barrel.

Sub could sit at depth and clear a fleet of ships + any aircover fleet of ships wanted to have.

Interesting....

"So what do we want to do tonght ?"

"The same thing we do every night — try to take over the world."

All I need now is a load of cash and a tropical island with a volcano shaped like a skull !!

Revenue opportunity!

An umpteen kilowatt FEL laser installation for making tea? Now *that* I'd pay for.

C'mon Boeing. Give up on the ships and give us the almost-certainly-non-lethal laser teasmaid! (Ideally mounted on a resin replica Shark's head stand.)

Best invention

The laser has got to the best invention if the last century. It has so many application and yet still steadfastly refuses to become a useful weapon. you could even argue that laser sights/guidance has made weapons safer.

woo lasers, I say.

Beat to Quarters

"Look alive on the gun deck lads, run out those 12 pounders ... ahem ... I mean 12 MegaWatters".

Alas, the modern equivalent of beat to quarters might disappear due to the speed of the engagement: "Hands to Action Stations, hands to Action Stations. Assume Damage Control State 1, Condition Zulu. Belay the last. Raid splashed."

It may take a while, but it will be pleasant to see Navy flyboys (and indeed Air Forces generally) taken down a few notches and gunnery back where it belongs.

Of course, lasers will do nothing for the submarine threat ....

Light speed weapons

Seriously, a laser travelling at the speed of light...who'd have though it.

largely gratuitous shark attached

I just wanted to see that again.

Thank you, the chain main one if you'd be so kind.

torpedoes a problem and what about aiming?

When thinking gun turrets most of the actual working bit (the barrel) is outside the turret. FELS work IIRC by wiggling electrons as they fly down the tube. The radiation (It could be Microwave to UV depending on the settings) comes out at *right angles* to the long axis through the sides. A whole different steering problem, more line a bearing detecting radar scanner. The fact it could emit from both sides might help response times, if you can cut off (or defocus) the output from the unneeded side of the tube. Otherwise the obvious tactic is 2 M5 sea skimmers (these puppies are Russian, but I bet they will be premium priced) from the same angle would mean the beam frying one on one side would totally miss the 2nd.

All of this depends on how short an array is needed to get the power levels. If short (few metres) then response speed (even with a low profile design) should be good enough. Or possibly go with a Phalanx (narrow and tall) form factor. But how to get the depression quickly enough?

But for cooking the fuel tank of some Somali high jacking boat. Perfect.

Unless they invest in a few Russian M5 sea skimmers of course. Or some torpedoes.

It's almost perfect

Sounds like a great weapon as long you're not in a very damp environment prone to thick fog... Oh, wait.

and to be capable of exploding liquid-fuelled ICBMs

As every rocket scientist knows, its even easier to explode solid rocket propelled ICBM's (such as all first-world ICBM's are) as the entire innards of a solid rocket booster is pressurized at about 1000 psi during burn. Hence, as one saw during the Challenger disaster, one only needs to make a small weak spot almost anywhere on the solid rocket booster to induce its failure.

@Scary

Metal mirrors suck (and so absorb too much energy) so badly that you can't even use them for university level crap laser optical systems of more that a watt or two without burning the mirror. For laser beams of any power more than a couple of watts or so, you have to use dielectric mirrors. Dielectric mirrors only work at precise wavelength dependent beam angles and if you are off those angles or wavelengths by much, they really suck (and so absorb too much energy & burn up), so you can't even coat an object with "dielectric mirror" as a defense even if you knew the laser wavelength directed at you.

Team Rocket?

haven't I already seen this crazy idea tried on the kids' Pokémon show? I seem to recall that Jessie and James' sub always had something bad happen to it whenever they tried to capture Pikachu.

So no attacking Japan then.

Stuart ~~~ Fighting Those Who Shoot Back

Stuart ~~~ only useful for fighting the kind of opposition that the US isn't planning on fighting (i.e. people who can actually shoot back)

These types of weapons encourage nations who are reasonably intelligent with the ability to shoot back, not to engage in warfare.

I somehow remember Saddam Hussein leading Iraq to shoot at over 1000 American planes in a U.N. declared no-fly-zone, during a cease-fire, before the United States decided to shoot back (fairly aggressively) in a full scale invasion.

The colonies need to shoot back a little more often.

Not entirely useless

This will help combat an age-old Naval problem: after many years of obsessive compulsive painting many battleships are top-heavy enough to be in danger of capsizing.

Bring them into line astern and give them a drive-by squirt from a couple of these new laser ships and they'll be all set for a fresh coat.

Paris, purely from a heat POV.

What?

What they are saying is they still can't make it light enough to go in a plane.

The Navy - knights in armour!

The Navy is the 20'th century version of knights in plate amour:

Lots of comfy, cushioned jobs for the kind of millitary leaders that like to stay waay back from the battlefield and really only effective at showing off against peasants that follow "the rules of war": i.e. stand still in the open and do not shoot back against their betters!!!

The first real opponent our navy runs into will turn it into a place where tourists are taken for diving excursions.

Torpdeos, stealth missiles and manouvering tragets

@ Magazine Unlimited >>> Seriously

The USN has been looking at anti-torpedo defences for a while. Currently, as well as towed decoys and their own torpedos programmed for the anti-torpedo role, they are looking at active sonar wave weapons powerful enough to actually break up a torpedo. The latter is unlikely to be popular with the whale-huggers. The big problem for a torpedo is range - any sub wanting to take a crack at a US battlegroup will have to get well within range of not only the carrier's airgroup, but also the extensive underwater sensors used by the ships themselves. In any confrontation where the USN is likely to meet such a threat, it is also likely they will use their own hunter-killer subs to sweep ahead of the fleet. The Soviets spent a lot of time during the Cold War testing the NATO anti-sub defences and the USN has a lot of practical experience in countering subs. An air-launched torpedo also means getting your launch aircraft within the fighter screen and past the same laser air-defence turrets, so again unlikely.

RE: Sod torpedos...

Nice idea, but stealthy missiles are only as stealthy as the launch vehicle, and all current missiles leave a very obvious IR trail that can even be spotted head-on, let alone from above. Any launch vehicle has to first get to a launch point and detect the target - the USN battlegroups have lots of fighters to make sure that doesn't happen, and lots of EW and ECM kit to make the task all the harder.

Re: DIVE! DIVE!

Whilst mach2 and 5g+ manouvering make the targetting harder, they don't make it anywhere near impossible. The old Phalanx or Goalkeeper kit will cope quite happilly with targets doing such manouveres, and they're both '80s designs. The mach2 and 5g+ manouvering was designed to avoid systems like Sea Wolf, which go for a head-on collision using a prediction of the attacking missile's flightpath. With lasers, since the lead is minimal, manouvering just gives the laser more time to engage you. A much better approach would just be a swarm attack using the fastest possible missiles.

The swarm attack would probably defeat a ship with one or two turrets, but the 80 MW engines of the likes on the Zumwalt class imply a future ship could have dozens of turrets. If Boeing can get a through-deck turret of around the size of the existing 4.5in/5in types used on the current fleet then we might see the return of all-gun destroyers with four or more turrets, and larger ships along the lines of the old WW2 Dido class air-def cruisers with five-plus turrets. Not so sure about anything bigger - even the USN may bulk at the expense of building something of the Iowa class size, but if they did it could mount a dozen-plus such turrets and still have room for many missile launchers. Of course, Iowa and Wisconsin have been mothballed, not fully-decomissioned, so the USN could actually make the step up to laser dreadnought much faster than such "sensible" nations as Britain, where the RN had all their capital ships broken up long ago by civil servant "experts" that said we'd never need such large ships again.....