No word on the possibility of fitment to sharks?
British military laser death ray cannon contract still awarded, MoD confirms
The Ministry of Defence has today re-announced for the third time that it has awarded a £30m contract to build a great big feck-off laser cannon for zapping the Queen's enemies. Originally awarded in July 2016 to the Dragonfire consortium, the Laser Directed Energy Weapons (LDEW) contract immediately stalled after a challenge …
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Friday 6th January 2017 11:59 GMT tr1ck5t3r
Wait till these get fitted into satellites, you'll be able to track any plane from low earth orbit and obliterate it, or even knock out satellites getting in your way. One thing doesnt ad up though, considering how much radiation there is in space, why can we build satellites & explorers to land on meteors, Mars & the Moon, yet we cant uild robots to clean up Chernobyl or Fukashima? Are they really more radioactive than the Sun?
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Friday 6th January 2017 15:41 GMT defiler
@tr1ck5t3r
Really? :-/
Okay, two points for rebuttal here - one, orbital LASER platforms are a bit shit. The effort they take to launch and to refuel is utterly astonishing. And no, solar-powered ones aren't really going to hack it. Have a look at a BBC (Horizon?) documentary called "The Road to Ruin" from about 1983 - it's mentioned in there.
Secondly, radiation is subject to the inverse-square law, so being inside the Chernobyl reactor, within a metre of a broken fuel rod, is significantly more hazardous than being 150 million km from the sun. Of course, Chernobyl is now knocking on for 30 years ago, so reduction due to half-lives etc, but still a serious issue.
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Thursday 5th January 2017 13:23 GMT Korev
The obvious long-term practical application for the laser would be aboard a warship, and perhaps one of the first aged Type 23 frigates to be retired in the next five or six years could have her hull life extended to serve as a trials platform.
At the usual rates of defence procurement, I'm not sure if the RN will be able to replace those frigates by then - do you think we could borrow HMS Victory?
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Thursday 5th January 2017 14:06 GMT Chris G
Re: Lead Contractor?
Lead contractor? Oh, you mean a plumber!
Is he going to put some nice oil fired central heating in the laser turret? Plus a lead roof to keep the sea out of the sparky bits.
I can see the BA consortium coming up with one of those keyring lasers from a Chinese shop but with multi million pound mil spec instructions; " Point at enemy and press button" There, now the bugger can't see to fly".
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Friday 6th January 2017 11:03 GMT phuzz
Re: operational in all weather
Pigs fly over my house all the time, here's a picture.
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Friday 6th January 2017 01:21 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: operational in all weather
According to the articles its a "Laser Directed Energy Weapon". So, by implication, it uses lasers for targeting but the "Energy Weapon" doesn't appear to be defined anywhere.
Or maybe it's taken as all one phrase, meaning a laser weapon using directed energy, ie you can point light at stuff and burn it. But since Lasers by definition are directed energy, then either laser or directed is redundant. Maybe they were worried about calling it LEW ("loo", 'cos it's crap, will be the immediate re-naming by the matelots) and felt safer calling El Due :-)
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Friday 6th January 2017 05:36 GMT Schultz
Re: operational in all weather
You misread, it says: "tracking targets in all weathers", not effective in all weathers.
So you want a decent radar for tracking. You may then proceed to shoot at the target in any weather and if the weather is nice, the target might take notice. Sounds realistic to me.
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Thursday 5th January 2017 14:37 GMT Nick Ryan
Re: FFS
"... projects like the Laser Directed Energy Weapon which will keep this country ahead of the curve."
Does every guvmint announcement now have to sound like a corporate tag line ??
Also somebody somewhere needs to understand that lasers tend to go in staight lines* and not curves.
* Except when passing close to something with very strong gravity of course. Actually, thinking about it given how dense many politicians (and "celebrities") are there is a good chance that our lasers curve.
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Thursday 5th January 2017 19:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: FFS
'...* Except when passing close to something with very strong gravity of course. '
Or, maybe being steered using microwaves, like round a copper tube bent into a 3ft diameter toroid?
WTF you say?, you know that won't work, I know that won't work, but I kid you not, at the behest of a rather spectacular example of the genus Academius fraggelli (ssp ægypticanusriskusmaximus), an ex-colleague had to waste his time trying to implement a test rig for such an insane scheme back in the 90's at a Certain University in London.
Academia+research grant money, got to love some of the BS they come up with.
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Thursday 5th January 2017 13:59 GMT inmypjs
Why do taxpayers have to fund this?
An effective Laser Directed Energy Weapon (LDEW) would be worth a packet. The chances of coming up with one are sweet FA which is why no private money will be spent developing it.
Given that why the fuck are idiot politicians and the MOD pissing away tax payers money on it?
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Thursday 5th January 2017 23:15 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: Why do taxpayers have to fund this?
> will eventually end up paying the full cost twice they buy the darn thing.
FTFY.
Also, I wonder against what or who this is supposed to be used. It's a bit dear to blow up Iranian speedboats.
In any naval engagement of the future I see, there are no survivable surface ships.
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Thursday 5th January 2017 14:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
One has a little list..
'The Ministry of Defence has today re-announced for the third time that it has awarded a £30m contract to build a great big feck-off laser cannon for zapping the Queen's enemies...'
Laser cannon, eh?
Ah well, I suppose the traditional means of dispatching enemies of the crown (car accidents in foreign climes etc) have become just a mite too passé for the 21st century..
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Thursday 5th January 2017 23:17 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: Never mind Lasr cannon
Excellent plan!
Meanwhile, I have prepared a funding request for means of remotely controlling an enemy's oxygen provision, aka. "force choke". I need to profit from the NATO/mandatory 5% of GDP military spending. The time is now!
There is a 100% guarantee to get the contract if an italian firm is involved.
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Thursday 5th January 2017 15:18 GMT JaitcH
The Usual UK Government Leaches Reinventing the Wheel
Instead of enriching the usual financial freeloaders, why doesn't the UK government do a deal with it's 'best friend' nation (allegedly the US of A) and buy some of the work the US government has already paid for?
And, before spending much more money, they should do a patent search, there's an amazing body of research out there on file - I know because many companies in the 'non-aligned' (military) world get so many of their ideas from patent filings.
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Thursday 5th January 2017 15:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The Usual UK Government Leaches Reinventing the Wheel
'Instead of enriching the usual financial freeloaders, why doesn't the UK government do a deal with it's 'best friend' nation (allegedly the US of A) and buy some of the work the US government has already paid for?'
Because BAE is the greatest make-work scheme this country has ever come up with.
Every few years they threaten to move jobs abroad unless the government gives them billions to develop an all-British* rival to something the Yanks already have. The government, terrified of being seen to be running anything other than an international superpower in the eyes of the Daily Telegraph immediately coughs up whatever ludicrous amount of money is required.
A few years later, roughly about the time the product is meant to be finished, BAE ask for more money muttering something about the hull being built upside down or the wrong number of wings being fitted to the fuselage.
Inevitably, at some point the government will either change its mind and decide that they want the project to work on a submarine rather than a helicopter, or there will be a change of government entirely and it takes a couple of years for the new lot to be sufficiently wined and dined to be accommodating to BAE's wishes.
This process is repeated for many years as jobs are quietly moved abroad until BAE unleash their latest turkey on the poor sods who will actually have to get it to work. Round about this time, we learn we've been pointing the wrong weapons at the wrong enemy all along and have to start all over again - with catered lunches.
* apart from all the foreign bits they'll need to make it work.
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Friday 20th January 2017 15:34 GMT Dave the Cat
Re: The Usual UK Government Leaches Reinventing the Wheel
'Instead of enriching the usual financial freeloaders, why doesn't the UK government do a deal with it's 'best friend' nation (allegedly the US of A) and buy some of the work the US government has already paid for?'
Who do you think did all the initial research? Hint: It wasn't us...
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Saturday 7th January 2017 00:36 GMT allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
Re: The Usual UK Government Leaches Reinventing the Wheel
"Instead of enriching the usual financial freeloaders, why doesn't the UK government do a deal with it's 'best friend' nation (allegedly the US of A) and buy some of the work the US government has already paid for?"
Well, they do. F-35, Trident missiles, etc.
There, I'll bet you're feeling better already!
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Thursday 5th January 2017 17:08 GMT Boris the Cockroach
If
BAE id involved the price tag will suddenly shoot upto to 250 million per ship, just like the e-mag catapults for out carriers did when the US manufacturer said they could supply them at 200 million a piece and BAE wanted 2 billion to fit them.......
But then BAE offer juicy fat non-executive directorships to retired politicians..... alledgedly
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Thursday 5th January 2017 18:52 GMT kain preacher
JackThompson
Even in the US we get tired of these ass holes. This guy kept on suing video game makers/publishers and losing that the judge finally yanked hi law license and said all future law suits must be signed off by another lawyer will ti risk his license
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_(activist)
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Friday 6th January 2017 09:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Old tech
Am I the only one who remembers that about 20 years ago a company advertising in an electronics mag (elektor?) was selling surplus laser cannons.
Apparently they were built to be installed in the turret of a tank and could burn things miles away. But they were 'surplus' for some reason and the military never seemed to use them... that makes me think the idea didn't work out too well and I doubt things have changed that much in this area since.
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Saturday 7th January 2017 21:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Still waiting for the portable laser than Kaneda used for mutant control.
Or for an orbital laser able to punch holes into a perfectly good (likely kickback-enabled) olympic stadium from LEO (how does one manage to get it overhead at the right time though?) with a beam so powerful it actually warps time to have levitating effects on groundside objects before the lightwave arrives...