Laser Cannons --> Military --> Spam

[Puke]

this is what i was thinking of before - N. Korea shooting at our choppers with Chinese lasers:

http://www.defensereview.com/modules...rticle&sid=325

neat, but fairly ineffectual. im sure theyre good for crowd control, or keeping the neighbor kids away.

[Cyrien]

This is the major problem with Polonium as a power source assuming you can mass produce it.

Weight for weight it is about 2.5 x 10^11 times as toxic as hydrocyanic acid.

Hope your battery pack doesn't leak. And talk about disposal problems.

Edit: And while recoil is an internal force it will act on the casing that holds it and that will be transferred to the person using it. In a handheld firearm any internal force will likely be transferred to an external one due to the size of the weapon and its limited mass.

[ October 30, 2003, 22:06: Message edited by: Cyrien ]

[Puke]

theres quite a few more problems with Polonium than that, but you basically summed it up. its still a darn neat prospect.

Anyhow, I'm not sure your on top of the whole internal force / external force thing.

in a conventional firearm, force is exerted on a projectile. a bullet and gasses exit the weapon, exerting an equal an oposite force on the weapon and wielder.

in this hypothetical laser, the force exerted by the light leaving the weapon is negligable, and thus the equal and oposite newtonian force resulting from the projected beam of light is also negligible. the gasses, while moving at high pressure and velocity within the weapon, never leave it. therefore, force should not be exerted on anything outside the weapon.

Granted, you will need sturdy components inside the weapon to contain those gasses and to channel them around, but there should be no felt force by the operator.

the best practical example that i can come up with, is a solonoid. if a solonoid is sitting on a table, and is repeatedly activated, the coil and the cylinder will both experience force from each other, but the net motion of the entire object should be zero.

but i could be easily be missing something obvious.

edit: dont you wish you had some? http://pearl1.lanl.gov/periodic/elements/84.html odds are, you do! I just saw an article indicating that commercially grown tobacco contains the stuff!

[ October 30, 2003, 22:35: Message edited by: Puke ]

[narf poit chez BOOM]

why would a laser have recoil?

for some reason, the picture on CBS looks cg.

the smallest to date is the size of a commercial jetliner.

and the one in the picture looks smaller. so, if it's cg, they should say so in the picture's caption. i just think all cg images in the news should be labelled as such.

any place i can see a video of it in action?

[Suicide Junkie]

why would a laser have recoil?

Because photons have momentum, and momentum is conserved. All the momemtum in photons going forward has to be matched by the momentum of everything else going backwards.

[Thermodyne]

The mass of the stream is such a small part of the mass of any weapon that could produce it, that there would be no recoil. The US has been testing an airborne system since the first gulf war, but the test were not all that impressive. I think they mostly helped prove the acquisition and targeting systems. Not to mention that it took a much overweight 747 to carry them. Any system that would be deployed in this time frame has to be basically ready for production. It would take that long to tool up for mass production.

[PvK]

Sure the recoil would exist, but of course Puke (and Thermo - posting as I write) is right - that recoil is extremely small because the emissions are photons, not metal bullets. The damage is done by burning from concentrated high-energy photons, not by kinetic energy imparted by the mass of the photons.

You'd have an extremely powerful laser before you'd have to worry much about recoil from the beam itself.

PvK

[ October 30, 2003, 23:12: Message edited by: PvK ]