Re:U.S. Air Force has shot down multiple air-launched missil...
by electrograv on Tuesday May 07, 2019 @09:24AM
(#19849082)
One would hope that they have made fundamental improvements / innovations to the tech in those past 50 years[1], and they’ll just be keeping that advantage secret for a while.
[1] Am I getting old or is it weird realizing that 1970 was almost 50 years ago?
Re:U.S. Air Force has shot down multiple air-launched missil...
by azernik on Tuesday May 07, 2019 @06:59PM
(#19854227)
One of the big changes has been the shift to (mostly) solid-state lasers for this kind of work - it's taken longer to scale those up to weaponized power levels, but they're much easier to work with and miniaturize. The telecoms industry did a lot of the fundamental work in this area for fiber optics purposes. Back in the 70s they were using mostly chemical-powered lasers, which could get high powers without high-performance electrical power sources, but were a pain to work with (hence the use of large airliners).
Aircraft these days have much better electrical power systems (since all control surfaces and a lot more engine operation is electrically powered), and new aircraft carriers and surface combatants are being designed with about 50-100% margin on electrical power to make them compatible with these systems in the future.
From the descriptions that gramps used to give me, I'm not sure how what's described here is an advance over what he did back in the late 70s. I guess one thing is that back then, they were nowhere near being able to put the whole assembly into a pod that could be mounted on a fighter jet's wing.
(gramps also worked on the Hubble Telescope, and spy satellites)