Untitled Document
DARPA's HELLADS (High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System) will be light
enough to fit on a fighter jet or drone aircraft, and yet powerful enough to
fire a 150 kilowatt beam of energy. Star Wars laser cannon may be closer than
you think.
High energy laser weapons already in development are powerful enough to bring
down missiles (see MTHEL
- Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser). However, their very large size has
precluded placement on any but the largest planes. The main weight problem comes
from the cooling systems needed.
HELLADS makes use of a unique cooling technique. The high-energy laser uses
a liquid that has the same angle of refraction as the mirrors inside the blaster.
That way, the "ray gun" can fire away, even while it's being cooled.
Currently in the third of five phases of development, a 15 kilowatt subscale
prototype is being tested in the laboratory. In the next phase, the demonstrator
device will be scaled up to 150 kW, and will specifically be targeted to achieve
the low specific weight (5 kg/kW) and compact size need to be mounted in a smaller
airborne vehicle. The final phase is engineering, fabricating, integrating and
demonstrating the complete HELLADS weapon system on a tactical platform. The
device will be built by General Atomics and the tracking system will be built
by Lockheed.
This kind of compact system is getting very close to what science fiction writers
since H.G. Wells have envisioned when writing about the heat
ray in War
of the Worlds. More recently, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote about
laser cannon in their 1974 novel Mote
in God's Eye:
..."The intruder came from here. Whoever launched it fired a laser
cannon, or a set of laser cannon - probably a whole mess of them on asteroids,
with mirrors to focus them - for about forty-five years, so the intruder would
have a beam to travel on... (Read more about
laser cannon)
Read more at MTHEL,
Playing
with Liquid Fire: High Energy Lasers Cool Down, HELLADS
(at DARPA).
