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from the do-not-examine-laser-with-remaining-good-eye dept.
Boeing thinks the best way to kill a drone is to zap it with a precision laser, burn a hole in it, and bring it down. So it created a weapon system to do just that. Wednesday morning, the company showed off its Compact Laser Weapon System for media in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s a much smaller, significantly more portable version of the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD) Boeing demonstrated last year. This setup looks like an overgrown camera, swiveling around on a tripod.
Instead of a massive laser mounted on a dedicated truck, the compact system is small enough to fit in four suitcase-sized boxes and can be set up by a pair of soldiers or technicians in just a few minutes. The new system is more scalpel than sledgehammer. Its laser, and, especially, the off-the-shelf gimbal (a fancy motor that can aim the laser and camera in any direction) it’s mounted on, make it precise enough to target different parts of a UAV.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Tuesday September 01 2015, @07:05AM
what they are showing off is something that burns plastic radio controlled toys that are a few hundred feet away, not Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles that fly thousands of feet in the air.
it should be referred to as a toy-killing laser cannot as it can't touch a real UAV.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @07:22AM
What part of "proof of concept" do you not understand?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @07:55AM
Concepts are too hard. Show me a video or I don't get it.
(Score: 4, Funny) by mtrycz on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:08PM
A car analogy would be fine, too.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 2) by bugamn on Thursday September 03 2015, @09:30PM
It's like a foot. You can step on a toy car, but not on a real car.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @11:38AM
Also, drone builders will start painting them in highly reflective (silver) paint, greatly reducing the laser absorption, which means they will need a much bigger laser, and the reflected laser light will go everywhere, creating a huge hazard for the operators.
A particularly evil adversary would build a retro-reflective (and possibly otherwise completely useless) drone, effectively DoS'ing the laser system, by either damaging the system itself (especially the camera), or permanently blinding the operators.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday September 01 2015, @05:10PM
Slight correction. UAV stands for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. Autonomous isn't part of the name. Some UAVs are hand-launched and not the multi-million dollar ones you typically hear about. Perfect tools for tactical situations where you want to know where the enemy is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_aerial_vehicle [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_RQ-11_Raven [wikipedia.org]
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