Where’s my railgun?
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WARNING: ‘ships’ may not be actual ships.
Maybe you should also put one in the stern. Jus sayin
Actually this thing’s a steal. We’ve only spent about $40mil over the last 6 years.
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No, it means guerrilla warfare. For which your big battleships and fighter planes aren’t generally well-suited.
No, just as a remote control plane and a drone are two different things that are now also commonly accepted as synonymous. Asymmetrical warfare and guerrilla warfare are two things. Asymmetrical warfare is a type of strategy used to exploit an opponents weaknesses. Guerrilla warfare is a type of asymmetrical warfare.
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as I argued above, The LaWs system seems suited for slow, unhardened targets, such as the inflatable boat that took out the USS Cole, or the cheap surveillance drones used by the Iranian navy.
Also, this is a test weapon. Presumably what is learned from this deployment will be used on later, more effective weapons.
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slow, unhardened targets
with the most favorable atmospheric conditions
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As far as I understand, laser weapons are particuluarly suited to the anti-missile defence role currently occupied by the CIWS system.
Nor were they taken out. What’s the word for a headline like this…?
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It means rather “war against much weaker enemies that know they would have no chance if they would play by our rules”. Hence blending with the population, emerging-striking-disappearing, and other fourth-generation warfare methods. And none of that classical third-gen crap that the strongest army prefers to fight because it is used to win there.
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The targets appear to be coming in on a constant heading and speed. Even at that, it looks like the laser needed about a second on target. Minimal evasive manuevers would have upset the weapon.
I don’t see anything here that a Vulcan wouldn’t do better.
Looks like it. I damn sure wouldn’t want to be under its gaze.
@fuzzyfungus your Naval successor to your M2 Kinetic Justice is, I believe, the Phalanx, or Goalkeeper CIWS.
I’m wondering if it is a diode-pumped fiber laser, or one of the free electron lasers the ONR has been working on. The FELs are amazing, and they are planning to scale them up above 100kw. They work in a completely different way than other lasers. An electron beam is accelerated in a cyclotron to relativistic velocity, and then run through an undulator, which is a bunch of magnets of alternating polarities lined up. This wiggles the electrons back and forth, and thus emits EM radiation. One great advantage of this system is that the lasers’ frequencies are fully tunable, thus letting you compensate for bad atmospheric conditions by, say, choosing a frequency that’s not absorbed by water.
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Also if you can knock out the motors of a bunch of speedboats, you can sail off and leave them in your wake. This would be a PR bonus for the US Navy, being able to say “we disabled X attacking enemy boats” rather than “we destroyed X attacking enemy boats”.
Also, embarrassed enemy soldiers aren’t dead enemy soldiers that can be made into martyrs.
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I do like that drone slingshot. Wonder if I can pick one up at the Navy Surplus Store someday soon?
But if that’s a “rockin’ music soundtrack” then I’m a monkey’s uncle. I haven’t heard such generic royalty-free untz-untz-untz outside of a Ditch Witch infomercial.
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According to wikipedia:
Ponce is the only ship of the United States Navy that is named for Ponce in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, which in turn was named after the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León, the first governor of Puerto Rico and European discoverer of Florida.
Yeah, makes sense that it’s named in a roundabout way for a conquistador.
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YES! And they thought I was crazy!
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