Solid State Laser News

[fredymac]

Which is why Israel's Iron Beam may be the key to breaking the psychological gate that has stopped everyone from escaping the R&D lab/limited field demos. A hundred Youtube videos of missiles falling and crashing for no apparent reason is hard to refute. The argument flips 180 in this case and rational arguments about how short range, home made missiles can not be extrapolated for military grade supersonic equivalents will be trumped by basic emotions.

 

[fredymac]

And now MBDA gets in the act. Note the use of IPG fiber lasers. IPG Photonics is the leading supplier for industrial high power fiber lasers. I would guess the MBDA system does not coherently combine the fiber outputs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMyd1KzhLfQ

 

[bobbymike]

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/07/on-way-to-personal-ray-guns-650-pound.html

 

[fredymac]

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/07/on-way-to-personal-ray-guns-650-pound.html

I wonder if they are including the acquisition/tracker system in this setup. If they are, that little beam director head has a lot of crap packed into it. Even it they didn't and used a remote acquisition/tracker sensor (not included in the descriptions) with realtime coordinate transfer gimbal command instructions, you would still want to have a Fast Steering Mirror to maintain precision aiming.


That output window (lens?) is probably 2 or 3 inches max so you aren't going to be shooting too far with that thing. It would make for a nice "permanent" dazzler or a seriously "go away" Active Denial alternative (assuming you didn't leave the beam on for more than a millisecond).

 

[bobbymike]

http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2015/07/11/directed_energy_can_defeat_massed_missile_salvoes_108212.html

 

[bobbymike]

http://defensetech.org/2015/07/13/pentagon-eyes-airborne-lasers-for-missile-defense/#more-25316

Most interesting quote IMO:

The service and the Pentagon’s research arm this summer began ground testing a 150-kilowatt-class electric laser built by General Atomics against rockets, mortars, vehicles and surrogate surface-to-air missiles at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The project, known as the Demonstrator Laser Weapon System, or DLWS, is based on Darpa’s High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System, or Hellads.

“That’s a pretty powerful laser,” David Hardy, head of directed energy at the Air Force Research Lab, said in a recent interview. “It’s exact power is classified.”

 

[bobbymike]

https://medium.com/@RDECOM/army-air-force-take-bomb-disposal-to-new-level-with-lasers-cf5ad0c0be65

 

[bring_it_on]

High Energy Lasers, recent developments

https://www.scribd.com/doc/272675710/HEL-Advances

 

[bobbymike]

http://breakingdefense.com/2015/07/the-laser-revolution-this-time-it-may-be-real/

 

[bobbymike]

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/07/directed-energy-combat-lasers-and.html

 

[bring_it_on]

Kendall: Energy Weapons Ideal, But Not Ready For Tactical Air Defense
Defense Daily

Directed energy weapons would be ideal for countering many of the anti-access, area-denial threats that peer nations pose to the United States in wartime, but technology has not progressed to the point where those weapons are operationally useful, the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer said Tuesday.

Since the U.S. military in 1991 demonstrated the capability of its precision munitions during the first Gulf War, potential competitors like China, Russia and Iran have invested in similar systems, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (AT&L) Frank Kendall said at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) and Booz Allen Hamilton [BAH] Directed Energy Summit outside Washington.
"The problems that we are facing are the very problems that directed energy systems have been envisioned as addressing for a long, long time," Kendall said. "In particular, precision missiles, cruise and ballistic."
Sophisticated ballistic and cruise missiles have become less expensive and have, therefore, proliferated to less advanced countries and non-state actors. That proliferation makes U.S. ships and ground forces vulnerable to attack and defending against missiles with terminal guidance using missile interceptors is prohibitively expensive, he said.
"What China is buying, or well on their way to buying, is a suite of capabilities designed to keep us out of their part of the world," Kendall said. That includes anti-ship missiles that would keep U.S. amphibious assault vessels too far offshore to launch Marines or aircraft carriers to launch air strikes in the event of a forced invasion, hence 'anti-access, area denial.'
"Air defenses are something we haven't focused on in recent years, because we tend to control the air," he said. In 1991, the U.S. was safely atop the technological heap with its monopoly on precision munitions technology. The world of missile technology is now much more level, Kendall said.
Instead of buying "fairly low numbers of very expensive things" that gave the U.S a decisive technological advantage in past conflicts, "the idea now is to buy fairly large number of inexpensive things and use them in a different way," Kendall said.
Whereas conventional anti-missile interceptors can cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars apiece, a single shot from the laser weapons system (LaWS) cost about a dollar. Laser weapons also let commanders dial up or down the intensity of the shot to deal with threats of varying lethality, giving them the ability to "deter, disable or destroy," a target with a single system.

There are major technological hurdles that need to be overcome before lasers or high-powered microwave weapons are able to destroy an incoming missile in flight, however. The main challenges involve the size, weight and power requirements for current systems.
The Navy is 2012 mounted a prototype laser on a destroyer and demonstrated the ability to shoot down a "soft drone" - one without weapons or countermeasures - during an exercise on a clear, cloudless day. Last year, LaWS, a similar system, was made operational and deployed aboard the USS Ponce afloat forward staging base in the Arabian Gulf.
Scaling the system up to a higher intensity could flip the cost-of-defense paradigm of defending against relatively inexpensive, highly sophisticated anti-ship missiles back in favor of the US, said Navy Secretary Ray Mabus.
"From these successes, I recognized the potential utility and cost-effectiveness of directed energy weapons across the full range of military operations," Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said at the summit.
That system still requires massive equipment to provide power and cool the laser. Those subsystems, though still fairly inexpensive compared to traditional munitions, are often three to four times the size of the actual laser, said Rich Bagnell, who manages the self-protect high-energy laser demonstration at the Air Force Research Laboratory's directed energy directorate.
"I believe we have much of the technology in hand, or nearly in hand, for us to be able to handle the self-defense mission," he said. "The laser is no longer the long goal. It's power and thermal. ... We have a lot of work to do on the subsystems."
LaWS and other laser weapons in operation, like the Marine Corps' ground-based area defense laser, operate at about 30 kilowatts of energy. In order for a laser to effectively "kill" incoming missiles it needs to emit about 100-150 kilowatts, Bagnell said.
The Office of Naval Research is feeding lessons from USS Ponce into the Navy's solid state laser (SSL) technology maturation program, which is aiming to produce a 100-150 kilowatt laser prototype for at-sea testing in 2018. The Navy, in the meantime, has decided to extend the LaWS deployment indefinitely.

Because Navy ships are large and have huge turbine or nuclear powerplants, Mabus said the service is the perfect host for large directed energy prototypes.
The Navy is "best-positioned to address these obstacles right now," he said. "The size, weight, power, and cooling required by contemporary directed energy systems makes naval vessels the platform of choice for operationalizing the technology. Our ships are big enough to host large, heavy weapons, our gas turbines and nuclear reactors can provide the magnitude of power necessary to make these weapons effective and we have all the saltwater in the world and the air in its atmosphere for cooling."
Energy could also soon replace traditional explosive propellents that are heavy, take up space and are volatile aboard ship. The Navy's electromagnetic rail gun, after decades of overhyped, underdelivered promise, is nearing fruition.
"The railgun has been a long time coming," Mabus said. The service already has successfully tested a 32-joule prototype that can hurl a metal projectile with the power of 11 pounds of C4, which translates to a 23-pound projectile accelerating from 0 to 5,000 miles per hour - seven times the speed of sound - in 1/1000th of a second and can strike targets as ranges up to 100 miles.
"As a point of comparison, the Navy’s current 5-inch gun has a range of 13 miles, its rounds weigh 100 pounds, and their explosive nature makes them more precarious to store and handle," Mabus said.
In 2015, the Navy will mount a similar weapon aboard a joint high speed vessel, the USNS Trenton, to gauge its operational utility at sea. Plans are to fire 20 projectiles at targets 25 to 50 miles out.

 

[ouroboros]

Not sure how relevant this would be here, but Facebook's Aquila HALE UAV is at some point going to be equipped with an in-house developed free space communications laser (10Gbps!), that allegedly can fire on a coin sized target from about 10 miles away, through atmosphere to a ground target. I'm not seeing a huge beam director on it, though that may simply be not present in provided images. Isn't there some relevant tech to weapons grade systems, possibly related to aperture and distributed arrays?

 

[jsport]

Kendall: Energy Weapons Ideal, But Not Ready For Tactical Air Defense
Defense Daily

Directed energy weapons would be ideal for countering many of the anti-access, area-denial threats that peer nations pose to the United States in wartime, but technology has not progressed to the point where those weapons are operationally useful, the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer said Tuesday.

Since the U.S. military in 1991 demonstrated the capability of its precision munitions during the first Gulf War, potential competitors like China, Russia and Iran have invested in similar systems, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (AT&L) Frank Kendall said at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) and Booz Allen Hamilton [BAH] Directed Energy Summit outside Washington.
"The problems that we are facing are the very problems that directed energy systems have been envisioned as addressing for a long, long time," Kendall said. "In particular, precision missiles, cruise and ballistic."
Sophisticated ballistic and cruise missiles have become less expensive and have, therefore, proliferated to less advanced countries and non-state actors. That proliferation makes U.S. ships and ground forces vulnerable to attack and defending against missiles with terminal guidance using missile interceptors is prohibitively expensive, he said.
"What China is buying, or well on their way to buying, is a suite of capabilities designed to keep us out of their part of the world," Kendall said. That includes anti-ship missiles that would keep U.S. amphibious assault vessels too far offshore to launch Marines or aircraft carriers to launch air strikes in the event of a forced invasion, hence 'anti-access, area denial.'
"Air defenses are something we haven't focused on in recent years, because we tend to control the air," he said. In 1991, the U.S. was safely atop the technological heap with its monopoly on precision munitions technology. The world of missile technology is now much more level, Kendall said.
Instead of buying "fairly low numbers of very expensive things" that gave the U.S a decisive technological advantage in past conflicts, "the idea now is to buy fairly large number of inexpensive things and use them in a different way," Kendall said.
Whereas conventional anti-missile interceptors can cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars apiece, a single shot from the laser weapons system (LaWS) cost about a dollar. Laser weapons also let commanders dial up or down the intensity of the shot to deal with threats of varying lethality, giving them the ability to "deter, disable or destroy," a target with a single system.

There are major technological hurdles that need to be overcome before lasers or high-powered microwave weapons are able to destroy an incoming missile in flight, however. The main challenges involve the size, weight and power requirements for current systems.
The Navy is 2012 mounted a prototype laser on a destroyer and demonstrated the ability to shoot down a "soft drone" - one without weapons or countermeasures - during an exercise on a clear, cloudless day. Last year, LaWS, a similar system, was made operational and deployed aboard the USS Ponce afloat forward staging base in the Arabian Gulf.
Scaling the system up to a higher intensity could flip the cost-of-defense paradigm of defending against relatively inexpensive, highly sophisticated anti-ship missiles back in favor of the US, said Navy Secretary Ray Mabus.
"From these successes, I recognized the potential utility and cost-effectiveness of directed energy weapons across the full range of military operations," Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said at the summit.
That system still requires massive equipment to provide power and cool the laser. Those subsystems, though still fairly inexpensive compared to traditional munitions, are often three to four times the size of the actual laser, said Rich Bagnell, who manages the self-protect high-energy laser demonstration at the Air Force Research Laboratory's directed energy directorate.
"I believe we have much of the technology in hand, or nearly in hand, for us to be able to handle the self-defense mission," he said. "The laser is no longer the long goal. It's power and thermal. ... We have a lot of work to do on the subsystems."
LaWS and other laser weapons in operation, like the Marine Corps' ground-based area defense laser, operate at about 30 kilowatts of energy. In order for a laser to effectively "kill" incoming missiles it needs to emit about 100-150 kilowatts, Bagnell said.
The Office of Naval Research is feeding lessons from USS Ponce into the Navy's solid state laser (SSL) technology maturation program, which is aiming to produce a 100-150 kilowatt laser prototype for at-sea testing in 2018. The Navy, in the meantime, has decided to extend the LaWS deployment indefinitely.

Because Navy ships are large and have huge turbine or nuclear powerplants, Mabus said the service is the perfect host for large directed energy prototypes.
The Navy is "best-positioned to address these obstacles right now," he said. "The size, weight, power, and cooling required by contemporary directed energy systems makes naval vessels the platform of choice for operationalizing the technology. Our ships are big enough to host large, heavy weapons, our gas turbines and nuclear reactors can provide the magnitude of power necessary to make these weapons effective and we have all the saltwater in the world and the air in its atmosphere for cooling."
Energy could also soon replace traditional explosive propellents that are heavy, take up space and are volatile aboard ship. The Navy's electromagnetic rail gun, after decades of overhyped, underdelivered promise, is nearing fruition.
"The railgun has been a long time coming," Mabus said. The service already has successfully tested a 32-joule prototype that can hurl a metal projectile with the power of 11 pounds of C4, which translates to a 23-pound projectile accelerating from 0 to 5,000 miles per hour - seven times the speed of sound - in 1/1000th of a second and can strike targets as ranges up to 100 miles.
"As a point of comparison, the Navy’s current 5-inch gun has a range of 13 miles, its rounds weigh 100 pounds, and their explosive nature makes them more precarious to store and handle," Mabus said.
In 2015, the Navy will mount a similar weapon aboard a joint high speed vessel, the USNS Trenton, to gauge its operational utility at sea. Plans are to fire 20 projectiles at targets 25 to 50 miles out.

If the "buyer" is peddling his former employer's swarm UAV (junk) and railguns using a discussion on DEW well then we'll just quote http://discovermagazine.com/1994/mar/rammingspeed349 about what was again forgotten.

""I especially like the idea of launching small payloads into orbit with a larger ram accelerator,"...""
"NASA's Langley Research Center were interested in building a ram accelerator so powerful that it would leap right into the oblique detonation stage. They wanted it for a huge testing structure called the Advanced Hypervelocity Aerophysics Facility, or AHAF. The AHAF accelerator was to be a giant tube about 2 feet wide and 1,000 feet long, designed to hurl a 2- to 3-foot-long sensor-studded model aircraft at speeds up to 27,000 mph."

 

[Grey Havoc]

Institutional amnesia is an on-going, and indeed arguably worsening, problem unfortunately.

 

[bobbymike]

http://breakingdefense.com/2015/08/air-force-moves-aggressively-on-lasers/

 

[bobbymike]

http://breakingdefense.com/2015/08/army-turns-to-lockheed-for-alternative-laser/

 

[fredymac]

So Lockheed is self funding development and integration of its' coherently combined fiber laser into HEL-MD. At least the article talks about the effort being through a CRADA (Cooperative Research And Development Agreement).



Under a CRADA, both parties may provide and share personnel, services, facilities, equipment,
or other resources in conducting the R&D. The nonfederal party may also provide funds to
the federal laboratory. Since the collaborating party does not receive any federal funds, normal
government procurement requirements do not apply. A CRADA can be executed in a short period
of time and can be easily renewed or modified as appropriate.

Military laser R&D funds have plunged over the past 7 years but industry thinks the technology might lead to an eventual program contract. In the end, all government programs are political in nature for no other reason than politicians are making the decision. I wouldn't bet on any program being initiated/approved in the near future.

 

[bring_it_on]

All the non-classified presentations at the Directed Energy Summit are now available on youtube -


https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL108jqIzJkKhtRIcrZFQaB7dG5EioPObV

 

[bobbymike]

http://breakingdefense.com/2015/08/return-of-the-abl-missile-defense-agency-works-on-laser-drone/

 

[jsport]

http://breakingdefense.com/2015/08/return-of-the-abl-missile-defense-agency-works-on-laser-drone/

ABL was cancelled for operational reasons as well th many others..

Difficult to take what is being said as any realistic means to handle the increasingly untenable ABM problem. The only benefit in now begin to view JSEAD, Air Sup and ABM as a totality.

 

[fredymac]

More info on the Boeing compact HEL. Looks like another IR&D project. I would guess laser and beam director are housed together in the tripod module. Not enough room for an AO system but I would think they have a FSM in there somewhere.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijp3-zjTIp0

 

[bobbymike]

Ghostrider’s Laser Challenge

—Arie Church 9/17/2015


​A laser-armed AC-130 gunship will take to the skies by 2020 if industry takes up Air Force Special Operations Command boss Lt. Gen. Bradley Heithold’s challenge. “I call this my John F. Kennedy challenge … to get a high energy laser on an AC-130J by the close of the decade,” he said, speaking at ASC15 on Tuesday. “We learned a lot from the Advanced Tactical Laser … that took the whole back of a C-130, but it did, in fact, work … it moved the ball to the 50-yard line,” stressed Heithold. The AC-130J platform could accommodate up to a 5,000-pound laser weapon—the size of the gunship’s existing 30 mm or 105 mm guns. “I don’t want to have to take a gun off the airplane, but I’ll give you that much space,” he said. The weapon would first and foremost defend the AC-130 against surface-to-air missile threats, but would also be capable of disabling ground targets, including vehicles. “We do danger close, close air support, but you’ve got to put the aircraft over the objective” to do that, said Heithold. Modern surface-to-air threats “continues to shrink” the window AC-130s operate within, making advanced self defenses essential to the gunship concept’s survival, he said. “I think we’ve got it in the red zone now with the technology that’s out there … the hard part of this will be directing the beam,” he said, adding that he is confident that “we can do it.”

 

[fredymac]

Ghostrider’s Laser Challenge

—Arie Church 9/17/2015


​A laser-armed AC-130 gunship will take to the skies by 2020 if industry takes up Air Force Special Operations Command boss Lt. Gen. Bradley Heithold’s challenge. “I call this my John F. Kennedy challenge … to get a high energy laser on an AC-130J by the close of the decade,” he said, speaking at ASC15 on Tuesday. “We learned a lot from the Advanced Tactical Laser … that took the whole back of a C-130, but it did, in fact, work … it moved the ball to the 50-yard line,” stressed Heithold. The AC-130J platform could accommodate up to a 5,000-pound laser weapon—the size of the gunship’s existing 30 mm or 105 mm guns. “I don’t want to have to take a gun off the airplane, but I’ll give you that much space,” he said. The weapon would first and foremost defend the AC-130 against surface-to-air missile threats, but would also be capable of disabling ground targets, including vehicles. “We do danger close, close air support, but you’ve got to put the aircraft over the objective” to do that, said Heithold. Modern surface-to-air threats “continues to shrink” the window AC-130s operate within, making advanced self defenses essential to the gunship concept’s survival, he said. “I think we’ve got it in the red zone now with the technology that’s out there … the hard part of this will be directing the beam,” he said, adding that he is confident that “we can do it.”

The wording sounds like he is challenging industry to spend their own money. They might if they thought a real program with enough $$ behind it would come about.

 

[fredymac]

Navy laser and railgun programs:


http://www.onr.navy.mil/en/Conference-Event-ONR/Future-Force-Expo/~/media/Files/Conferences/EXPO-2015/Proceedings/VR-35-Air-Warfare-Electromagnetic-Railgun-Lasers.ashx

 

[fredymac]

General Atomics display stand at the Air Force Air And Space Conference. Back in the day, some companies would have private IR&D briefings for the Air Force. I was lucky enough to attend one and got a free sandwich along with briefings on trans atmospheric vehicles. There is probably a similar briefing for this item but I doubt if anyone will see it outside of a select few.

 

[bobbymike]

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/09/uk-looks-to-put-combat-lasers-on-navy.html

 

[bobbymike]

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2015/09/21/us-air-force-general-says-laser-warfare-in-sky-is-coming-sooner-than-think/?intcmp=features

LRS-B will have defensive DEW IMHO.

 

[Ian33]

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2015/09/21/us-air-force-general-says-laser-warfare-in-sky-is-coming-sooner-than-think/?intcmp=features

LRS-B will have defensive DEW IMHO.

LRS-B and the high altitude long endurance UAV for anti ballistic missile defence IMHO.

 

[bobbymike]

http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/news/a17425/germanys-got-a-4-barrel-laser-gatling-gun/

I think I've seen the end result of 'beam combining lasers' before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd8fyptDhdk

 

[fredymac]

"Superimposition" is non-coherent beam combining. There must be a trade analysis assessing when you should simply go to a single big telescope versus having so many smaller ones with all their duplicate mechanical housings and the need to actively fine tune pointing to a common target. I assume they tilt the individual secondarys and exit each telescope with a slightly different off axis line of sight so they coincide at a specific range. 20KW is too much for an individual fiber (defocus error builds up once you get past 1 or 2 KW). This would suggest they are combining multiple fiber lasers in each telescope before combining multiple telescopes on a single mount. Maybe in another galaxy they have a way for the laser beams to merge in mid air before heading off to the target.

 

[GeorgeA]

TRW showed something similar to this with the APACHE concept, although that utilized chemical lasers.

 

[bobbymike]

http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/09/drones-armed-high-energy-lasers-may-arrive-2017/121583/?oref=d-river

 

[fredymac]

From the Wayback machine: the Aerospace Relay Mirror System. This was a subscale test of the laser relay battle mirror concept. The "mirrors" actually are complete telescopes and there are 2 of them arranged back-to-back. The first telescope receives the beam and "re-images" it to the near field and applies wavefront and jitter corrections before sending the beam to the 2nd telescope which re-expands and projects it to either the target or the next relay mirror. This way, the final spot size on target depends on the distance from the last relay mirror rather than the point of origin.

 

[bobbymike]

http://breakingdefense.com/2015/10/lockheed-launches-laser-production-line-bets-on-fiber-tech/

 

[bobbymike]

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2015/10/16/Lockheed-Martin-develops-laser-weapon-turret-for-aircraft/2691445007497/

LRS-B will have defensive DEW IMHO

 

[bring_it_on]

Why not an offensive DEW?

 

[starviking]

Why not an offensive DEW?

Power?

 

[Dragon029]

There is also of course the issues too of volume and thermal constraints.

 

[fredymac]

And now a laser ad from Northrop (actually the TRW unit they bought way back when). Maybe this will be followed by an update on JHPSSL testing at White Sands which would be a lot more interesting.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwWMFSxG_QM

 

[seruriermarshal]

Lockheed Martin laser weapons work tackling the problem of atmospheric turbulence

October 20, 2015

THE MIL & AERO BLOG, 20 Oct. 2015. Laser weapons experts at Lockheed Martin Corp. are moving closer to overcoming one of the most difficult design roadblocks that so far has prevented deployment of laser cannons on supersonic jet fighters.

The problem involves compensating for atmospheric turbulence to enable a laser weapon to fire accurately from any angle on a fast-moving platform like a supersonic jet fighter.

Without compensating for atmospheric turbulence, a laser weapon mounted to an aircraft moving at near the speed of sound only could fire accurately at targets directly in front of it, company officials say.

Such a setup would be ineffective in countering manned and unmanned aircraft, as well as a variety of missile threats, which can attack from any direction.

Researchers from the Lockheed Martin Space Systems segment in Sunnyvale, Calif., have completed nearly 60 flight tests of the Aero-adaptive Aero-optic Beam Control (ABC) turret, which Lockheed Martin is developing for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va.

Related: Lockheed Martin tests laser weapons to protect aircraft from enemy fighters and missiles

The ABC turret is demonstrating a 360-degree field of regard for laser weapon systems on an aircraft flying near the speed of sound, Lockheed Martin officials say. The tests have been on a business jet to simulate the supersonic environment of a jet fighter.

Lockheed Martin began developing the ABC laser turret in early 2013 under terms of a $9.5 million contract modification from DARPA for the ABC program's third phase to improve the performance of high-energy lasers on tactical aircraft against enemy aircraft or missiles in the aft field of regard.

Work on this project is going on at Lockheed Martin facilities in Sunnyvale, Calif.; Fort Worth, Texas; and Orlando, Fla. Work on the third phase of the ABC program is winding up this fall.

The ABC test turret involves a low-power laser that fires through the turret’s optical window to measure and verify the laser's performance in all directions. The design uses aerodynamic and flow-control technology to minimize the effects of turbulence on a laser beam.

The tests have involved a partnership of DARPA, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, and the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind.

Related: Laser tail gunners: DARPA seeks to use laser weapons to defend aircraft from rearward attack

The ABC turret system is designed to enable high-energy lasers to engage enemy aircraft and missiles above, below, and behind the aircraft. Flow-control and optical-compensation technologies counteract the effects of turbulence caused by the protrusion of a turret from an aircraft's fuselage.

An optical-compensation system that uses deformable mirrors helps the beam to cut through the atmosphere to the target. Without compensation from the deformable mirrors the intense atmospheric turbulence around an aircraft flying at supersonic speeds would scatter the light of the laser beam.

The atmosphere -- even with benign turbulence, can have a profound influence on light. Even on a clear, still night, one can see how the atmosphere influences light by looking at the stars. It's movement in the atmosphere that makes stars appear to twinkle. Stars actually emit fairly continuous beams of light that viewed from space do not twinkle.

Scientists from DARPA and the U.S. Air Force Research Lab will use results of the flight tests to fine-tune future requirements for laser weapons on high-speed aircraft.

Designing high-energy laser weapons for supersonic aircraft has the potential to revolutionize air-to-air and air-to-ground combat. Given a sufficient supply of electric power, laser weapons do not run out of ammunition as conventional cannons and missiles do.

Laser weapons on a rotating turret, moreover, have the potential to be faster, more effective, and far more difficult to spoof than conventional air-to-air weapons. Missiles and bullets fly far more slowly than the speed of light, and are more prone to problems from atmospheric turbulence, high-G forces, and countermeasures to throw off their guidance systems.

Given a 180-degree field of effectiveness for a laser mounted to the surface of an aircraft, just two laser weapons potentially could set up a sphere of protection against missile and aircraft threats.

In addition, laser weapons would be immune to conventional electronic warfare (EW) jamming that can defeat many of even the most advanced radar-guided anti-aircraft missiles. The development of laser weapons would force adversaries to spend time, effort, and money to devise optical countermeasures to laser weapons and usher in a new generation of optical warfare.

It's not clear how long it might take to use the results of these and other tests to devise an effective and deployable laser weapon for high-performance jet fighters. It's unlikely we'll see deployed laser weapons on fighter aircraft until at least the next decade.