I'm sure that George Lucas will be looking into the copyright implications of that one!

How big is the thermal exhaust port on a Type 45? Though istr the Royal Navy DOES regard a single fighter as a threat... unlike the Imperial Navy

It's got funnels. Not sure how large they are in comparison to a womp rat though.

After typing that, I then had to look it up, as there were a few ships in WWII that took bombs down the funnel - which ended up being catastrophic. As that meant going straight into the engine room, and doing much more serious damage - plus without power damage control becomes a lot more difficult.

I had a vague memory that USS Arizona took a bomb down the funnel at Pearl Harbour. But that's apparently not true, though it was thought so at the time. Instead it took a direct hit to a magazine and exploded. However the destroyers HMS Keith and the unfortunately named HMS Grenade both did take hits down the funnel that led to their sinking. Plus the troopship Lancastria.

Of RN ships to be on that were worse than HMS Grenade, I can only think of HMS Decoy. Fortunately there wasn't an HMS Meatshield...

You beat me to it!

In case it's not working as expected, it would leave what's left of the remains of the poor crew practicing Incoherent Beach Combing.

.... the bad guys are spraying their drones with silver paint before launching them?

You'll be able to tell the bad drones by their chrome bling!

---------> Mine's the one with the retro-reflective panels!

Sorry to ruin your joke ... BUT Laser weapons are able to ablate some/all ??? reflective coatings and go straight through !!!

The ablation is a result of heat buildup and/or impurities in the surface coating heating/transfering light at a different rate to the majority constituent of the coating which creates 'holes' by which the laser can 'pass' the coating towards the substrate it has been applied to.

[It made sense when I wrote it !!! :) ]

:)

That gets cooked off in a second. Even a mirror still absorbs enough of that energy to be destroyed, although you could maybe make a rotating body and redirect the incoming beam for a while (possibly even taking down something else with it) before it melts.

That said, I'm personally more worried about someone developing an algorithm to make the drone sit exactly between a plane and the laser so the incoming beam would commit blue on blue if it's not immediately switched off afterwards, or when the drone blips out of the way and the beam doesn't immediately follow. I guess it depends on how long it takes to take out a drone what is possible.

I'm personally more worried about someone developing an algorithm to make the drone sit exactly between a plane and the laser so the incoming beam would commit blue on blue if it's not immediately switched off afterwards

That would be incredibly hard to do - given that you've got to account for the different speeds and angles in order to be in the right place to make that possible. Basically it would require something with very complex sensors and with the ability to change speed and manoeuvre rapidly. At which point, you're no longer talking a cheap drone.

Also the whole point of these weapons is to have a very capable aiming system. You overwhelm your target by maintaining a beam on a fixed point, the more it moves around the longer it takes to do any damage and/or the more power you need to output.

Plus you're supposed to look at what's behind your target when you fire. At which point you wait, or use a short range weapons system. Wait to get into gun range, or more likely do no damage to the target behind, because being much further away it's out of range of the laser.

Can we now build lasers without internal mirrors? If not then mirrors can cope with the weapon's energy levels.

The issue with incoming mirror coated weapons is that they'll accumulate non reflective particles on their surface, as they fly. If you ablate the particles, you'll also ablate the mirror beneath and the ablation will grow until the weapon is destroyed.

This begs the question: what happens when a fly lands on the laser's front, or a seagull craps on it?

This begs the question: what happens when a fly lands on the laser's front, or a seagull craps on it?

Possibly an expensive repair bill. But hopefully something that was part of the testing, and not just its effectiveness vs flying rats. But having heard the sound of exploding optics from mucky optics on ULH links, it could be a louder bang. There's also the issue of attenuation and dispersion if there's fog or just high humidity.

As for mirrordrones, mine's the one with a parabolic reflector!

A [1]parabolic reflector would focus the laser beam down to a point.

What you want is a [2]retro-reflector ! These are what [3]NASA left on the Moon so they could bounce lasers off the Moon to see how far away it is. They work but they only average 1.6 photons from each laser pulse arriving back to be detected!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_reflector

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retro-reflector

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Ranging_Retroreflector

A parabolic reflector would focus the laser beam down to a point.

Yep, but has the advantage of simplicity, ie simpler mirror surface that can divert some of the energy back to a point in front of the target.

What you want is a retro-reflector! These are what NASA left on the Moon so they could bounce lasers off the Moon to see how far away it is. They work but they only average 1.6 photons from each laser pulse arriving back to be detected!

Yep, those are fun. Especially listening to flat-earthers trying to come up with arguments about how they don't work. Or just how the Moon's orbit is supposed to work in their theories. But also pondering some fun I had with Luneberg lenses a looong time ago for retro-reflecting and beam forming. One downside is fitting something with retro-reflectors would be kinda anti-stealthy and just make targetting easier. Which is also probably one of the advantages of DEW, ie less mass and recoil to manage than gun mounts, so quicker to get on target and keep focused on it.

There are mirrors, and there are mirrors. It's going to be very expensive to coat a drone in a good enough mirror finish to stop a proper laser weapon. As others have said, if you do this, it's no longer a cheap drone.

Tricky with aircraft, but if there's more than one ship, there'll be an area in between them where neither ship will be able to fire anything for fear of hitting the other.

phuzz,

Several ships in the Falklands took hits from "friendly" fire aimed at aircraft, as well as in WWII. In 1991, while liberating Kuwait, The USS Missouri fired chaff to decoy an incoming missile which had been reported (but didn't actually exist). This was the night after 2 were fired at it, with one shot down by HMS Gloucester. However, it fired its chaff almost directly at USS Jarrett. Which had its Phalanx activated (for obvious reasons) - and automatically fired at the chaff cloud. Hitting Missouri with several 20mm rounds. Not that they'd do much to a battleship, but not so nice for anyone on deck, or in an unarmoured compartment.

More plausible is to have the drone fly low and keep a coastal city or a concentration of commercial shipping in the background. Using a laser to shoot down a drone under those circumstances would be like Assad dropping gas on cities because there happen to be some rebels hiding there.

I have a fair bit of experience with industrial welding lasers and they are an absolute pain to deal with because of the great lengths that are required to maintain safety. The beam can undergo multiple reflections and still be dangerous to eyes (the main threat) so there's simply no way to operate them safely in open air in a factory. This makes troubleshooting and maintenance very difficult and only the company's very best tradesmen had any hope of keeping them going. As a result of this laser welding was something we did only as a last resort if no other process was able to do the job.

Are you suggesting that some bastards might have the Wrong Sort Of Drone?

(See also Leaves, Snow, Rain, etc ad nauseum)

There just so happens to be a rather large area in eastern europe where there are significant numbers of drones being used in a warfare setting. Perhaps a few of these sent towards the front lines there to provide cover would make excellent field trials to prove that this tech works as well as claimed...

A lot of those drones are very small and are flown in such a way that you can't see the wood for the trees (literally).

Its only a matter of time before 'drone' becomes 'anyone or anything I don't like'. You or me, for example.

That's true of some of the Drones, mostly those at the very front lines. The Iranian drones attacking Residential blocks in Ukrainian cities though are a very different kettle of fish. They fly pretty much like a missile, maybe with a bit more zigzagging. They would seem to be the perfect target for this sort of system. Remove those from the equation, and a lot of Ukrainian civilian lives would be saved, and Putin would have to rely on his very expensive missiles to continue his terror compaign.

As for the small ones at the front line, if this thing is as good as claimed it should be able to handle a relatively short warning period and a very small drone size. But I dont have the details tosay if that's true or not.

Power supply and cooling can be limiting for land based laser defence systems. The article mentions 50kW so you need a generator that will provide that, and a fair bit of it will land up as waste heat that you need to get rid of. Ships have nice big engines with generators attached and sit on a relatively cool heatsink, or the ocean as it's sometimes termed. The army version mentioned is a fair bit less powerful as everything has to fit in an AFV chassis or two.

> Power supply and cooling can be limiting for land based laser defence systems. The article mentions 50kW so you need a generator that will provide that, and a fair bit of it will land up as waste heat that you need to get rid of.

News from 2028: Google, Meta and Microsoft datacentres to get rooftop LDEWs to deter fleshy meatsacks from attempting to turn off the AI

50kW output does not equal 50kW input....

I would almost be more surprised if that hasn't happened already than I would if it has; sure companies like to boast about successful trails, but no one wants their trail targeted by wave after wave of missiles.

Or maybe I'm just being optimistic.

They wrote "This was a UK first for above-the-horizon tracking, targeting, and destroying such drones with a laser weapon, it said"

I think the "above-the-horizon" part is crucial. That is easy on the seas, not so on land.

Type 45 now has more missiles. And cheaper ones too. Aster (Sea Viper) is the long range version, of which there are 48. But Type 45 is currently going through 2 major upgrade programs. Most have already been through PIP (power-plant improvement - and upgrade) - while HMS Defender is doing both that and the new missile upgrade. Getting another 24 VLS cells for Sea Ceptor (CAMM) missiles These are shorter range but also much cheaper.

Sadly the 4½" gun on Type 45 isn't currently used in the anti-air role, as the ammo is no longer made. Although it also has 2 x 30mm cannon (which are excellent for anti-drone work - and can be either TV or radar laid) and 2 x 20mm Phalanx - for really scarily short range last-ditch defence.

The problem with all the shorter ranged stuff though, is that it's shorter range. Several ships in the Red Sea have had to expend the gold-plated multi-million moolah's-worth of missile, because they could easily shoot down the drone or cruise missile with their guns, but they're defending a ship that's 30 miles away and none of that stuff will reach. In self-defence they could just wait until the missile is closer, then shoot it down the cheap way.

If the drone is 30 miles away, then all it needs to do is to stay low and it will be below the horizon.

For anti-drone self defence work, I think 30mm or 40mm guns with time air burst anti-drone ammunition (off the shelf in both cases) will make mince meat of pretty much any drone in a self-defence situation. 20mm Phalanx is very outdated and being phased out in most navies.

It may still be possible to overwhelm the system if it can locate and kill a drone every 15 seconds, but the enemy sends a couple dozen drones. On second thought that's probably classified so I'd be better to ask on War Thunder.

AVR,

Upvote for the War Thunder gag.

From what I've read, we're talking a few seconds for the cheap, crap drones, to 10 or more for bigger stuff. Remember the ship also has a layered defence setup, with long range and medium range surface to air missiles, two 30mm cannon, two Phalanx 20mm Gatling guns, both heavy and light machine guns, plus a helicopter which can carry 20 Martlet short range missiles in a load. Plus the ship has various electronic warfare capabilities and both chaff and active decoys.

They also warn approaching fighter jets not to come within a couple of miles of their high powered radar, so I don't know if that's enough to bugger up smaller, non-shielded, drones at close range?

Remember that it's a ship, so while at sea you're not going to reach it with anything truly cheap and cheerful. Your basic quadcopter is going to run out of charge first. Once you're talking long range drones, you're into the tens to hundreds of thousands in cost, at which point using missiles is no longer an unreasonable expense. When transiting the Suez canal, or at some other choke-point, the risk is much higher of course, because the cheap stuff is within range. But the cheaper it is, the more vulnerable it is to electronic warfare.

Is anyone making subaquatic drones? That seems like a logical approach for naval work.

breakfast,

Everyone seems to be making sub-aquatic drones...

Ukraine have used several of them to sink Russian ships. They've got a drone that looks a bit like a small speedboat, but with a fibreglass cover over the top. And the idea is that it can loiter just underwater, which just a few sensors peeping above the surface, until the target comes within range. Then the engines come on, and I think it operates above the water. They've fitted them with missiles of all sorts, or just filled them with explosives and rammed them into ships. They've even shot down helicopters with a version with old heat-seeking air-to-air missiles on.

This is just a development of what's already been done with speedboats (either with suicide crews or drones) - but with the extra stealth of being able to hide underwater. Ukraine have tried lots of other drone-related tricks, to attack Russian ships or the Kerch bridge.

Russia have many different ones. Including the Poseidon that they call a nuclear powered torpedo. Well a torpedo is already a one-way attack drone, but this thing (if it works) has an effectively unlimited range, and is a nuclear weapon carrying drone. They've also got a large sub called Belgorod, which is specifically designed for special operations - including operating underwater uncrewed vehicles. As well as carrying the Losharik, which is a nuclear powered crewed deep submergence vehicle - which requires a mothership for support (the Belgorod or a surface ship).

There's also XULVs, which are small unmanned drone-submarines with lots of stuff in them. Some are supposed to have month-long endurance, as long as they're only doing a few knots, while listening with sonar - the idea being that a ship could launch a few of them to cover an important area - or they could be used for sneaky recce close to an enemy's coast.

Of course there's also loads of civilian unmanned

Què és això? — You will have to forgive me I'm from Barcelona. ;)

22.50 mm round £1 coin (<2017)

23.43 mm twelve sided £1 coin (>2017)

Anything like 50kW delivered to 10 mm circle at 1000m even for a minute is ~ 3MJ — that would devalue your pound faster than the Chancellor. ;)

At £10 a shot and the average retail price in the UK ~26p/kWh roughly 40 kWh (144MJ) per shot… more wholesale ;)

Which suggests the 50kW is the continuous supply and laser is operated intermittently with stored energy to produce pulses with considerably greater power.

If they're paying £10 for 50KW in 10s for eg, they're overpaying. They ought to switch suppliers.

50KW over an hour at 25p/unit is £12.50, and in 10 seconds that's about 3.5p (not including the standing charge of course). Even accounting for the cost of gas, £10 is severely too much!

They don't plug in to get their power in the middle of the ocean. They use a combination of marine diesels and gas turbines. Plus you need the fuel, which you may have to get replenished at sea from a Royal Fleet Auxiliary tanker.

Pah! Rubbish.

They have a really long extension cable from the nearest mains socket.

Or they hijack it from electric eels?

> A laser weapon can continue firing for as long as the ship has sufficient electrical power, and costs just £10 ($13) per shot, according to the MoD.

You forgot the subscription charge - dragonfire probably give them the first 10 shots free, then a monthly sub of £100 for the next 10 (maybe with a free one for every 10 fired). Guaranteed to rise by the rate of inflation + 5% every April 1st.

Presumably, the £10 includes the maintenance required after every 100 or so "shots", i.e. replacing the front glass if it has been fired after a seagull has crapped on it.

Why does it take so long for anything to be done?

"Like most modern military projects, DragonFire has taken some time to make it into service. The contract to build a laser demonstrator was signed back in 2016, and a public demonstration was planned for 2019."

Why do you think it takes so long? Because it's hard. We didn't have working laser weapons before. Now we do. That took R&D. Going from working prototype to actual deployable weapon also takes ages, and lots more R&D, plus large applications of time and money.

For example, lets say you want to make a new air-to-air missile. Easy job right? It's only going to get used once. Then it explodes into millions of pieces. However there's a problem. Fighter jets often need to fly around armed. But don't fire their missiles off every mission. Therefore you have to make your missile be able to fly 100 miles at mach 4 and then go bang, preferably near to its actual target. While also being subjected to temperature ranges from -80°C to +100ºC and forces of up to 9g while strapped to the wings of a jet going about its normal business. And to be able to do this for several years between refits. Because otherwise, when that fighter jet needs to fire a missile, it may just drop off the wing and do bugger-all.

Similarly Dragonfire has to sit on a mount on a warship, outside in all-weathers, in operating areas from the Arctic Ocean to the tropics - being subjected to salt-water corrosion, battering from wind and waves and stresses from repeated corkscrewing movement as the ship ploughs through rough seas. And then it needs to work reliably, and at very short notice, in order to protect the ship and everyone on it from explodey things being aimed at it.

As the joke goes, it ain't rocket science. It's actually much harder, just like rocket engineering.

..... If you're not part of the solution, then there is money to be made by prolonging the project!

----------> Mine's the one with the contractors pass in the pocket!

By 'A UK first' did the article mean it's the first laser cannon developed in the UK?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LY-1

As tested by the People's Liberation Army Navy in 2024, with the earliest report of such a system under development in 2019.

Too lazy to check, but didn't the article say a European first deployment of a laser weapon to a warship?

I'm pretty sure the prototype was in testing throughout the 2010s. But the UK had laser weapons deployed on ships in the 1990s. Although I think those were to blind the sensors on missiles and/or the pilots of aircraft.

Supposedly lasers for dazzling enemy pilots were developed for/ deployed to the Falklands in 1982:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23518592

EvilDrSmith,

Thanks. I remember reading something about that, back in the 90s in a discussion about the ethics of laser dazzlers that were being deployed. I'd never seen it confirmed before.

Did the RN skip past the "sharks with frigging lasers" or this a small step towards making them a reality?

First, find your nuclear powered shark. Battery powered is a cheaper option.

Is successful strikes per second.

Assuming you are using a low inertia aiming system (I am probing the bits that will be beyond top secret here) then I would be expecting something of the order of 5-10 ?

So 4 of these bad boys could rack up 40 strikes per second ?