https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/11/asia/south-korea-antidrone-lasers-intl-hnk-ml/index.html
South Korea is beginning the mass production of a low-cost laser weapon that has successfully shot down small drones during testing, the country’s key arms agency said Thursday.
The release did not give a cost for the weapon, but said each shot fired would only cost about $1.50.
A common marketing gimmick when it comes to future tech is giving the price as raw materials/energy only, and glossing over all the other costs associated with running the thing - see Musk’s stupid tunnels and every other gadget ban ever proposed.
Does this cost include cooling, or part replacement due to wear? What electricity cost are they using for the calculation and what infrastructure is required to supply it? How much does it cost to maintain this infrastructure?
Cause it’s one thing to wire this up in a lab somewhere off the industrial grid. But what would it take to forward deploy it? How fast do you plan to cycle between shots? Cause that has cooling and power implications - see the difficulties associated with fast charging EV stations.
How much does it cost?
Also, it's a stationary target that announces its exact location with a laser beam fired into the sky when it is used. It will need to be mobile because pinpointing that exact location will be easy for counterfire.
If it's not cheap as shit then just send out a couple of bait drones. One that is getting a big wide overview of several hundred square kilometers of land and another that functions as bait. When the bait is shot down the second camera (designed to see the laser) picks up the exact location it was fired from. You now blow up that exact location with a ballistic missile or whatever.
I honestly can't think of anything worse than announcing your precise location with a laser pointer to everything within hundreds of kilometers, which must be the case because the power this laser has to have is going to be very high.
Not to mention they need to be supplied with electricity to function, so any attacks on the power grid supplying them will shut all of them down at once. (They might all have separate power sources, but then that just makes your point against them even stronger, they'll be far more expensive that way)
Also, it's a stationary target that announces its exact location with a laser beam
How does it give up its location?
Imagery supplied by the agency appears to show a weapon around the size of a shipping container with a laser mounted on top and what appears to be a radar or tracking device mounted on one side of the platform.
Radar emissions are easily detectable.
This is an old problem and traditional cold war era SAMs for example have an alternative optical tracking mode to try and counter this for example.
Radar emissions are easily detectable
Missed the fact that it has a radar attached.
This is an old problem and traditional cold war era SAMs for example have an alternative optical tracking mode to try and counter this for example
Wouldn't the same solutions work here, though?
Radar is a type of electromagnetic emission, and this weapon would also emit EM radiation. I think they mean that the SAMs have an illuminator, and the SAM operation principle is that it works in conjunction with another operator stationed away from itself to illuminate the target using EM for the launched missile to lock. The vulnerability here is that the operator with the illuminator is vulnerable to being detected and targeted by anti-radiation missiles. Similar missiles can be reused in this case, since the only difference is that they would need to home in on a different wavelength of light rather than radar. The reason the switch to optical won't work is because the principle of operation of this anti-drone weapon seems to be fundamentally based on high-power EM radiation. I may be misunderstanding their point, though.
I think you’ve got it exactly right. Anything putting out kWs into the air is gonna light up the sky in its spectrum. Now, an ideal laser would be fully coherent with a perfectly planar wave and next to no spread. But even that would ionise the air in its beam, and with a very distinct fingerprint at that. I can’t really think of a way to make it truly invisible.
And you made a really good point that at this point you’re back to using cheap drones to expose and destroy million $ equipment
Yeah but how do you really know it's at the other end of that beam? They could use bendy light or mirrors
Point taken, although there is still room for doubt, given that the power of the weapon from the article is significantly lower.
By the way, is that photo in the visible frequency range?
The laser might be invisible to the naked eye, but it would still be visible in infrared or other spectrums, and so it will be fairly easy to watch and see where the laser comes from and then strike that location.
Wouldn't that still require for the scattering to be significant enough? If so, how are we sure that that is the case?
That's true, I was assuming it would scatter a fair bit, but it isn't an extremely high powered laser, it's designed to take down small drones, so it may not be as visible as I thought. I suppose it could still be worked out via good old fashioned triangulation though, but that would probably be quite difficult with a laser.
Fires a laser pointer with immense power into the sky. Under infrared camera that will point to its exact location. You could counterfire at this with very unsophisticated methods of just using a camera and a good enough map. A bait and wipe operation would actually be very very easy, you just need a camera with overwatch, a team using that information to map target coordinates then feed that information to artillery or missile launches. You could counterfire them with artillery within 30 seconds if you set the bait operation up correctly.
This means you need to fire this thing then move it immediately afterwards very quickly or get toasted. That would be ideal practice, but soldiers in the field do not follow ideal practice and get super lazy or overconfident. Counterfiring enemy artillery positions is a similar process but a little slower and works effectively for similar reasons as soldiers set up static positions instead of remaining mobile.
Lol, another "energy weapon" that will totally work just around the corner 5 years tops trust me bro we just need $10bn dollarinos for development! Maybe they can pop a few slow moving trash balloons sent back from the north. Let's just hope Kim doesn't have access to those fancy highly reflective "happy birthday" baloons.
South Korean military after the DPRK starts applying a mirror coating to drones: "Ahh. Well... Nevertheless."
Jokes aside, the real challenge will be cooling and targeting and fire rate. China has already got swarming drone attack munitions in service so it's less of a matter of how much it costs to down one drone and more of a matter of can this thing fire fast enough to down 10, 20, or 50 drones in a minute.
The South Korean defence industry is very interesting because its products are being treated as substitute goods for American/German/French weapons by 2nd tier NATO and vassal powers but all of them are essentially completely untested in any sort of conflict and who the fuck even knows how the supply chain from South Korea to (say) Poland will hold up in an actual conflict. I suspect that a lot of it is just NAFO types blindly cheerleading whatever tanks their side buys.
If the rumors are true then you are better off addressing that question to the kpop industry.
If it's more than zero
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take so we can't afford to not build these things.
It faces the same issue as the Israeli iron dome project, if it's a static structure, being being the question of construction rates and vulnerability to indirect saturation fire.
If it's somehow small and mobile enough to weave into front line air defense systems it becomes a target of artillery and thus an issue of production rates and equipment reliability
“It is invisible and noiseless, does not require separate ammunition and can be operated only when electricity is supplied,” the DAPA release said. Future versions could be developed to take out much bigger targets, including aircraft and ballistic missiles, which would be a potential “game changer,” according to the release.
would be special if we went back to massed trench warfare if these things are easy to set up and operate at all times. just kill off aircraft and missiles and turn everything into a gigantic meatgrinder
These things has to be mobile not to be blown up after firing a single shot, giving away their location. Supplying enough power to fire and cool a laser weapon powerful enough to do what they claim this does, especially with a short enough cooldown period for it to be useful, would be a non-trivial challenge for a stationary platform during peacetime. Doing it on a large scale during live battle with a destroyed electrical grid and on a mobile platform sounds very challenging.
Just slap some retroreflectors on your drone.
Even if that still kills it, it'll reflect enough light back to the source that 2 other drones watching the return path could instantly pinpoint it's location
Start wars?