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DragonFire: UK fires high-power laser at aerial targets for first time - with 'intense beam of light' able to cut through drones

https://news.sky.com/story/amp/dragonfire-uk-fires-high-power-laser-at-aerial-targets-for-first-time-with-intense-beam-of-light-able-to-cut-through-drones-13051553

The Ministry of Defence has said the laser "boasts pinpoint accuracy" and can cause "structural damage or more impactful results if the warhead is targeted".

DragonFire: UK fires high-power laser at aerial targets for first time - with 'intense beam of light' able to cut through drones

"lasers"

34 comments

Showroom7561

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What if enemies just start adding mirrors to their planes, drones, etc?

cloudless

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Grab some popcorn and search YouTube for "mirror vs solar death ray."

Spoiler: magnifying glass plus sunlight obliterate mirror within seconds.

Showroom7561

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Yes, a small, stationery, "Walmart mirror" would be destroyed easily. Probably without using a death ray.

But military grade glass and cooling (i.e. heatsink) can do wonders.

I'm sure some creative anti-laser technology exists, or will exist, if these laser weapons become more common.

Even infrared reflecting paint + additional cooling might be an option.

Keep in ming that the "target" could have a weapon like this to fire back... No one wins.

ForgotAboutDre

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You can build lasers that can change thier wavelength (such as an electron wiggler). With a wide enough bandwidth most materials won't be reflective at some frequency. It's easy to find this frequency by sweeping the vehicle and detecting reflections. This could be done prior to destruction levels of laser power.

This technology is for use against small and cheap drones. If you fire costly missiles at a 2k drone. The people sending the 2k drones will eventually win out as the defending country can no longer economically support the war. These laser weapons bring the cost down to pounds not 10/100s thousands of pounds per missile. As the target is small drones their ability to carry large deflectors with cooling is limited (payload and range will be diminished).

These small drones couldn't carry such a weapon. The best they could manage is a one shoot retro reflector. This is a mirror that reflect in the same direction as the source light. Most would burn out in a very short time with this type of weapon.

The instantaneous power would be hard for many aircraft to generate. So this type of systems would be limited to ground based, large ships and possibly well configured jet engines aircraft.

Showroom7561

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The countermeasures will be interesting, then.

The offensive potential, terrifying.

ForgotAboutDre

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This of weapon will inspire very creative counter measures. If it's deployed in Ukraine I think we would see another big leap in how small drones are used. Lots of innovations happened with drones there, whilst exciting from an engineering point of view the human cost is scary.

CarbonIceDragon

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I could be wrong, but I don't suspect that a laser powerful enough to physically destroy stuff at a distance is going to be meaningfully stopped by regular mirrors, because mirrors don't reflect all the light pointed at them, and as soon as the mirror gets damaged enough to not properly reflect light in the spot the beam hits, it might as well not be there anyway.

TheChurn

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A good mirror reflects more than 99% of incident light, effectively increasing the amount of power the laser needs to destroy the target by a factor of 100.

This isn't the real concern, however. Fog, dust, clouds, and rain are quite common on the damp and dusty sphere we live on, and they would all strongly attenuate the beam power and greatly reduce the effective range.

Jaytreeman

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You're not wrong, but at that power level anything longer than a short pulse is going to vaporize the stuff in the way.
They probably take that into consideration and pulse the lazer before giving a more consistent shot.
Clearing out the path before shooting the shot.
Maybe they have a ring around the primary shot as well. Vaporizing the stuff that could get in the way of the primary attack.
These people are smart. It's easier to assume they've taken that into consideration

Monument

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Off the cuff idea, but thermally ablative coatings that dissolve into light blocking smoke might buy drone operators time to evade - assuming their rotors don’t thin out the smoke screen too much.

ForgotAboutDre

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The pointing system on a laser based weapon is going to be very fast. It's unlikely to be carrying much weight and will have big high performance motors.

The time of flight is practically instances relative to the spend of drones. So their is no evasion happening like top gun or star wars.

Tricking the section system is the only way a vehicle will avoid this.

If it's electro-optic sensors (cameras) smoke helps, but the laser weapon will be tracking the target prior to engagement and have a good estimate in the few seconds after smoke. A laser this powerful can burn through the smoke and hit the target in a much shorter time. It can also fire in a spiral in the last known location and hit the drone before it could get away.

If it's radar based, then the drone will need to have anti-radar coatings and profile. This avoids detection, but once detected it doesn't stand a chance.

If you want to avoid this system, you need to avoid detection. Or detect and destroy it first. Any adversary going up against this system will have to fly it's drone low and towards the ground. This makes the drones harder to detect and target. However, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has shown drone operators like to fly high above. Flying high gets them outside of human detection range, which allows for observation and targeting. Drones avoiding this type of laser system will be subject to small arms fire from hostile soldiers on the ground. They will also be less capable of carrying out their missions like they do in the current Ukraine conflict.

Monument

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That’s a very thoughtful response, and it makes a lot of sense. Thank you!

Paddzr

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But is this the same type of light? We're talking about pure heat damage, how do mirrors reflect heat?

Shadow

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Lasers don't send heat. Lasers send light energy that is absorbed by the surface and radiates it as heat.

If a mirror was 100% effective it would work, but the tiny bit that hits the backing of the mirror will melt it and then it'll cascade.

Zorque

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Wouldn't all those things also affect the mirrors ability to reflect?

aeronmelon

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2028: Chinese scientists have developed "supermirrors".

ForgotAboutDre

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Super mirrors would enable better lasers technology. This cat and mouse game will never end. I'm just glad the UK, Europe and USA are ahead, because they generally support liberty and value human life. If China gets ahead the world will become much darker.

iAvicenna

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easy you put another mirror at the gun

ech

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That's how baby lasers are made

hglman

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They become easy to spot.

Bears_Koolaid

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The future really is chrome

mannycalavera

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tapshead.gif

sandevistan

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Well I'm basing this off what I've seen the Chinese get up to, they have these mounted on trucks so if there is some kind of effective counter like super smoke, idk, inclement weather conditions (lmao), they just don't roll it out.

Also if these ever get mounted on fighter jets it might be wise to make them part of the automated drone fleets that are gonna be flying in locked formation like Blue Angels. Just don't send out the laser drones unless necessary idk.

I'm just speculating. You're stuck buying our shitty F-35s or whatever lol

blackn1ght

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The F-35 is the complete opposite of shitty.

sandevistan

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It's one of the most financialized and ineffective projects in the entire US military, and that's really saying something. It's billed as a hypothetical way for our close allies to use nukes, We would use ICBMs in real nuclear warfare which everyone knows is being stashed actoss Europe and Israel not-so-secretly the F35 shit is LARPing, but anyways conveniently nobody really plans on it since it would result in us getting property damage lol.

Anyways that's a red herring the real issues is the expense and the production of the parts for it + the amount of time it has to spend being babied by mechanics!

That shit is so unreliable even when it's not damn near killing the pilots with shitty ejects or weird landings, you want to see a video? It's Fed up. Guy's head clearly gets SMASHED against the Fing plane.

It's way less reliable based on inclement weather than these prototype direct energy weapons.

We have effective weapons programs I don't feel the need to talk about F35 when it's so well covered. I can get you democrat, republican, bloodless investor, or communist takes on it

ForgotAboutDre

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With lasers this powerful weather would be turned to steam, it's going to clear its path eventually.

sandevistan

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Well the power limitations and cooling issues that were previously considered to be insurmountable have been, so you may be right. I guess the question is can it effectively dispatch missiles headed to jets.

Taking out drones with a tank mounted direct energy weapon seems very feasible or having other shit around that can do that

ItsAFake

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This is going to be a weirdly lit world war.

Linkerbaan

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trslim

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Generals does take place in like 2030

autotldr

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has said latest trial of the DragonFire system, which typically costs less than £10 a shot, marks a "major step in bringing this technology into service".

It is hoped the weapon could reduce the UK Armed Forces' reliance on high-cost ammunition, with the cost of firing the laser for 10 seconds equivalent to using a regular heater for an hour.

Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps said: "This type of cutting-edge weaponry has the potential to revolutionise the battlespace by reducing the reliance on expensive ammunition, while also lowering the risk of collateral damage.

"Investments with industry partners in advanced technologies like DragonFire are crucial in a highly contested world, helping us maintain the battle-winning edge and keep the nation safe."

Shimon Fhima, director of strategic programmes at the MoD, said: "The DragonFire trials at the Hebrides demonstrated that our world-leading technology can track and engage high-end effects at range.

The development of DragonFire is being led by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), on behalf of the MoD, working with its industry partners MBDA, Leonardo and QinetiQ.

The original article contains 420 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 57%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Ratulf

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Have they solved the issues with particles in the air like dust or clouds? Or is it just a good weather defense?

voracitude

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DragonFire was able to destroy incoming drones from several positions miles away, The Times has reported.

Sounds like it. A laser that can cut through metal and plastic at those distances is going to vaporise anything else that gets in its way. Normally you'd have an issue with the surface of the target ablating and vaporising into a dense cloud that does a much better job of stopping photons than the atmosphere (see some Styropyro videos for examples of this in action), but it sounds like it's strong enough to punch through that as well to finish the job. And quickly enough that it takes out an aerial target, which typically have to move pretty fast to stay airborne. There's power behind that beam.

Tweak

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Drones don't necessarily move that fast, I can't imagine this would be all that effective against fast moving targets that vary their speed. So it might catch a drone hovering, but it probably won't catch a 200mph racing drone going through its paces.