Northrop in electric blaster cannon milestone
By joshuah at 4 September, 2008, 1:54 pm
Source: The Register
US war-tech behemoth Northrop Grumman announced yesterday that it had achieved another milestone in its battlefield raygun programme – ahead of schedule. Company blaster cannon execs believe that the first tests at combat power – 100 kilowatts – will take place as planned by the end of this year.
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Yesterday’s milestone, following the first successful test of a “chain” in March, was the combination of two chains to produce a single beam of 30kW. Northrop blaster chiefs believe it will now be a doddle to hook up a further six and put out a proper arse-kicking beam using electrical power.
“Our march towards providing compact, electrically powered, operationally scalable and affordable laser weapons for U.S. military services continues to produce world-leading results,” said Dan Wildt, Northrop directed energy veep.
“We’ve achieved all of our major milestones ahead of schedule,” added JHPSSL boss Jay Marmo. “We have proven all aspects of our scalable design for 100kW.”
The first application for battle lasers will probably be that of burning down incoming bombardment rockets, mortar bombs and the like. Military bases and perimeters in warzones (and some Israeli towns) are typically subject to constant harassing fire of this type, and a proper working defence would be very useful.
Static or semi-static use of this sort could be a good fit for the JHPSSL. Though the company describes the laser weapon itself as “compact” and “portable”, it admits that electro-optical efficiency will be in the 20 per cent area – it was “greater than 19 percent” in this most recent test.
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