Lockheed Martin Destroys Drones in Latest Laser Weapons Demo

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Lockheed has released a video showing off its latest tests of the 30-kilowatt class ATHENA (Advanced Test High Energy Asset) laser weapons system at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico: the laser destroys five Outlaw drones by using its own fuel source against them.

The Lockheed Martin Advanced Test High Energy Asset (ATHENA) prototype laser weapon system proved that an advanced system of sensors, software and specialized optics can deliver decisive lethality against unmanned aerial vehicle threats. In tests conducted at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, ATHENA destroyed five Outlaw unmanned aerial systems in August 2017.
 
With drones that size there will be cameras mounted on the outside of them now. After this laser in this video. Bad guys with drones will see this on Youtube.
 
Airbrushkid said:
With drones that size there will be cameras mounted on the outside of them now. After this laser in this video. Bad guys with drones will see this on Youtube.
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Kind of makes me think they could easily make random maneuvers so it is never flying straight... then the laser has to go in to pew pew mode
 
None of those had anything to do with the fuel.. they simply tracked in broad daylight and burned their tail rudder off... I want to know how effective that is when you DON'T have a cut & dry flight path with no deviations, reflective anti-laser coating, or battery powered propulsion.....
 
oROEchimaru said:
Kind of makes me think they could easily make random maneuvers so it is never flying straight... then the laser has to go in to pew pew mode
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The tracking tech available today would mean that anything large enough to be considered dangerous couldn't move around fast enough to avoid it. Light speed acquisition and light speed deployment combined with today's sensor and control resolution is an insane combo. Just look at what they can do with Phalanx, THAAD, and Aegis, now remove all the delay involved with getting the payload to target. Wind speed and density, who cares? Gravity drop? Fugetaboutit. You can see on shootdown number 2, even after the violent pitch up it's still tracking and burning the same spot.

The only thing holding back battlefield laser tech is power generation and storage.
 
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Not a bad start but it looks kind of slow. What happens if they swarm or apply a reflective coating?
 
James Robinson said:
None of those had anything to do with the fuel.. they simply tracked in broad daylight and burned their tail rudder off... I want to know how effective that is when you DON'T have a cut & dry flight path with no deviations, reflective anti-laser coating, or battery powered propulsion.....
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At 30KW a reflective coating will protect the vehicle for a couple of seconds before it too is ablated (because such a coating can't be a perfect reflector and will heat up quickly). Also, the reflective coating will make tracking it visually much easier. Probably better to go with a sky-blue and white color scheme to make it harder for the optical tracker to lock onto. Once it's locked, keeping the laser on the target is not difficult unless it is supersonic. The propulsion mode doesn't really matter since all you need to do is damage a control surface enough to make it uncontrollable.
 
steerable mirror on drone?

I'm rubber and you're glue. Whatever you emit at me bounces back and zaps you.

;)
 
Arcygenical said:
Laser mirrors for kw lasers are solid blocks of polished metals... because they too sink optical power and heat the fuck up.
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Usually they are actively chilled with Liquid Nitrogen or something similar. But i could imagine effective counter measures being formed with a reflective coating being temporary protection measure.
 
Arcygenical said:
Laser mirrors for kw lasers are solid blocks of polished metals... because they too sink optical power and heat the fuck up.
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Fill the drone with pressurized gas. (I like CO2 because it will then be deemed a weapon of mass destruction by the left.) Laser burns a hole in the skin...anywhere...and the gas comes out, forming an opaque cloud around the drone.

Game, set, match!

;)
 
James Robinson said:
None of those had anything to do with the fuel.. they simply tracked in broad daylight and burned their tail rudder off... I want to know how effective that is when you DON'T have a cut & dry flight path with no deviations, reflective anti-laser coating, or battery powered propulsion.....
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I'm not sure how you think battery powered propulsion would affect the effectiveness of the laser.

I wanna know when they'll have this ready to take down North Korea's next missile launch! :)
 
c3k said:
Fill the drone with pressurized gas. (I like CO2 because it will then be deemed a weapon of mass destruction by the left.) Laser burns a hole in the skin...anywhere...and the gas comes out, forming an opaque cloud around the drone.

Game, set, match!

;)
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The laser provides its own cloud of smoke, but the plane is moving, so the smoke clears...
 
Full Otto said:
The tracking tech available today would mean that anything large enough to be considered dangerous couldn't move around fast enough to avoid it. Light speed acquisition and light speed deployment combined with today's sensor and control resolution is an insane combo. Just look at what they can do with Phalanx, THAAD, and Aegis, now remove all the delay involved with getting the payload to target. Wind speed and density, who cares? Gravity drop? Fugetaboutit. You can see on shootdown number 2, even after the violent pitch up it's still tracking and burning the same spot.

The only thing holding back battlefield laser tech is power generation and storage.
Click to expand...

I was going to make the same point.
 
Airbrushkid said:
With drones that size there will be cameras mounted on the outside of them now. After this laser in this video. Bad guys with drones will see this on Youtube.
Click to expand...

And ?

When it comes to warfare on a rapidly changing battlefield where armies are covering 80 miles or more in a day, for an enemy drone to be effective, it must reach a target whether as a weapon system, or an intelligence platform. This system is being designed and built to prevent that. If the drone is killed and fails in it's mission, that's a win, if it spots the laser defense system and flies away without being destroyed and fails in it's mission, that's still a win.

For the military there are three "purposes" to an attack, you can attack to destroy or atrit, (attrition), an enemy force, you can attack in order to deny the enemy a capability or asset, and you can attack in order to neutralize or suppress an enemy.
 
James Robinson said:
None of those had anything to do with the fuel.. they simply tracked in broad daylight and burned their tail rudder off... I want to know how effective that is when you DON'T have a cut & dry flight path with no deviations, reflective anti-laser coating, or battery powered propulsion.....
Click to expand...

The laser might not be the only means of attack available in their final plans for a system. A reflective coating would work fine against a laser but would make radar or laser guidance for missiles and guns very easy, a drone that is flying in wild evasive gyrations makes for a poor camera platform.

Maybe you would do better by not assuming that the professionals are idiots. Not that they can't make mistakes or become fixated and fail to see something, but just as a general rule they aren't as dumb as you might think.
 
Every "defense" you have to mount on a drone, from mirrors, to reflective coatings, to multiple control surfaces and power supplies, to highly complex flight patterns all defeat the purpose of a drone, and that's a cheap, easily replaced platform. The more money I have to spend to defend the damn thing, the less like I am to risk losing it.
 
lcpiper said:
The laser might not be the only means of attack available in their final plans for a system. A reflective coating would work fine against a laser but would make radar or laser guidance for missiles and guns very easy, a drone that is flying in wild evasive gyrations makes for a poor camera platform.

Maybe you would do better by not assuming that the professionals are idiots. Not that they can't make mistakes or become fixated and fail to see something, but just as a general rule they aren't as dumb as you might think.
Click to expand...


Leme tell ya a little story...

It's a brisk October morning, about 600 miles off the coast of San Diego... Brass is DYIN' to do a live test on their brand spanking new Phalanx system... not going to say what ship we were on.. doesn't matter, they sank her over a decade ago.

Techs all swear ta gawd its ready to go... the word is given, a sister ship fires the test missile into the air.... Phalanx whips around, targets the ship that fired it and NOT the missile.. fires.. jams after a half a second of firing, shits out its guts and smokes like there's no tomorrow.

We pull back into port.. not San Diego... they gut it all, after a week, we're ready to go.. we head back out.. test is ready... word is given.. test missile is fired...

Phalanx does dick... just sits there....

5 minutes goes by.. techs are working.. a seagull flies by, the Phalanx whips around and turns it into red mist... everybody shits themselves... we pull back into port.

4 more days.. NOW we're ready. We head back out.... everything is ready to go....

Test missile is fired... and it passes less then 50 feet over our bow... during which the Phalanx whips around, locks on the REFLECTION of the missile on the Tower... and shits itself.....


Now tell me again how these people are not now and always will be fucking morons?

I spent the next 2 weeks in Long Beach getting so tore up I honestly don't remember a single moment of it after I left the pier
 
Bandalo said:
Every "defense" you have to mount on a drone, from mirrors, to reflective coatings, to multiple control surfaces and power supplies, to highly complex flight patterns all defeat the purpose of a drone, and that's a cheap, easily replaced platform. The more money I have to spend to defend the damn thing, the less like I am to risk losing it.
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Perhaps. But until that price exceeds the price of an actual plane with a pilot, it seems you're still coming out ahead. Just spitballing, what if you send up 30 drones all connected together through some form of wireless communication? How many lasers do you need then?
 
percydaman said:
Perhaps. But until that price exceeds the price of an actual plane with a pilot, it seems you're still coming out ahead. Just spitballing, what if you send up 30 drones all connected together through some form of wireless communication? How many lasers do you need then?
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Well, a couple questions first. What kind of drone? If it's an ISR platform, sending 30, having some percentage shot down, just to get some pictures is a bad investment for the bad guy.

If they're attack drones, then missiles or long-range rockets are going to be cheaper and more effective if you're going to do a swarm of 30 and lose a number of them on the way to the target. Cheap drones just can't carry a large payload, and large drones get expensive quick.

After that, it depends on who your adversary is. If you're going up against the PRC, they have the money and tech to make complex drones, and make a lot of them, and then you may have to deal with the problem of multiple linked drones. If you're up against other countries without that kind of budget, you're more worried about commercial off-the-shelf drones that have been repurposed by the bad guys. And they don't have the R&D budgets for complex drone swarms. Yet.
 
Bandalo said:
Well, a couple questions first. What kind of drone? If it's an ISR platform, sending 30, having some percentage shot down, just to get some pictures is a bad investment for the bad guy.

If they're attack drones, then missiles or long-range rockets are going to be cheaper and more effective if you're going to do a swarm of 30 and lose a number of them on the way to the target. Cheap drones just can't carry a large payload, and large drones get expensive quick.

After that, it depends on who your adversary is. If you're going up against the PRC, they have the money and tech to make complex drones, and make a lot of them, and then you may have to deal with the problem of multiple linked drones. If you're up against other countries without that kind of budget, you're more worried about commercial off-the-shelf drones that have been repurposed by the bad guys. And they don't have the R&D budgets for complex drone swarms. Yet.
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Hey..hey.....Hey. Don't ask me to think about this for more than 5 seconds. Otherwise my entire argument might fall apart.
 
What's cool to watch is that the laser isn't just targeting the drone. It's targeting a specific *part* of the drone, specifically the smallest part which, if it fails, will bring the drone down. All the laser had to do was burn the vertical stabilizer at its narrowest point, just below the horizontal stabilizer.

Apply it to a ballistic missile, and you've got similar capabilities--target an exposed turbopump, or the wall of a tank, or punch a hole in the nosecone to throw off its aerodynamics, and it's game over. You don't have to blow the missile up in order to keep it from landing on LA.
 
great that it works on big military targets, but I really want to see this popping quad-copters like popcorn
 
James Robinson said:
Leme tell ya a little story...

It's a brisk October morning, about 600 miles off the coast of San Diego... Brass is DYIN' to do a live test on their brand spanking new Phalanx system... not going to say what ship we were on.. doesn't matter, they sank her over a decade ago.

Techs all swear ta gawd its ready to go... the word is given, a sister ship fires the test missile into the air.... Phalanx whips around, targets the ship that fired it and NOT the missile.. fires.. jams after a half a second of firing, shits out its guts and smokes like there's no tomorrow.

We pull back into port.. not San Diego... they gut it all, after a week, we're ready to go.. we head back out.. test is ready... word is given.. test missile is fired...

Phalanx does dick... just sits there....

5 minutes goes by.. techs are working.. a seagull flies by, the Phalanx whips around and turns it into red mist... everybody shits themselves... we pull back into port.

4 more days.. NOW we're ready. We head back out.... everything is ready to go....

Test missile is fired... and it passes less then 50 feet over our bow... during which the Phalanx whips around, locks on the REFLECTION of the missile on the Tower... and shits itself.....


Now tell me again how these people are not now and always will be fucking morons?

I spent the next 2 weeks in Long Beach getting so tore up I honestly don't remember a single moment of it after I left the pier
Click to expand...


Great story, I don't doubt a word of it. I'm just not sure we are talking about the same set of idiots :notworthy:
 
Full Otto said:
The only thing holding back battlefield laser tech is power generation and storage.
Click to expand...

Not really if for anything armoured. It's power density, beam quality and optics required in lieu of the first two. a 50kW laser is the size of a few large server racks. Not to mention they are basically off shelf commercial lasers lol. Even a Russian owned company based in USA to boot ;)
 
Bandalo said:
Every "defense" you have to mount on a drone, from mirrors, to reflective coatings, to multiple control surfaces and power supplies, to highly complex flight patterns all defeat the purpose of a drone, and that's a cheap, easily replaced platform. The more money I have to spend to defend the damn thing, the less like I am to risk losing it.
Click to expand...

A 99.8% reflective coating can be applied easily and cheaply. None of the tests they show have this applied - Now your power requirements are well over 100x higher.
And you're talking to a laserfag who is actually designing laser weapon with a different approach that costs 1/10th of these.
 
Whereas I did write some snarky comments upstream, which some seemed to think were serious (c'mon, a pressurized drone filled with dense CO2???), it was merely to point out that although there ARE ways to harden a drone against a laser, they all come at a cost. That cost can be measured by monetary outlay or performance decrement. An armored drone? Seriously?

The Russians, in the invasion of Ukraine, have made widespread use of cheap drones, primarily to spot for artillery. The Ukrainians have learned how deadly Russian artillery (fired from behind the Russian border and left untouched) can be. That's the reality of modern war.

The US has relied upon the USAF for battlespace air dominance. The proliferation of drones, be it a quadcopter (yes, they are being used VERY effectively) or a 10-20' wingspan prop, is a problem which the US Army needs to counter. The USAF cannot.

Solid-state lasers offer a HUGE opportunity. We are all familiar with the Patriot missile being fired to down a drone. That is not cost effective...and it is an excellent way to deplete the ammo stores of an air defense battery. A laser (solid-state) only costs a couple of bucks per shot. It's more expensive to shoot some long-range rifles. (The procurement cost is a bit different!!!) A maneuvering drone is a drone which isn't observing. If these lasers can be mounted on Strykers, then each platoon can have an anti-drone capability. Bigger lasers on trucks set back a bit and you've got layered defenses.

A side benefit, and a huge one, is that increased power (100kW +) will allow anti-mortar, anti-rocket capabilities as well.

(Liquid pumped lasers are another technology. Solid-state seems to offer cheaper scalability.)

It'll be cool when we strap them onto sharks.

;)
 
c3k said:
A side benefit, and a huge one, is that increased power (100kW +) will allow anti-mortar, anti-rocket capabilities as well.

(Liquid pumped lasers are another technology. Solid-state seems to offer cheaper scalability.)


;)
Click to expand...

From the video it still looks relatively slow to shoot down one aircraft. There are already plans on the drawing board where a larger drone dispatches hundreds or coordinated micro drones. (I saw the promo vids) WTF are you going to do then? If a laser can't shoot down 1 target every second, then swarming the target with cheap micro drones seems to be the effective anti-counter measure.

A better solution would be to fry the internal circuitry quickly. But directed gamma & x-ray burst are generally frowned upon and aircraft can be "bullet" hardened too. (That's a term we used for space hardware to protect against radiation burst)

A maneuvering drone can very easily have 360 video with a couple cameras and process and stitch it's video in real time of it's intended target. The gimbal, compass, and acceleration sensors tied in with visual motion tracking would be able to track a target automatically no problem.
 
Required dwell time (all other variables held the same) is directly correlated to delivered power. 30kW takes 4 seconds? (No, I didn't time them, that seems about right. Shrug.) Make it 300kW and it becomes .4 seconds. 3MW makes it .04 seconds. Yes, that's a HUGE jump from 30kW to 3MW. ;)

One of the early issues with the airborne laser program (okay..."one of the MANY issues"....) was the heat transfer to the mirror array. Even with 99.9% reflectivity, the thin mirrors needed cooling to prevent distortion and destruction in just a few seconds.

Drone swarms? That's tomorrow's problem. Hardening a drone defeats the primary benefit of drone tech. They are cheap and plentiful. A high power laser, with rapid recharge/recycle time, would be far more effective at destroying a maneuvering drone swarm than any missile or cannon system....and have less collateral damage from all the misses.
 
As the technology improves, target acquisition, tracking, and cycle time will all improve to the point where it would be increasingly more difficult to overwhelm a laser based defensive system. They may be able to destroy drones, even swarms of them far enough away that they'll never reach the ship.
 
Drones? Wouldn't a bunch of rednecks with shotguns been more effective?

Also, did my ears deceive me or wasn't that music from the original DooM?
 
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