Spartan95
Junior Member
Re: The End of the Carrier Age?
Beats me really. There is no public information on how the vernier thrusters will be used. And the way the video shows the the thrusters being used, I doubt that they are 1-time use only. There is just not enough information on it either way.
The BrahMos travels at Mach 3, which means ~1km per second (Mach 1 is ~330m/s). If a laser takes 10 secs to destroy the seeker head, the missile would have travelled ~10km.
Whether the missile's trajectory is affected depends on how the missile is programmed to react when it loses its seeker head. It can be programmed to just continue the original trajectory. And this seems like a fairly simple solution to laser based defence.
Quite a few factors involved, with perhaps the most important being range to target, and time needed to cause damage by the laser on the target. 100kW or 200kW laser may not be powerful enough to damage the BrahMos sufficiently in a short period of time (i.e., less than 10 sec).
Even if the laser has an effective range of 20km, it will be constrained by line of sight issues (due to the sea skimming nature of BrahMos, the engagement horizon is likely to be less than 20km anyway). Thus, the laser needs to be able to destroy the BrahMos quickly before it gets into the terminal dive phase. Assuming the engagement horizon to be 15km, the laser need to destroy the missile before it gets too close. There are 2 important factors to consider here:
1. How powerful is the laser at 15km?
2. How much atmospheric scattering is there?
In some places and depending on season, visibility is less than 15km due to pollution, haze, and any other number of atmospheric factors. This reduces the effective range of lasers.
There is also the issue of power efficiency of lasers. Currently, if I'm not mistaken, most lasers have efficiency of ~30%. That means that for a 100kW laser output, it needs to be powered by more than 300kW of energy. This is 1 of the key limiting factors why laser weapons are not widely used, particularly on ships. Given the foreseeable technological advancements, laser weapons are only practical on nuclear powered vessels (such as an aircraft carrier) in the next few years. Smaller ships simply don't generate enough power for lasers.
The issue for trying to ignite the propellant of a missile coming directly towards the laser platform is that the propellant is behind the warhead, which is behind the seeker head. Thus, to get through to the propellant of an incoming missile requires the laser to burn through close to half the length of the missile itself. Not exactly a quick method.
And here's a list of possible counter-measures listed on Wiki for Tactical High Energy Laser:
1. Reflective coatings which attempt to reflect a large proportion of the incident radiation which is incident upon the aimed projectiles.
2. Modification of projectile geometries to take into account the possibility that laser light radiation might be used to neutralize the projectiles.
3. Enveloping gas/substance the use gaseous envelopes around a missile would ensure that a sufficiently cool gas will carry away a portion of the incident radiation energy which is incident upon the missile by both convective and diffusive effects.
4. An oscillating or chaotic trajectory will increase the difficulties in the use of the THEL system due to guidance. If guided into windy or turbulent environments, such a chaotic trajectory would also ensure that there is more of a turbulent gaseous flow around the missile.
5. Heat Resistant Coating Layers (HRCLs). Similar to reflective coatings. However, in the case of HRCLs, internal capillaries/coolant mechanisms could ensure that excessively large amounts of heat could be dissipated.
6. Multi-stage projectile systems which “dummies” a THEL kill.
I think the vernier thruster will be only used for the initial launch, and won't play much of a role in the actual terminal phase, correct me if I'm wrong.
Beats me really. There is no public information on how the vernier thrusters will be used. And the way the video shows the the thrusters being used, I doubt that they are 1-time use only. There is just not enough information on it either way.
If the seeker head's destroyed, and the target ship is still powered then it should be able to manouever out of the missile's final trajectory? Or maybe not, considering how fast the missile would be in the first place. But the laser would be a hard kill and should cause the missile to veer off course at least.
The BrahMos travels at Mach 3, which means ~1km per second (Mach 1 is ~330m/s). If a laser takes 10 secs to destroy the seeker head, the missile would have travelled ~10km.
Whether the missile's trajectory is affected depends on how the missile is programmed to react when it loses its seeker head. It can be programmed to just continue the original trajectory. And this seems like a fairly simple solution to laser based defence.
I'm not sure how powerful a laser has to be to cause a minimum hard kill for say, the Brahmos -- 100 kw? 200?
Quite a few factors involved, with perhaps the most important being range to target, and time needed to cause damage by the laser on the target. 100kW or 200kW laser may not be powerful enough to damage the BrahMos sufficiently in a short period of time (i.e., less than 10 sec).
Even if the laser has an effective range of 20km, it will be constrained by line of sight issues (due to the sea skimming nature of BrahMos, the engagement horizon is likely to be less than 20km anyway). Thus, the laser needs to be able to destroy the BrahMos quickly before it gets into the terminal dive phase. Assuming the engagement horizon to be 15km, the laser need to destroy the missile before it gets too close. There are 2 important factors to consider here:
1. How powerful is the laser at 15km?
2. How much atmospheric scattering is there?
In some places and depending on season, visibility is less than 15km due to pollution, haze, and any other number of atmospheric factors. This reduces the effective range of lasers.
There is also the issue of power efficiency of lasers. Currently, if I'm not mistaken, most lasers have efficiency of ~30%. That means that for a 100kW laser output, it needs to be powered by more than 300kW of energy. This is 1 of the key limiting factors why laser weapons are not widely used, particularly on ships. Given the foreseeable technological advancements, laser weapons are only practical on nuclear powered vessels (such as an aircraft carrier) in the next few years. Smaller ships simply don't generate enough power for lasers.
Burn through the surface, ignite the propellant? Boom? There will be detriments (fog, cloud etc, as you said) and some countermeasures (surface coatings and the like) which may limit the laser's potential, but they will keep getting more powerful and imho I think you're kidding yourself if you think lasers will not supplement or even supercede conventional ciws systems within the coming decades.
It's just my 2 cents anyway. :/
The issue for trying to ignite the propellant of a missile coming directly towards the laser platform is that the propellant is behind the warhead, which is behind the seeker head. Thus, to get through to the propellant of an incoming missile requires the laser to burn through close to half the length of the missile itself. Not exactly a quick method.
And here's a list of possible counter-measures listed on Wiki for Tactical High Energy Laser:
1. Reflective coatings which attempt to reflect a large proportion of the incident radiation which is incident upon the aimed projectiles.
2. Modification of projectile geometries to take into account the possibility that laser light radiation might be used to neutralize the projectiles.
3. Enveloping gas/substance the use gaseous envelopes around a missile would ensure that a sufficiently cool gas will carry away a portion of the incident radiation energy which is incident upon the missile by both convective and diffusive effects.
4. An oscillating or chaotic trajectory will increase the difficulties in the use of the THEL system due to guidance. If guided into windy or turbulent environments, such a chaotic trajectory would also ensure that there is more of a turbulent gaseous flow around the missile.
5. Heat Resistant Coating Layers (HRCLs). Similar to reflective coatings. However, in the case of HRCLs, internal capillaries/coolant mechanisms could ensure that excessively large amounts of heat could be dissipated.
6. Multi-stage projectile systems which “dummies” a THEL kill.