Higher power HELIOS laser cannons have been tested on Arleigh Burke-class destroyers to interdict aerial and sea drones. The Army, P-HEL truck-mounted lasers to intercept drones and mortar rounds. The Air Force, SHiELD and other laser systems for use against stationary ground targets and enemy aircraft and missiles.
The one thing all military-grade lasers have in common is the requirement for a large power source. The most efficient operate at 30% efficiency. That means a 100 W power source will provide a 30 W beam output. A 60 kW laser needs a 180 kW input! Not hard to do on a naval destroyer or with a truck-mounted generator.
Assume that a future laser rifle will have its own battery pack power source. Now consider that a typical EV lithium battery pack has about a 500 W output. It would take 350 car batteries to power that 60 kW laser. The advent of solid-state batteries with higher energy density might cut our number of battery packs in half, and weigh less as well. Even so, the batteries will be too heavy and bulky to tote around. If we attach a really long electrical cord from it to our laser rifle, it won’t be very practical in the confines of our base on Mars.
With all that power sluicing through and out of these lasers, the military has grappled with cooling the devices. Even with cooling systems, most prototypes deployed must limit operating durations to prevent damage from overheating.
Lasers have proven to be impractical rifles in the near future. What about masers? They emit electromagnetic radiation between radio and infrared frequencies.
Masers are primarily used for amplification of microwave signals for telecommunication on Earth and in space. They rely on semiconductor solid state microwave generators to pump their gain medium. Masers produce very weak microwave signals, measured in picowatts. That’s trillionths of a Watt!
Practical maser rifles are farther in the future than lasers. Today’s devices are small and low power. Their semiconductor generators may not scale up, and it’s unknown how durable their organic gain medium would be at higher inputs and outputs. Once the scaling problems are resolved, they would face the same constraints of power supply and overheating.
Unlike optical lasers, a beam of X-rays is generated by a single pass through the gain medium resulting in lower beam coherence. But the energy needed to produce X-rays is greater than for visible light, making the systems more complex and expensive.
During the Cold War, the US funded Project Excalibur to research and develop an orbiting X-ray laser system as a ballistic missile defense. The concept involved packing large numbers of expendable X-ray lasers around an orbiting nuclear device. But using a nuke for the pump source made them very costly one-use devices. The program was cancelled in 1992.
I’m dropping this X-ray laser idea faster than quantum teleportation.
Unless there are multiple technological breakthroughs, the lack of a compact power supply and the high cooling demand makes laser rifles impractical in my timeframe. Scratch them off my list of Ep City, Mars weapons.
Next month we’ll examine non-ballistic projectile weapons. Rail guns!
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For further readinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laserhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_weaponhttps://www.astrodynetdi.com/blog/power-supplies-for-laser-applications#:~:text=Efficiency:%20Power%20supply%20efficiency%20is,the%20risk%20of%20thermal%20degradation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personnel_halting_and_stimulation_response_riflehttps://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/researcher-creates-most-powerful-maser-ever-spare-parts-flna949918https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur
