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- - Don't invest too much in night-vision gear, sniper scopes, and binoculars (http://goldismoney.info/forums/showthread.php?t=221634)

Weatherman | 01-11-2008 07:29 AM
Don't invest too much in night-vision gear, sniper scopes, and binoculars Planning to defend your homestead using optical gear? Better have a Plan B too! Fortunately, this super high power laser isn't designed to blind people, so TPTB can use it for crowd control with a clear conscious. :sarc: Quote:
Camera Shy? Pentagon Builds a Portable Lens-Destroying Laser The Pentagon's newest laser weapon has a peak power of more than a million megawatts, so intense that it warps the air around it. When the beam strikes the target it vaporises the impact site, producing a plasma fireball and a highly destructive shockwave. The end result: a tiny crater barely visible to the naked eye. That's because the so-called "laser crazer" is designed not to burn up missiles or tanks, but to scratch lenses. It's a portable nonlethal weapon designed to take out enemy optical systems at long range -- ruining an adversary's night-vision gear, sniper scopes and binoculars in a fraction of a second -- by sandblasting their lenses with ultrashort pulses of laser light. While it's still in the research phase, the so-called "laser crazer" may shift the balance back to those who want to stay unseen, in an era of constant advances in zoom lenses, unmanned aircraft and night-vision cameras. The project also represents a departure for the Pentagon's laser research, which typically embraces large-scale chemical lasers capable of cutting through metal. Because the anti-surveillance weapon only needs to crack a thin layer of glass, it can use a small, portable solid-state laser. The pulses it fires off require very little energy, because each lasts only a fraction of a nanosecond. "The primary benefit is to allow very high peak energies to be transmitted in very-short-duration pulses," says David B. Law, technology division chief for the Pentagon's Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate, or JNLWD, which is funding the research. In a little-noticed 2006 test at University of Central Florida's Laser Plasma Laboratory, a 10-terawatt laser damaged a glass target 30 meters away using pulses lasting just 110 femtoseconds -- about 1/10,000 of a nanosecond. For that instant, the laser pulse was a million times more powerful than the Pentagon's best-known laser project, the megawatt-class Airborne Laser designed to be mounted on jumbo jets to destroy any approaching surface-to-air missile. The power of the crazer pulse makes it effectively self-focusing: It's so intense that it warps the air in a way that cancels out any scattering. As each pulse slams into the target lens, it produces a tiny explosion in the glass, leaving a crater less than a millimeter across. When pulsed in quick succession, the combined shockwaves from multiple blasts cause much more extensive damage, and lenses are rendered useless in less than a second. Given more time, the laser could blank larger areas of glass. For example, a vehicle windshield could be whited out to force it to stop at a checkpoint, without having to open fire with a lethal weapon. The machine used in the Florida test was desk-sized, but by 2009 a separate Darpa program aims to have a shoe-box sized laser (.pdf) that can produce millijoule-strength pulses at the rate of 10,000 a second while consuming less energy than a 100-watt bulb. As for applications: Whoever has the laser crazer owns the night. Any night-vision device used by the enemy -- light intensifiers, thermal imagers or infrared scopes -- could be swiftly nullified. And crews of enemy armored vehicles might find that their only way of seeing out is to open a hatch and expose themselves to fire. The crazer could also be slaved to existing military devices that can precisely locate any lenses pointed in their direction using a technique called retro-reflection. That would make it an instant sniper-blinding tool. In the future, a laser crazer could even blind laser-guided or heat-seeking missiles in flight. Perhaps the most controversial issue is the potential to cause eye damage to the enemy: Femtosecond lasers are the same ones used for eye surgery. "Eye hazards are a risk when using any laser," says Law. "We continue to research the human-effects issues surrounding this type of laser." Even if it could cause eye damage, such a laser would not be outlawed by an international weapons treaty, which "only bans lasers intentionally designed to blind," says Neil Davison of the Bradford Disarmament Research Center. "A weapon designed to damage lenses rather than eyes would not be covered." The crazer is still at the laboratory, with researchers looking for the best way of combining shockwaves to maximize the area of damage. Meanwhile other countries, including France and Germany, are working on their own high-powered femtosecond lasers.
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscell...1/laser_crazer

Neuro Artist | 01-11-2008 07:53 AM
Re: Don't invest too much in night-vision gear, sniper scopes, and binoculars Much better to get a quality Yedi-knight training. Right Obi Wan? May the force be with you! :D

1919A6 | 01-11-2008 10:27 PM
Re: Don't invest too much in night-vision gear, sniper scopes, and binoculars Check history on the outcome of those who used these type weapons on their adversaries, when the adversary CAUGHT them with it and sometimes without it!

rad | 01-11-2008 10:46 PM
Re: Don't invest too much in night-vision gear, sniper scopes, and binoculars http://www.wickedlasers.com/

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