Navy Shoots Down Plane With Really Big Raygun

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How did they know that the plane had a really big ray gun on it? And what did they use to shoot down such a plane?

we're gettin there!

Sweet.

Oh....fuck yeah. I think I just jizzed in my pants....

Go Navy!!

I want one.

Can the Spartan Laser be far behind?

Fucking-a. If they can make a ship with lasers for defensive weapons and at least one railgun for an offensive weapon I will have a spontaneous day-long orgasm if demonstration footage ever makes YouTube.

!!

I can hear it now... "There was a video but it only survived about 5 seconds..."

Here's a question: if you can equip a cruiser with Railguns striking up to 200 miles inland with GPS level accuracy and hypersonic-speed warheads, and by the same token defend the battle group from missile/aerial attack with a cooperative-engagement network of directed energy weapons slaved to something like the Aegis System and their own independent fire control, do you even need tactical airplanes and aircraft carriers anymore?

Would we have finally turned the corner and sent the big-deck carrier the way of the battleship?

What if you could mount these weapons aboard submarines, only to be deployed when the ship surfaces to make a long range, Over-The -Horizon attack? Now you've got an entirely stealth Navy.

I'd say you still need at least a little deck carrier capability. It seems to me like even with precision fire, indirect fire still cant completely replace an airframe. Whether there is a human in it or just a camera and a remote control us up for debate, but I think you still need carriers.

Well, you'd need some small deck stuff for helos, UAV,s and aerial assaults, etc. The cool thing about the railguns, however, is that unlike current direct naval gunfire support they can strike the 'back side' of hillsides and mountains in a way conventional munitions can't. The projectiles can practically achieve low orbit after being fired.

Between UAV's, railguns, and laser-based fleet defense systems, you have largely eliminated the need (and expense) of naval aviation. Part of me doesn't know how to feel about that but my gut tells me the golden age went out with the Tomcat anyhow.

Big carriers are getting so expensive just to defend that they're hard to justify. If you can replace their striking power with something like you're describing here and put airlift and recon into drones / helicopters in smaller contingents in more and more dispersable groups then we may be moving on to the "next big thing".

Awesome shit! That's gotta be an order of magnitude faster to engage a threat than the Phalanx, 'cause it eliminates that pesky bullet-travel time.

As for the carrier question - I agree I think we still need eyes over the targets both for targeting and post-strike assessment. And an armed-and-manned aircraft can probably still react faster with precision follow-up shots.

As for CBGs being so big - hey, maybe equipping a CV with a bunch of these lasers will allow it to defend itself better, and we can reduce the battle group by a few air defense cruisers.

A large number of these placed north of Seoul could possibly protect the city.

As it is NK has Seoul (and thus everyone else) by the balls, due to about 15,000 arty pieces trained on it, capable of causing nuke-level casualties and impossible to knock out in a first strike quickly enough.

But if laser CIWS could stop them, then we'd have a free hand with NK.

That's.. pretty damn hot.

That's awesome. I'll take three.

As long as we're not getting here:

Now all we have to do is figure out how to mount this on the head of a shark and we're in business!!

Not to worry.

The Obama Administration will cancel the program if it is promising.

An update!

The force shall be with you... always.

Still looks a little big to be mounting in the rear of the Jeep, though.

Maybe a version of it could be towed, like a cannon.

They should keep quiet or Obama will cancel this.

This was in Farnborough, you'll notice. Raytheon's getting the idea.

let me know when they advance to the gatling laser

I'm not sure how that would anyway improve over a continuous beam.

*thinks*

But, actually, if you put six lasers in a Gatling gun configuration, each one could be run at higher peak power because of the lower duty cycle (each would only be in operation one-sixth of the time)...

Geordi had this idea with the multiphasic tractor beam. A technique similar to the way his visor works was used to move a stellar core fragment from it's original trajectory to spare a colony of humans who had moved their centuries ago to experiment with genectic breeding.

Star Trek: Starfleet Command II had a "Phaser G" on certain ships. 'G' stood for "gatling," which I took as a joke from the programmers, but it actually did fire several times in a single turn.

I only really noticed it when I started modifying ship specs, and then I only used the big starbase phasers.