Anti-rocket laser cannon gets funding
Report: Company develops rifle that fires at right angles
Wednesday, October 29, 2003 Posted: 10:27 AM EST (1527 GMT)

Excerpt:
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israel and the U.S. are to spend at least $57 million for development of a laser cannon that can shoot down short-range missiles, an Israeli legislator and security officials said Tuesday.

A recent Israeli delegation successfully lobbied Congress to approve the new funding package for the joint U.S.-Israeli Nautilus laser weapon project, said Israeli lawmaker Yuval Steinitz, who was part of the delegation.

Israel wants the Nautilus to help protect its northern border towns from Katyusha rockets, fired by the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah during Israel's 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon that ended in 2000. Israel claims that Hezbollah now has 11,000 rockets aimed at Israel.

wasnt there something like this vs nukes once that was abandoned?
i thought it was that the defence wouldnt work during bad weather

Yeah the star wars project was slighly grander though! I think they wanted to use satellites to fire at and detonate nukes while they were still in the air. I think this is a ground based cannon to explode the rockets in mid-air?

A noble effort, but depending on the warhead payload, someone could be in for one hell of a surprise. (ever hit a water-balloon in mid air with a dart?)

That would really depend on the range of the laser canon. If it could denote conventional warheads a kilometer away then the imapct in most cases would be minimial. It sounds like Isreal wants to field test it against very low yeild rocket and morter acts coming accross it's borders.

<font color = lightgreen>From the footage I have seen on laser-intercept tests the missile don't blow up like they would normally; instead, they disable key components and do have a smaller subsequent explosion, as those components heat up very quickly. However, according to [url=http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/launches/laser_shootdown_000926.html]the news story[/b] this particular system seems to detonate the warhead. [img]graemlins/erm.gif[/img] There seems to be some discrpancy between the date of the story on my web search and the date in the story itself....

Anyway...even if the range of the chemical laser is only 1 km that will effetively render any non-nuclear missile useless. The worst problem facing laser systems now is their size, since they require large trucks to carry all the needed equipment. You would have to position laser trucks carefully so as to create a successful line of defense; they couldn't do their job on the move.

*****

On a related topic, laser rifles are also in development. However, these rifles don't burn holes through things or any such silly movie-type nonsense; they will blind you, though. Very deadly if used against a pilot effectively....</font>