The world’s largest defense company is taking a big step towards battlefield laser weapons. In a few weeks, Lockheed Martin will start production of high-efficiency fiber-optic modules that can be wired together into a wide variety of different weapons. Production will start with a prototype 60-kilowatt rocket-killer for the Army, they said, but it could easily scale to larger numbers, higher power, or both. Lockheed envisions its lasers potentially arming Littoral Combat Ships, AC-130 gunships, F-15 fighters, and one day even the F-35.
“We’re testing this facility out with a view to ramping it up,” Lockheed business developer Iain Mckinnie told me when I quizzed him after a roundtable with reporters. “In many ways, it’s… a test production facility, to test out how do we optimize this , to make it as efficient as possible [or] respond as quickly as possible [if], let’s say, if an urgent need came up.”
“I can’t get into the exact dollar figures of the investment,” he added, “but it is certainly very high profile within the corporation.”
The plan is to ramp up not just production but power. Fiber lasers like Lockheed’s generate use large numbers of small modules to generate many low-power beams. These run through fiber-optic cables to a “spectral beam combining” unit that turns the dozens or hundreds of weak lasers into one strong one. Increasing the power is simply a matter of adding more modules — along with appropriate power and cooling, that is, but small individual modules are much easier to cool than a single large “slab” of laser-generating material, the previous state of the art. (Overheating has been a particular problem for lasers in the past, since it distorts the beam into uselessness).
“Our 60 kW design is scalable to over 100 kW, if we populated it with more fibers. Right now the customer’s only asking for 60,” said Lockheed senior fellow Rob Afzal. “That’s kind of the core advantage. You can have a system that you can choose to populate with 10, 20, 50, 100 lasers.”
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