No Spam! wrote:

One of the issues is the lasers produce toxic gases. On the ABL, they
are vented outside the plane and are dispersed in the slipstream.

On ships it could be a more significant problem to get rid of them
without endangering the crew.

On the other hand, a ship could carry more laser fuel and heat
dispersion is easier to solve.

The lasing chemicals used in weapons like ABL are not really considered safe
for shipboard use. For example, one part of a COIL's typical fuel is
high-test hydrogen peroxide, the same stuff that blew up Kursk. So you
almost certainly will not see high-energy chemical lasers aboard ship.

Naval laser applications are pretty much focused (no pun intended) on lasers
that run on electricity from the ship's power system instead. (Such as the
all-electric propulsion system planne for DD(X)) There are a couple of
candidates -- free-electron lasers are promising these days (seppite a poor
hsitory back in the 1980s). So are solid-state lasers. There's been a lot
of research on these two in the last couple of years, from all of the
services. (The Army is looking at a solid-state laser to replace the
chemical laser in the THEL anti-artillery system, to make it usefully
portable. The Air Force thinks it can put a solid-state laser in the
lift-fan bay of a JSF.)

People have taked about absorption problems, which are certainly a real
issue. The shipboard environment is about the worst possible for a weaopn
laser, with salt spray, fog, mist, haze, etc. ABL gets to operate above all
this stuff and thus can be comparatively simple. But it's still dependant
on adaptive focusing to get through the thin, dry air where it would be
shooting.

That's one thing making free-electron lasers of particualr interest to the
Navy. An FEL can be tuned across a wide range of frequencies, letting it
pick the optimium one for good propagation under prevailing conditions.

http://www.jlab.org/news/articles/2003/navy.html

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