It needs space, mass, power and cooling and this can be difficult on our modern surface combatants. The hinge point in the directed-energy push in the Navy can be summed up in the brash judgment of Rear Adm. Fred Pyle, which was contained in a CRS survey of Navy shipboard lasers: The laser is merely the tip of an electrical iceberg.
Shipboard lasers have been frequently talked about as a clean replacement of missiles light, in place of interceptors, electricity, instead of reloads. In reality, the short-term potential of the technology is not so much dramatic, long-range eliminations as much as it is the reworking of the economic and stamina of a ship in terms of defense. The Navy itself frames it in terms of “depth of magazine” and cost exchange: a solid-state laser uses the fuel-to-electricity pipe on the ship, and in marginal terms can shoot with the range of approximately 1 to under 10 dollars per shot, as opposed to incinerating small magazines of expensive interceptors.
It is based on that reasoning that prototypes and early fielded systems have focused on the targets that are most likely to run out of conventional defenses small unmanned aircraft, fast boats, and the sensors that guide them. Laser roadmap outlined in CRS The 30 kW-pinnacle Laser Weapon System (LaWS) and its demonstrators and operational experiments have led to systems that are now built into ships, as opposed to being bolt-ons on the flight deck. The HELIOS installation on USS Preble is squarely in that transition: a weapon which is interconnected with the combat system of the ship, but not a separate science project. The description of the program is as important as the beam power, because HELIOS is not just placed to have targets, but also add surveillance and identification information to the Aegis processes. However, software integration is not the determining limitation. It is electrical margin.
It is on the same reporting thread, which boasts of lasers, that is recorded the unpleasant arithmetic of contemporary destroyers. HELIOS is a growth potential 60 kW-class laser, but the ship has to support much more than the beam. Stable, high-quality power and aggressive cooling is required in beam control, thermal management, sensors and combat-system interfaces. Flight III Arleigh Burkes, which had already been gnashed by the SPY-6 radar, were termed as being “out of schlitz when it comes to power,” a lasting expression to mention that there is a steady increase in the capabilities of the future operating within a finite generator-and-chiller framework.
It is here that the actual contest space is ship design. The concept of next-generation large surface combatant of the Navy clearly focuses on growth margins- more SWAP-C (space, weight, electrical power, cooling). The CRS DDG(X) material discusses a design at a baseline centered on an integrated power system (IPS) and higher growth margin such that directed-energy weapons are not always trade studies versus existing loads. The implication is simple, unless changed radically in the power architecture, lasers will continue to be capability demos brought into service by the ship reality.
A similar engineering argument is presented in U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, which presents how a ship based on the design of Arleigh Burke would be able to pursue significantly higher electrical power without incurring the reliability costs of electronics-intensive integrated propulsion. The proposal of the article to implement synchronous electric propulsion with the help of the modern high-temperature superconductor or permanent-magnet machines is to maintain the image of the Burke plant as a simple one and to transform the ship into a more versatile power broker between the propulsion and the combat systems. The particular implementation of that approach is not as significant as the point behind it: lasers can only be as fast as ship power architectures allow them to be.
Directed-energy beam power is a headline measure in the case of the directed-energy trajectory of the Navy, whereas ship power is the limiting factor. The following laser breakthrough will require less optics than the capacity to create, condition, distribute and dispose heat, consistently, at sea, over decades.
