Just read on a Article on gCaptain about the Russian Ice Breaker with a Laser

Not sure about the rest of you but this seems more than a little scary. Now, I can see how it might be a nice tool to have but I have to wonder if they are TESTING it for other uses also.

What are your thoughts on this?

http://gcaptain.com/russian-icebreakers-frickin-laser-beams/

Little scary is right. This is right out of a sci-fi movie.

A laser with enough energy to melt ice also has enough energy to make one hell of a weapon.

I want to think lasers have a short range for effectiveness…certainly a shorter range than heavy calibre naval guns!

of course, we don’t even have a viable platform to even put a popgun aboard so the Czar Pootin and the Rooshins already have won…

[QUOTE=Tugs;142879]What are your thoughts on this?[/QUOTE]

This is not the first time someone is proposing using a laser to break ice. It has never worked before and I seriously doubt it’s going to work now either.

Mount the lasers on sharks or whales is the best bet.

//youtu.be/Bh7bYNAHXxw

[QUOTE=c.captain;142892]I want to think lasers have a short range for effectiveness…certainly a shorter range than heavy calibre naval guns!

of course, we don’t even have a viable platform to even put a popgun aboard so the Czar Pootin and the Rooshins already have won…[/QUOTE]

MY GOD! Forget the lazer, that computer generated voice was destructive enough to melt a man’s brain within his own head!

Anyway, huzzah for the Navee and their uber techie weapons…gloriously expensive toys for our squidees to play with! I wonder how many hundreds of millions have been spent on that system? Probably BILLIONS in fact!

I’ll say this much…Admiral Halsey is not impressed!

Let’s do some math! If you have a laser pointed downwards at 45-degree angle while sailing in 3 ft ice at 5 knots and you want to continuously melt a crack that is one inch wide using a laser in front of the ship, the energy output into ice must be around 26 kW. That doesn’t sound much, but remember that even bare sea ice reflects about half of the light back (and snow-covered ice up to 90%) and there are other efficiency factors as well, meaning that you need to pump much more energy (electricity) into the laser gun to transfer that much energy into the ice to warm it up and melt it. Still, it’s within the range of hundreds of kilowatts at most, so it’s not totally impossible.

However, what does this effort give us? A crack that is one inch wide. Does that really help a ship that has a beam of 50 to 100 feet? Or a platform that is 200-300 feet wide? Also, three feet of any kind of ice is not “difficult” for modern ice-going vessels and ice-capable offshore installations and level ice in general is one of the easiest ice conditions to tackle. “Difficult”, in my book, refers to icebergs, very thick multi-year ice floes and drifting pressure ridges. If you cut an iceberg in half, you have two icebergs. If you cut a one-inch slot into a pressure ridge, it makes no difference: you still have a pressure ridge. And if you want to melt more, you’ll quickly need a nuclear reactor just to produce enough electricity to power the laser, and then you’d be better off just pumping the cooling water on the ice.

People often propose strange ways to deal with ice. In case of oil spill cleanup, there’s always someone saying that we should load the contaminated ice on ships and melt it. In my eyes, these people often fail to see just how much ice there is in the sea and how much energy it takes to melt it.

Best regards, your friendly icebreaker engineer.

Buy yours today! Soon everyone will want one!

Well…they DO have nuclear powered ships, lazer technology AND a history doing freaky shit… Why not?

[QUOTE=captjamied;142915]Well…they DO have nuclear powered ships, lazer technology AND a history doing freaky shit… Why not?[/QUOTE]

The Russian nuclear-powered icebreakers do not have unlimited power - there’s a limit to the amount of electricity the turbogenerators can deliver and most of it goes to the propulsion motors. Also, as with many “auxiliary systems” intended for helping with icebreaking, it might be that the power would be better utilized if it was just fed to the propellers instead of a fancy laser gun…

Here’s some additional information about the laser system, published already in 2013:

Good luck with that.