According to reports, the USS Prebel guided-missile destroyer stationed in Pearl Harbor is about to become the first active warship in the US Navy equipped with high-energy laser pointer weapons. In May, the US Congress Research Service issued a report stating that the US Navy has made “substantial progress” in the shipboardization of laser weapons. Once shipborne laser weapons are successfully developed and deployed, they will become a “game for US Navy ships to intercept enemy missiles.” Rule changer”.
System project director Brandon Hilton pointed out that the future high-energy laser weapons do not need to be equipped with additional batteries, but continue to rely on the power system of the warship. The power supply design of the system has passed the review, and the battery prototype development is planned to be completed around June. This means that once the system’s technology is mature, it can be quickly deployed in batches without the need for large-scale modifications to warships.
Lockheed Martin said that current tests have confirmed that a high-energy laser system with a power of 10 kilowatts can defeat small air targets at the “speed of light”; the power is increased to 30 kilowatt-hours, which is enough to invalidate an incoming missile warhead.
With the further development of technology, high-energy laser will undertake the most complex sea-based anti-missile mission, thereby saving expensive anti-missile interceptor missiles. By effectively using the extracted components that only contain HSF, high-resolution beam shaping is achieved. A flat-top beam with all angles and a flat height is obtained, thereby suppressing the edge height of the shaped beam to 20 μm, which is less than 20% of the traditional vertical phase grating.
At the same time, the researchers also developed an adaptive beam shaping technology that uses a phase grating encoded green laser pointer on a spatial light modulator (SLM) with spatial frequency filtering on the Fourier plane of the optical 4F system. The traditional method is to control the diffraction efficiency through space, which can generate a square flat-top beam without wavefront deformation.