India¡¯s DRDO Building Laser Blasters, Star Wars-Type Weapons For Future
DRDO is planning a national program on directed energy weapons (DEWs) that make use of high-powered microwaves as well as high-energy lasers to take down enemy drones without making physical contact. To the uninitiated, DEWs are essentially beams of concentrated magnetic energy or subatomic particles to take down targets.
Whenever we see any sci-fi movies from the future, we often come across laser blaster guns that destroy enemies blasting colourful streams of light. While that surely looked cool, that¡¯s restricted to movies and sci-fi shows.
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However, in real life too we have applications where lasers can cause damage. And India¡¯s DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organisation) are working on using them to attack enemy drones.
According to a report by TOI, DRDO is planning a national program on directed energy weapons (DEWs) that make use of high-powered microwaves as well as high-energy lasers to take down enemy drones without making physical contact. To the uninitiated, DEWs are essentially beams of concentrated magnetic energy or subatomic particles to take down targets.
The programme has short, medium as well as long term goals, aiming to develop made in India DEW variants that can possess up to 100 kilowatt of power with the help from domestic industry.
As per the roadmap, in its first phase, Indian Army and AirForce currently requires 20 tactical high-energy laser systems to take down small aerial targets as well as radar systems at a range of 6-8 kilometres.
It has already been working on numerous DEW projects for a considerable amount of time now including Chemical Oxygen Iodine and High Power Fibre lasers and even Kali particle beams to take down incoming missiles and aircraft without even touching them.
However, these are just at the proof of concept stage and there is time till these are rolled out. DRDO has also developed two anti-drone DEW systems -- one that uses a rather minimal 10-kilowatt laser to take down aerial targets in a 2-kilometre range, and a second compact tripod-mounted system that can take down targets in 1-kilometre range.
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While these DEWs have been successfully demonstrated to take down small drones, it is still nowhere close to what the US, Russia and China are working on.
The US, for example, demonstrated a 33-kilowatt laser that can shoot down drones on a ship, several years ago. In fact, they¡¯re already en route to testing out lasers ranging from 300 to 500 kilowatt.
