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A consortium of major engineering firms, including BAE Systems, missile systems specialist MBDA and Qinetiq, has received £30 million from the Ministry of Defence to develop a Laser Directed Energy Weapon demonstrator.
Laser Directed Energy Weapons (LDEWs) deliver highly focused energy to a target to damage it. The technology would be used to disrupt and damage targets such as missiles or swarms of drones, which conventional weapons have difficulty disarming.
The UK Dragonfire consortium aims to bring to maturity the key technologies for an LDEW system, in the 50kW class, including laser coherent beam combining, weapon systems command and control, advanced pointing systems and high power storage. It will also assess how the system can pick up and track targets at various ranges and in varied weather conditions over land and water, to allow precision use, culminating in the demonstration of a system in 2019.
The project will tackle drawbacks of the technology including the fact that laser energy degrades over distance and in certain atmospheric conditions, as well as determining the required dwell time on targets, depending on the structure and material of the weapon system.
A spokesperson for MBDA said: “The difficulty is to deliver the same level of energy at range on a moving object. The system must track the target accurately so that the laser spot warms up the same piece of the target for several seconds.”
The programme will provide the body of evidence for the MoD’s procurement decisions. If successful, the laser weapons would come into service in the mid-2020s.
Dave Armstrong, UK managing director of MBDA, said that the programme will put the country at the forefront of high-energy laser systems, and will provide “significant export potential”.
Peter Cooper from the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory said: “This programme draws on innovative research to understand the potential to provide a more effective response to the emerging threats to UK armed forces.”