It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's A Flying Laser Death Ray! ...Wait, What?

So, in their infinite genius, Defense Department contractors L-3 Communications, Brashear, Hytec, and Boeing have managed to make science fiction a reality, just in time to create a future huge waste of taxpayer money.



The cool part first: they've developed and are testing a high-energy LASER cannon, which is designed to engage targets from an airborne platform - they can mount it on a plane, and blow the shit out of North Korean missile silos and mobile nuke launchers with it.



That's cool, right? LEOS is cool. Blowing the shit out of stuff with a LASER DEATH RAY is cool. I'm so for that.



There's just one tiny problem.



They're putting it on a C-130H.  Now, I will grant that the C-130H has better engines than its predecessors and greater fuel capacity and thus speed and range - but it's still a HUGE, NOT STEALTHY, UNARMED TRANSPORT PLANE. It's a PROPELLER plane, so even at its greatest airspeed, it's not what you could call "fast." 366 MPH is not fast for a military aircraft.



To make my point more clear, the North Koreans have a huge number of SA-5 anti-aircraft missiles.  The SA-5 travels approximately 8 times faster than the C-130H; it has a range of about 250 miles. Since the C-130H has no defense systems whatsoever besides flares, unless the pilots are very, very lucky, if an SA-5 should be fired at the C-130H, the C-130H is pretty much toast.



But, whyever would the C-130H get an SA-5 fired at it? I mean, it's just an innocuous transport plane, right? Why waste a valuable air defense missile on it?



...Oh, right, the multimillion dollar high-energy LASER cannon on it. Right.



The C-130H has no stealth characteristics. It is an enormous flying kielbasa, detectable on RADAR from a really, really long way away. North Korea has invested a significant portion of their Gross National Product, for 50 years, in air defense. They have stockpiles of missiles that beggar the imagination, along with beggaring the North Korean peasants who have lived on tiny portions of rice a day for two generations to buy them.



And if Kim Jong-Il's military sees this incredibly obvious, juicy, dangerous-if-left-unmolested target flying very slowly towards them, the cloud of SA-5's that will rise will blot out the sun, and inevitably it will blot out the ATL-ATCD as well.



The C-130H's maximum sustainable payload is 42, 000 pounds - 21 tons. By comparison, the B-2 "Stealth" Bomber has a maximum payload of 40,000 pounds - 20 tons. It flies nearly twice as high; nearly twice as fast; is "low-observable" on radar; and is designed for airborne weapons delivery. Granted, it costs a shitload more money (1.1 BILLION dollars -  waaaaaay more than the C-130H's paltry 30 million,) but it's also a lot more difficult to even find, much less shoot down.



Maybe you eggheads could have gotten someone with some common fucking sense into the team too; they could have told you that spending more money on the delivery system is worth it if the fucking thing COMES BACK.



[*A note: for those of you who wonder why I capitalize the "word" LASER, it's because it's an acronym - Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. RADAR is one too; Radio Detection And Ranging. The More You Know.*]