Taking place on the Ministry of Defence’s range at Porton Down in Wiltshire, it involved firing the demonstrator at a number of targets over a number of ranges, requiring pinpoint accuracy from the beam director.
According to the Dstl, the tests will improve the UK’s understanding of how high-energy lasers, and associated technologies can operate over distance and defeat representative targets.
“The ability to deliver high levels of laser power with sufficient accuracy are two of the major areas that need to be demonstrated in order to provide confidence in the performance and viability of LDEW systems.”
Companies involved with the programme are: MBDA, which has overall responsibility for the system, Leonardo and QinetiQ.
Specifically, MBDA have developed the advanced command and control (C2) and image processing capabilities.
Leonardo has developed the beam director that can track and point at targets with extreme accuracy.
And QinetiQ’s laser experts have built a phase-combined laser capable of generating in the order of 50kW of power, with the ability to scale fire-power levels in the future.
“MBDA, Leonardo, QinetiQ and Dstl all working together are putting the UK at the forefront of research and technology in laser domain,” added Chris Allam, UK Managing Director and Executive Group Director of Engineering at MBDA. “The results from these trials have verified analysis and given the team confidence that DragonFire will offer a near term and unique capability.”
The technology‘s development, which Dstl says could provide the basis for a number of future weapon systems, is running in parallel with, and connected to, other defence programmes including the Novel Weapons Programme.
The exact capabilities of DragonFire are classified.
“This trial is the culmination of design, development and demonstration activity over a number of years,” said Dstl’s Technical Partner, Ben Maddison.
“DragonFire has already successfully demonstrated an ability to track targets with very high levels of precision and to maintain a laser beam on the selected aim-point. This trial has assessed the performance of the laser itself – the outcome shows that the UK has world-leading capability in the technologies associated with laser directed energy weapons (LDEW) systems.”
Images: Dstl
See also: DSTL partners with U.S. on ML support for armed forces
