Ablative armor won’t help much. It creates enormous engineering challenges for endoatmospheric hypersonic missiles at energy levels orders of magnitude lower th

Ablative armor won’t help much. It creates enormous engineering challenges for endoatmospheric hypersonic missiles at energy levels orders of magnitude lower than what a laser will deliver. The amount of ablative armor required to slow these lasers would be infeasible on a practical weapon. Similarly, smoke wouldn’t even be a speed bump, since it would be instantly turned into plasma like the rest of the atmosphere. The base challenge on the receiving end is that it is very, very difficult to divert enough energy when the power levels are that high to limit damage. Based on the description of these laser, they are explicitly designed to defeat dielectric mirrors[0], which is the only vaguely plausible material that might survive a simple laser at these power levels. The original design target for the military lasers the US has been developing and refining for the last 40+ years is that they could deliver sufficient power on target such that no ordinary molecular material could withstand them as a matter of physics. That is a non-trivial objective but it looks like they’re starting to design practical systems that can approximately achieve that over some range. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_mirror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_mirror