Half a mil? Dont ask how much the airbase, personel, & runtime costs are though. These ops probably took thousands of person-hours to run. How many craft would

Half a mil? Dont ask how much the airbase, personel, & runtime costs are though. These ops probably took thousands of person-hours to run. How many craft would you guess were involved? Just 1 vs adversary, or were there all sorts of support vehicles & search craft? Maybe deserved but this spotlight piece on a missile glorifies-while-obscuring more than a bit. That said, there do seem like a bunch of reasons lasers could potentially be useful. Im curious what kind of ranges were involved here, and what kind of windows-of-engagement durations we had; could lasers give us longer opportunity windows, more or less range, better or less targetting control? It's a trope that adversaries "just add mirrors" (probably before Ringworld, but that's a well known example), but also curious there. That said, current powerlevels seem generally inadequate, but that seems addressable. Not firing expensive ammo seems good... albeit places like Iron Dome & other more active genuine-defense systems seem like better uses. One other q I have... one of the first or second balloons, there were reports the Sidewinder had a dummy load, just weight, no explosive; a kinetic impactor, to try to preserve the payload best we could. Would be curious to know whether that was true and or whether that's happened again. "Side"-note: I only paid like $60 for my Microsoft Sidewinder (joystick), to go play X-Wing with, back in the day! So cheap! Joke... but it is a vaguely amusing comparison of magnitudes, ~2 zeroes vs going on ~5 zeroes. And it shows how rooted "Sidewinder" as a term is.