4 ms·

Nah, it’ll totally work. For one thing, you won’t be able to precisely track the spot at which energy is focused. For another, most rocket shaped targets can be

• jjtheblunt 2y ago
  What if mounted on an airframe a la pave-low ?
• some_random 2y ago
  How are you going to defeat a drone swarm with a 50bmg rifle or dumb mines?
  • ein0p 2y ago
    Not “drone swarm”, this laser can be easily defeated with cheap as dirt weaponry that’s been in use on the battlefield since WW1. In general anything that’s high tech and expensive makes an excellent target. Doubly so if it emits any electromagnetic radiation, and doesn’t shoot very far.
• jandrewrogers 2y ago
  Your intuition about the properties and effects of high-power lasers is failing you. The original design targets for US military lasers several decades ago were specifically selected because there are no practical countermeasures. These design targets were ambitious; it took several decades to develop practical lasers that could start to meet them. There are fundamental limits to material physics. Spinning doesn't help because there are always fixed points by definition. There are both materials science and engineering limits to spin rates, so you can precisely design your laser power levels to be reliably effective at the upper bound spin rates. All of this was fully modeled out and calculated half a century ago. Other countermeasures, like dielectric mirrors, would be very expensive to use on cheap weapons, and the US already developed a counter-countermeasure anyway with the invention of lasers that emit "white" light. The scientists and engineers that did R&D on this over the last several decades weren't idiots. Everything "obvious" that armchair weapons experts might come up with were accounted for a long time ago.
  • ein0p 2y ago
    I’m not an “armchair” weapons expert. I’m actually trained in weapons design (guidance systems mostly). This is a moronic waste of money and “engineers and scientists” who worked on it have no illusions whatsoever about that, I can assure you. It might be able to defeat something “Hamas grade” or a Mavic with an RPG taped to it, but it’s absolutely useless against any even remotely serious adversary or even something as pedestrian as a modern (where by “modern” I mean made in the 80s or later) wire guided ATGM, which both itself rotates and flies along a pseudorandom spiral trajectory. Try engaging that with your high energy barrel of MIC pork.
    • ptero 2y ago
      > It might be able to defeat something “Hamas grade” or a Mavic with an RPG taped to it That alone would be a major capability for a layered defense system. Cleaning up decoys would be another one (not necessarily getting those down, IDing them due to reflectivity is almost as good).
      • ein0p 2y ago
        Two counterpoints: 1. Russia had its own DEW system since at least 2018, and doesn’t currently use it on or off the battlefield 2. Israel has Iron Beam, reportedly a 100KW DEW system, and also doesn’t use it Perhaps it’s not as cool as it says on the tin?
        • ptero 2y ago
          I suspect at least in part due to the difficulties with reliable tracking and ID, not the negation component. Plus due to the fact that RF is (so far) still very effective at least against cheaper stuff. But once that changes the game will be very different.
        • jandrewrogers 2y ago
          What does any of this have to do with US weapon systems? They are way ahead of anyone else in this area of tech. They have invested a lot in these capabilities over many decades, and the public capabilities are state-of-the-art. Laser tech is an extremely difficult engineering discipline, you can’t enter it casually. The US has made large focused investments on mastering this tech in a way no one else has over many decades.