https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/first-laser-weapon-for-a-fighter-delivered-to-the-air-force
First Laser Weapon For A Fighter Delivered To The Air Force
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/first-laser-weapon-for-a-fighter-delivered-to-the-air-force
We have even better. If you think the public stuff is all that exists you are moronic.
Weapon capabailities are publicily exagerrated, not hidden. The primary use of every weapon system in existence is deterrence
>Mutual Assured Destruction has never been an official policy of the United States (or in any records recovered after the fall of the Soviet Union).
This is true and it will make /k/ seethe endlessly. All weapons are kafabe and are about 40% less reliable and effective as claimed.
True for everyone except the US
>The primary use of every weapon system in existence is deterrence
How can you be such ignorant, stupid Black person. For the love of god, only just F-117 existence disproves your fricking deranged notion.
>I can invade your airspace and commit strikes with impunity, do not give me a reason to do so
You don’t get it. Ask yourself with the Air Force announced the F-117 before they ever used it in anger. Ask yourself why they announce any weapon.
You kind of stroked out when you typed that. I'll just respond by saying the f-117's existence was uncertain for a long time.
>Air Force announced the F-117
I don't know if you are baiting or it is just genuine moronation. It was a black project for 13 fricking years you schizo ape.
>Weapon capabailities are publicily exagerrated, not hidden.
The U.S. is pretty open about what systems don't really work and lies the other way ("No, our ship only does 20 knots not 30"). If you see experimental shit and want to say its aylmaos they're happy to let you believe that. We aren't like the Russians, Iranians or Chinese trying to pretend our stuff is hot shit for dictatorship sales, convincing our population we're strongk and general dick measuring.
The US scam is the opposite; we need more money for dem programs. The real reason aaylmaos entered the conversation in the past few years is that there's simply no terrestrial reason to continue pumping money into R&D and the MIC wants to keep the money rolling in. The super weapons keep getting made because they keep being cool and the nerds keep wanting to make more and better weapons largely for the sake of it, because if you could, why wouldn't you?
>America’s Military industrial complex thrusts the country into being a full type one civilization because they wanted a nice bonus this year and the nerds down in R&D asked really nice this week for funding for their Faster than light drive that they’re putting together for shits and giggles
>”but yeah it only goes 90% the speed of light”
Assuming we remain an actual country over the next century, this is exactly how it will play out.
Things are rough at the moment, but we'll survive. Got too many brown people in the world to bomb before we bite it.
>MIC starts hyping up aliens to get more money
>Public starts to get skeptical, starts complaining about "muh tax dollars"
>Random intern suggests crashing some drone with some weird CRISPER made freak to convince congress for more gibs
>It leaks
>Public wants alien blood
>MIC needs to wage fake war against itself
>Rest of world joins in to combat the alien menace
>Us becomes head of planetary federation because of some moronic interns idea
The Avatar movie is a falseflag so they could get public support to nuke the blue Black folk
That's how vatniks do it, not actual humans
Different roles, some of the same technology. I would be curious if this system employs any of phase conjugation stuff gleaned from the zapper, or whether the power is sufficient and combat range is short enough that atmospheric dispersion isn't an issue.
I would say this is the exact opposite. Discussion of the zapper basically doesn't exist expect here, old threads on ATS/Fark, and the UFO nutter's website who witnessed the test. There are lots of references to naughty conversations being scrubbed off Fark and military.com by the DIA for discussing this very thing. It basically doesn't exist. And it never will unless we hit a major escalation with Russia/China. It's because it's the end game in both weaponry and power generation. The implication that we have the ability to polarize the vacuum at relatively lower energy requirements using novel physics and materials science is an absolute game changer.
Anon, what is that weapon supposed to do? Shoot satellites or icbms or something?
>what is that weapon supposed to do?
?t=6
Zapper? Explain further please.
dugway zapper, what the 1st post was talking about
I will explain further once I get my home office put back together. I have shit everywhere right now. If this thread still up in an hour, the two hits of LSD I took about 15 mins ago should be kicking in, and I would be more than happy to explain
Well?
Waaaay too fricked up, frendo.
Okay, homosexual explain BEAR?
I legitimately love to know an actual reason this is "wikipedia tier". No one is claiming that we store this shit, but that we make it on the fly. Can someone with an actual fricking physics background explain two things
>A.) Is an electron hole pair (such as in a condensate of excitons) considered to be not only a virtual, but an actual positron (because Frederick W. Kantor says math is the same as reality)
>B.) Frick if I can remember right now
>C.) Lepton Color/flavour violation and/or and forbidden decay modes and their relationship to Yakoz Zeldovich and question A
OK, what's your Fark handle, mate?
>antimatter particle beam
That would instantly destroy the weapon firing it, you fool. As soon as half a gram of antimatter hits the atmosphere it's going to make an explosion the size of the hiroshima bomb.
The most probably way antimatter would be weaponised is as a kickstarter to a nuclear warhead. This makes a "clean nuke" with no fallout radiation. You may ask, "Why wouldn't you just use pure antimatter as the explosive?". The reason is cost. It's more economical to make 0.0001g of antimatter + 10kg of plutonium than it is to make 0.5g of antimatter.
>What is laser induced plasma channel
Not antimatter is what it is.
What keeps the antimatter apart, tard. Magnetized plasma channel ftw.
Jesus what a moronic mixed up post. "Antimatter" isn't all the same anon. If you don't use neutral particles in it then actually no it doesn't instantly explode and to get multi-kiloton+effects takes a lot too.
Also, you start off kinda ok about "clean nukes" and then you talk "plutonium" which shows you're just spouting random shit. You'd need aneutronic fusion for a clean nuke, so helium-3. Antimatter would be REPLACING the fission kicker moron, if it could be realized at all.
> If you don't use neutral particles in it then actually no it doesn't instantly explode
Positron, antineutron, antiproton all annihilate when meeting their opposite particle, all of these particles are in the atmosphere. Please don't give me that shit about photons and other particles being their own anti particles. An antiphoton laser is just a laser.
>and to get multi-kiloton+effects takes a lot too.
Half a gram of antimatter mixing with half a gram of matter literally is a Hiroshima bomb's worth of energy. I looked that one up to be sure.
>You'd need aneutronic fusion for a clean nuke, so helium-3
Uranium and plutonium are essential components of the fusion secondary stage in a thermonuclear warhead, even if Lithium-6 deuteride is the fusion fuel. Antimatter replacing the fission "primary" explosive to ignite the fusion of deuterium and tritium is exactly what I was talking about.
Black person, look up what a "magnetized laser induced plasma channel" is and how a "Penning Trap" works before you reply with dumb shit.
Clearly you're suffering from the dunning kruger effect and don't understand what you're talking about. You're insane if you think antiparticles can be transported along the ionized wake of a laser fired in the atmosphere.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms11785
>It's almost like you have no idea what the frick you're talking about
You're talking about phenomenon that only works inside the controlled environment of a particle accelerator. It requires both external magnetic fields and specific gases. It does not work nor will it ever work as a "gun" for firing antiparticles in the atmosphere without the antiparticles instantly annihilating.
Absolute moron tier Wikipedia level knowledge of basic particle physics. Please go back to school and better yourself. There is no way to ensure 0% collisions in a plasma channel after any realistic distance and any collision at the periphery will cause a huge release of energy that then disrupts the channel. There's a reason this work is done in laboratories under carefully controlled conditions.
Also
>What is bound state positronium
I really should make a general about this
>What is bound state positronium
I know! I know! It's a phrase you just copy pasted from wikipedia.
I think you fail to understand some fundamental ideas in nuclear weapon engineering.
Fusion weaponry is largely considered to be a dead end, because 1. you don't need something that big and 2. they requireme much heavier investment and much more frequent maintenance, since your tritium just rots away. And the whole fusion concept has really been a measure to fix a problem with fission weaponry in general, which is the sheer inefficiency. Fission is not an extremely fast process, which means when a fission device detonates, the material is being separated too quickly to split most of it, even in implosion-type Pu-based designs (it's obvioulsly much worse in Gun-type U-based designs). So basically what you need ia a way to generate an extremely large amount of neutron flux to get all the energy out of your fissile material before it separates so much that it goes below-critical again.
The solution to this problem IS nuclear fusion, because you can generate a huge amount of neutron flux that way.
You the have a nuclear weapon which ignites a fusion reaction and the neutrons from that fusion split the remaining fissile material very quickly, leading to very yields.
You also do not require huge amounts of tritum or deuterium or lithium isotopes.
Virtually every single nuclear device today functions on that principle and there is no need for a bigger boom.
We need weapons that are more robust and cheaper to produce and maintain, not bigger and flashier ones. And the boosted fission weapon is the culmination of these efforts.
I knew most of that. Something antimatter offers to current nuclear warheads actually is the ability to make their yields as small as the designer wishes, because there's no critical mass of fissile fuel needed to make a fission kickstarter for the fusion explosion. That, and the fact that they allow for pure fusion explosions with minimal radioactive fallout.
Something antimatter doesn't offer is building weapons that don't bankrupt you.
And yknow, actually existing.
Hey man I'm not even advocating for it. You'll get no argument from me on antimatter weapons being economical.
An antimatter weapon couldn't be any smaller than it's containment device, though. If a containment device for a large amount of antimatter could even be built.
The technology needed to contain antimatter would be similar in complexity to using magnetic fields to hover a tank over water.
Anon, literally nobody is using tritium for their nuclear warheads. They're making Lithium deuteride shells around plutonium warheads because they're not completely moronic.
Wrong, fusion booster warheads use tritium gas, because it offers much better neutron flux.
I guess I should be more specific.
Non down syndrome moron countries that aren't using boosted fission as a poor man's substitute for an actual fusion weapon.
It's not a poor man's substitute, it is widely accepted as the better solution.
What do you think dial-a-yield means? You vary the neutron flux to make boom bigger or smaller.
you're fricking moronic, just flat moronic. The secondary stage of fusion is not there for neutron flux to stimulate the first stage, that's just what the first stage's casing is for. The second stage is there because hydrogen (or actually more *commonly* lithium) are simply far less expensive than U or Pu, and when you can initiate fusion using the energy from fission, it becomes a far cheaper to build far bigger bombs. The increase of blast yield is not due to the fissile material being utilised more efficiently, it's due to the huge amount of energy being released by the fusion itself. That's why Sakharov's device designs were infinitely upscalable. The reason fusion bomb designs are a dead end, is because past ~100Mt of blast and you can't compress the atmosphere laterally anymore and most of the effect is lost into outer space, until you build a world cracker device, and nobody has any need for that.
You're right about not needing them, and tritium being a maintenance hassle, but the rest of your shit (and the guy you were replying to) is so ignorant it gave me a fricking fit.
>(and the guy you were replying to)
Nothing I said was even wrong.
I think you may be confusing boosted fission weapons, the best solution, with fusion weapons. These are two ver different things and they are built in very different ways.
Nuclear isomers would be a better radiation source to replace a primary anways
>We have even better.
if by 'we' you mean the reich.
>some light in the sky
>moronic larper on the internet: "ah yes, the Phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range"
>We have even better.
You may not like it, but the US is 6 million years ahead in military tech. The US military & government holds the keys to the meaning of life & death, has both friendly & evil alien helpers (ET/FNORD), psychic "remote viewing" spies, time travel tech, fleets of reverse-engineered antigravity alien tech "TR-3B Black Triangle" flying ship's powered by element 115, communication with ghosts the afterlife & the unborn, triple-barreled M551A666 PsychoSheridan tank's, 75th Rangers exoskeleton-hip-fired gyro-stabilised 120mm infantry mortars with pinpoint accuracy during 25mph sprint, access to other "parallel" universes, NSA/DARPA GGGQEP quantum ∞(±6^∀)Petahertz microprocessors to eavesdrop on every single electronic & non-electronic communication in the world even sign language underneath 1km of EMF Kevlar, "Rods from God" (just 1 orbital tungsten telephone pole = two Czar Bombas), the 300,000-strong "Fighting Molemen" U.S. SUBTERRANEAN FORCE, FT LEE VA (the secret "7th branch" existing since 1899), quantum IFVs, "phase-shifting" Armored Recovery Vehicles, new "Stealth" tech that makes jet's invisible to Radar. Shoulder-fired ASAT missiles. Stealth field kitchens. This is publicized in Stargate SG1, scientific research publication Popular Science, only a fraction of the more spooky & shadowy stuff not listed above is merely hinted at in Marvel Cinematic Universe™, history documentary Red Alert 2, time travel documentary Life is Strange (David Madsen was a rogue DIA test subject), but the pardoned parcel is the US of A is at least 6 million years ahead in military tech even without the help of alien's. It is 6 million years ahead though the exact number fluctuates due to the activities of the US Military Time Travel Program underneath Barksdale, A. F. B., L.A., this 6 million years ahead is a universally agreed-upon average by the world & intergalactic/ET scientific communities.
You are functionally moronic if you believe satellite kill lasers exist. Mounting them on aircraft allows them to bypass MILES of atmosphere that will scatter the beam making your fantasy nuke sat still weaker than a Cessna with a ball turret laser
Ya
I miss the YAL-1. I grew up imagining seeing those things dab on ballistic missiles and literally anything else in the air.
hypersonics
https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2022-04-05
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-successfully-tested-lockheed-hypersonic-missile-this-week-sources-2022-07-13/
microwave missiles
https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/2022/07/01/us-navy-air-force-running-capstone-test-of-new-high-power-microwave-missile/
now airborne lasers. remind me why russia decided to piss off the united states again?!
ow! my retina! you can't post images like that, OP.
is there any public test of them lasing anything air to air with this thing?
You'd like to see that, wouldn't you Chang?
Unless you post a high resolution image of the engineering drawings on TikTok it is gweilo propaganda
Bring these to a drone platform you god damn cucks.
Launch some couple hundred of drones that destroy any and all incoming missiles.
I guarantee some nerd at the Pentagon is already working on it. Just to extra infuriate the Chinese it's probably a transgirl and she's going to draw her au ra FFXIV character on the side of the finished product.
>it's probably a transgirl
>she
yeah no, i doubt that part
Us does not have a drone factory, anywhere.
China has hundreds of drone factories.
The problem isn't whether or not someone can think up a solution, its whether or not they can make those into reality. An idea on paper is worth less than the raw materials used to create the paper.
>Us does not have a drone factory, anywhere.
Except for AeroVironment (Switchblade), General Atomics (Predator, Reaper), Kratos (XQ-58), Boeing (MQ-25), Northrop Grumman (X-47, RQ-180) and Lockheed Martin (RQ-170). I'm probably forgetting a few.
Read a book some time.
You just need few billions to build 1 of them per year.
Yeah who's going to do that?
The... companies who already build the things? Are you moronic or something?
You're a moron. No one's giving some random intern couple dozen billions to play with. All these go through decades long procedures with the final decision being made 20+ years after the initial proposal, if EVER.
We're not talking about expensive fighter airframes here, moron. We're talking about drones. Kratos' UAV business didn't even exist 20 years ago.
We don't have non-expensive drone factories that can churn our hobbyist/intern drones in the US. All the drone factories that the US buys are from China. Thats the fricking point.
If the US had a consumer drone factory, DOD interns could play with thousands of these to field all types of weapons/softwares/etc. Instead that sort of thing doesn't happen in DOD due to lack of easily accessible hardware for interns to play with. DoD also cannot allow Chinese drones to be fielded in DoD facilities due to security concerns.
https://www.allamericanmade.com/american-made-drones/
Why do you lie?
That's great, but I only see Autel drones on amazon and that's $1000+ drones.
Where as I see millions of Chinese drones on amazon from $20
The nature of capitalism is such that whoever floods the most gets the most benefit out of scaling, experience, and innovation. If they're simply making expensive drones, thats only being produce handful at a time, its a useless gimmick.
>a $20 dollar Chinese drone out competes a $1000 use drone
So this is the bizarre mindset that’s been drilled into them. They drank their own koolaid, amazing
*US
You're not buying a drone for the drone, you're buying a drone for a function, a purpose.
In this case, to either do recon mission or to kill a target. From a military stand point. Which means, a $20 drone can do just fine. A standard $20 drone can give you coverage of ~100-200 meters with 2.4 ghz signals. Thats the coverage from 1-2 street block.
If you add in a sim card modification, you can travel further out for ~1-2 hours distance or loitering worth of time. With each drones going ~10-40 mph, that means in 1 hour, you can get recon cover of ~10+ miles from this $20 drone.
So yes, a $20 drone is absolutely a key factor here. Every military unit should have a dozen of these $20 drones with a smartphone to link the controls for each operator that shouldn't cost more than $100 total each set.
Show me the cheapest drone with a camera on it, moron. I guarantee you it's not cheaper than $100.
This thing is from 4-5 years ago. Under $100.
The point is, you can't afford it. Hence you have no peace of mind.
Each one costs $200K. Its a non-starter.
For $200K, you can buy 2000 of these. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wv6wp9pZpM
Are you trying to say the American MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX and AMERICAN MILITARY, cannot afford drones?
Because if you are then my god you either live under a Chinese government mandate “rock” or are the dumbest man alive.
>Are you trying to say the American MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX and AMERICAN MILITARY, cannot afford drones?
Yes. If our drones cost $200K, while the chinese costs $20. Its a 10,000 to 1 difference.
The nature of warfare is economics. America cannot engage in high intensive drone warfare. We're not prepared economically or industrial wise. We could say our software is better, but that faith rests upon shaky foundations.
Ok this is just too funny, come back later with a believable script sweetie.
>Yes. If our drones cost $200K, while the chinese costs $20. Its a 10,000 to 1 difference.
The big problem is US has no scaled drone factory. Which is a self inflicted wound. It would take months/years to scale up production capability in the US, while sacrificing long term economics. We should instead be baking the mass produced drone factory into equation today so as to not disrupt the wartime economy.
And the way I see it, the Chinese are utilizing dual-technology economy for both wartime and peacetime mode. So conversion from one mode to another becomes seamless.
Post weapons
Oh. More "quantum" cope.
Are...are you arguing with yourself now? This is a strange bot.
>Each one costs $200K
lolno
That was the price in 2013 for a comprehensive managed services contract in the UK that included the drone units.
If you buy them direct with a full support and training package they go for $40k each.
and if you buy 8000 of them like the US did, they run you about $10k each.
again that's with full support, training, guaranteed performance, parts/supply chain and etc.
$10K is $9900 too much.
Training to use drones comes with practice. Practice can be had when you can buy 100 of the Chinese drones for the price of a single American one. Suppose it takes 2 hours to train someone to use the drone. With 100 units @ 2 hours each, within 1 12 hour period, you can train 6 people on a single $10K drone. Vs 600 people on a $100 drone.
Relaibility and performance can be had by fielding 100 of them at a time with 95% reliability. Which means you can get 95 missions done. Vs 1 drone with 100% reliability which means you get 1 mission done.
Parts and supply chains can be had if you mass produce them domestically. But ofcourse that's illegal in the US because if the pork barrels aren't fed $10,000 a drone each hour, its somehow not worth it.
you are moronic
You are a moron sir
I’d buy the $1000 dollar drone for peace of mind that it’s not Chinese garbage and probably actually works and doesn’t have Chinese malware
>Every military unit should have a dozen of these $20 drones with a smartphone to link the controls
yeah, so welcome to 2015
>black hornet nano
What crap are you taking up your arse, dumb c**t? Everything you just wrote if provably false. Fricking idiot. Don't post shit if you don't know what you're on about. Dumb c**t. Christ what a fricking dumb post from a dumb fricking c**t.
>Piece of shit ebay toy falls out of the sky after RF 2.4 ghz gets jammed
This is why you suck at war.
I've had cheap drones and no, it won't do "just fine".
I recognize your posting style from the F-35 thread a day ago.
>We
You are not and will never be an American. Cope, seethe, etc…
That being said, did you notice any changes in your quality of life when your brain died and began decomposing in your skull or were you just born with an amorphous gelatinous puddle of pond scum for a brain?
Do you have any idea how manufacturing works?
>Us does not have a drone factory
wat.jpg
https://www.thedronegirl.com/2020/06/23/american-drone-companies/
and that's not even counting all defense sector drone makers
Why do you people have to insert your bullshit into every single discussion, regardless of topic?
It was literally a joke at both trannies and them you autistic Black person
WoW is the troony game, not XIV.
People like you need to be hanged from the gallows
Just because all of your gay little homosexual friends ERP as cat girls in one MMO and not the other doesn't make one more or less troony
Both are pozzed beyond belief and the pre-requisite to start either one is to wear a skirt you fricking homosexual
One game has themes of "white men bad, racism bad, stronk woman never wrong." The other is blatantly pro-nationalist, portrays rapefugees as a problem, and has an entire questline about why the Second Amendment is a good idea which you literally cannot avoid if you want to level every job. The latter is the one with cute uwu catgirls.
Sounds neat d e s u
Anyone have anymore information of that anti-missile laser for the F-35 that was being worked on a year or two ago where it's basically a small R2D2 on the top and bottom where the vertical lift fan is on the F-35B?
Minor dickwaving considering you can't use this on a cloudy day or at anything but a precise angle.
ground/sea based lasers are where it's at
also the graphic is stupid because these lasers aren't in the visible light spectrum. asinine PR move
It's early days now, but someday these lasers will could be useful for their ability to be aimed. Good for missile defense as well as precisely engaging multiple ground targets in quick succession.
Current best use case is drone interdiction, when people finally get off their asses and figure out that sending 5000 mini drones is more cost effective than 2 big ones we'll need computer guided lasers to shut that shit down
>be China/Russia
>flood the internet shrieking about your new wunderwaffe that will totally destroy the West
>it turns out to be a theoretical idea in a lab somewhere or a nunfunctional cardboard mockup, best case scenario a handful of prototypes are made that don't work as promised but can be wheeled out for parades, usually using tech America had over half a century ago
>the money spent on it becomes a new yacht for an oligarch
>be America
>deny having wunderwaffe
>"just a normal defense expenditure bro" says the Pentagon as trillions of dollars slink into secret projects
>stay completely silent and sweat nervously as autists on the internet keep asking about various technologies they've heard are being researched and noticing weird pods on planes or types of rocket being tested they've never seen before
>finally forced to admit that yes, the US has some new space age god-tier weapon straight out of sci-fi and although it cost a mint to develop it works perfectly and utterly invalidates our "competitors"
>Mongolian rape babies scream and cry about low IQ mutts as outdated muttech is shipped to Ukraine to thoroughly teabag combloc rustbuckets
I am not even American and at this point I would not even bat an eye if the Joint Chief came out and confessed that, yes, America has an intact UFO from Roswell and has successfully reverse-engineered its technology for its own use and is in contact with the aliens with some US Senator representing Earth at the Galactic Council. Western Individualism is too fricking strong.
<< HERE COMES THE SNOW >>
><<We're going to start over from scratch. That's what V2 is for.>>
>LAUNCH THE BIG FRICK
We have entered the Ace Combat timeline.
Se we really are in the X-Com timeline.
IMA FIRIN MA LASER
Hehe
Iran on suicide watch
It’s talking to itself now, the frick is happening?
When some wumao lose arguments they start talking to themselves because they have to put their required posts into the thread but are too angry to reply to the people dismantling them further.
>"I've got a girlfriend back at the base. I'm gonna propose to her when I get back. I even bought flowers!"
>puts it on plane with garbage RCS
Hope it can shoot down fox 3 missiles in flight.
I tend to think lasers are just being tested on fighters. You test them on fighters at first but ultimately you want to use them on custom drones that can be stable, networked, and dump all of their power into the laser.
You can have small swarms of laser drones loitering, each with 1-2 lasers tuned to vaporize different aerospace materials.
So when a hypervelocity missile is launched you just need to get these laser drones in the general vicinity of an intercept point. Then they all focus on the same flight surfaces of the vehicle. Most of the lasers are ineffective but a handful of the lasers are perfectly tuned to vaporize the heat shield on the flight surface. The flight surface is already engulfed in plasma and the imbalance of the extra pressure disrupts this flow of plasma, making the vehicle wobble at mach 10, and forcing it to rip itself apart.
>Le spoopy secret weapons with magic physics
They don't exist sorry.
The most secret squirrel capabilities that the US has are likely in cyber and EW.
They don't have orbital plasma guns or anti-gravity.
The most recently 'revealed' groom lake black project was literally just a stealthy reconnaissance drone.
Please keep in mind I am really fricked up. But seriously, answer me Black folk. Where is DoE anon when you need him?
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1990liac.conf...10O/abstract#:~:text=On%20July%2013%2C%201989%20the,propagated%20in%20an%20exoatmospheric%20environment.
Heart the Air Force saying something like this since early 00s. Living in germany and having to hear US generals blasting about all the secret high tech in all kinds of documentaries - Yeah I am sure they get their Wunderwaffen soon.
So what are the chances these eventually end up being used in an anti-ballistic missile role? They're at the speed of light, computer controlled and as long as the power is enough, could target and melt ICBM's even in the final stages. Even at separation into cluster nukes, I could see there being defensive laser batteries in most major US cities at one point
Where do you get the power though? E=mc^2, and a missile has a lot of m.
>E=mc^2, and a missile has a lot of m.
That's the equation for a total conversion bomb, not a missile using conventional explosives.
It's actually the relativistic energy W(v) = mc^2/sqrt(c-v^2/c^2). E = mc^2 is an approximation for low energy. The relativistic energy formula includes both the classical newtonian kinetic law for low speeds, the relativistic correction and E=mc^2 for a resting mass.
>mc^2/sqrt(c-v^2/c^2).
I meant mc^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2).
Reentry vehicles deal with so much heat from compression heating because of their speed I doubt a laser is going to do much. Also I think they're spin stabilized and the laser wouldn't be able to target the same spot for long enough so it would be even harder to force their outer shell to unevenly ablate with your hypothetical laser and destabilize them.
I wonder how feasible it would be to have these pods on really high flying planes where the atmosphere is thin and then target missiles during their mid course. Maybe they're too far away during that time, no idea what the engagement range on these lasers would be or if they would even be able to be used in this role.