Lasers are on the cusp of becoming real point defense weapons. How would you apply them in real life?
Would it be feasible to put them on transport aircraft to protect against missiles?
The advent of the lazors
Lasers are on the cusp of becoming real point defense weapons. How would you apply them in real life?
Would it be feasible to put them on transport aircraft to protect against missiles?
lasers are a meme in the atmosphere, they will never be feasible. But in space they will be KANGZ create a laser sattelite constellation and suddenly ICBMs become irrelevant
Tests indicate otherwise
they exist right now and have been deployed, they probably assisted somewhat in the Iran chimping.
>powered by a Po-210 thermal energy source
Umm.
This doesn't sound biodegradable or particularly fun to be around if my mag takes a rough impact and cracks.
the army doesn't revolve around you anon. now pick up that beat up rifle and get to charging. your country needs you. ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
>ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country
This is not the sort of glowie I signed up to be
>a system tactically superior to all systems any rival would ever consider developing
Yeah. I think even the USSR would have hesitated at putting polonium RTGs in every grunt's gun.
Couple of things: 1) is this a real document and 2) where would they have sourced the Polonium if the majority of it is sourced in Russia?
Looks like an SBIR grant submission maybe, so probably real. As far as Polonium and Russia, same place we got all that sweet titanium
Pretty sure that's not what he meant considering he got his has a master's in EE from USC and was working at Edwards.
The document is dated 1999. Russia was a friendly country at that point.
>russia was friendly
anon delete your post before the jannies see it
Are you ok? Western powers were friendly towards Russia during the 90's, but they decided it would be better to play pretend superpower.
USA was literally keeping Russia from collapsing.
In the 90s Russia was in the “good boy” phase, ie, the oligarchs and Putin’s circle hadn’t taken over yet and were, at that time, busy robbing everything they could get their hands on. After the oligarchs had gotten rid of the last vestiges of actual government in Russia in the 00s they began settling into the role as the new power system which the government was fully subordinated to. So even in the late 90s Russia was still seen as salvageable by outside observers.
> is this a real document
Yes, I remember reading it online in elementary school. There was more than that 1 page.
Lmaoooo how can something that has no mass even hurt you loop just like dude turn away from laser.
Dude just carry a mirror,
Laser flashes you.
You:
"GUESS WHAT."
Bigger vehicles have more spare electricity and spare mass to hold and power a laser.
USN has been running a 40kW laser for a decade.
>Would it be feasible to put them on transport aircraft to protect against missiles?
I mean USA did it 20 years ago, so it's more feasible now than then.
Doesn't work really well against swarms, also lasers lose power very quickly, there is a reason this thing was scrapped
Fun fact, it was scrapped because the optics sucked for aberration correction. Apparently the laser worked just fine, but the mounting attachments jiggled the every living shit out of the laser because it was directly attached to the plane.
>t. knows a guy who worked on this in Colorado Springs
He even went on to say "they ended up fixing that particular problem on another project" with no further elaboration.
>"they ended up fixing that particular problem on another project" with no further elaboration.
Pretty sure he meant the laser weapons pod designed for the F35
I thought that plane used a chemical laser, which uses less direct power right?
Didn't the laser internals take up almost all of the internal volume of that plane? I don't know if I'd call that viable for a transport.
Of course laser tech has advanced a ton since that thing was around, by now you can probably get the same power in a quarter the size and weight.
It was a chemical laser, so it has no relevance to modern or future ones. Chemical lasers used a chemical reaction channeled through what was basically a glass jet engine to produce laser light; so they were loud, fragile, spewed toxic exhaust, and dependent on special poisonous fuels.
Most modern lasers are a fiberoptic lasing medium you can plug into a wall, along with a few FELs or solid-state crystal ones.
>How would you apply them in real life?
The eventual goal is to have a relatively small semi-autonomous laser turret on top of any armored vehicle to deal with small drones, both the kind that drop munitions and FPVs. This will result in drones getting smaller and smaller until they can't carry a payload that's effective against vehicles. Those micro drones that are used just for recon are going to be the norm in the near future.
>Would it be feasible to put them on transport aircraft to protect against missiles?
There's already a proposal for exactly that for the F-35. If they ever become a real thing and planes will start getting laser defenses, then aerial warfare will likely end up going the missile spam route, Macross style just to ensure a hit after maneuvering, decoys and laser defenses.
>Mfw F-35 chan gets herself a spicy R-2 unit
>If they ever become a real thing and planes will start getting laser defenses, then aerial warfare will likely end up going the missile spam route
Or it's a return to gun fighting.
Blow your swarming wad but follow it in to get the kill with bullets (or at least prox-fuzed AC rounds), the Macross Missile Massacre is just to keep them on the defensive while you manoeuvrer for a kill shot.
Laser tanks!
>cusp
>soon
>verge
>brink
>positive
>success
>progress
>defense
As soon as these things begin to propagate you better believe we're gonna see people and light armor start to get zapped. I imagine that a laser would be helpful for damaging exterior equipment, sensors, etc on armored vehicles and will evenbe helpful in dogfighting roles. Lasers night eventually get to the point where they can effectively shoot down any and all missiles nearly instantly, which means you need to use guns or lasers to shoot down aircraft. If the power issues get resolved I don't see why you wouldn't one day outrange a gun with a laser in the sky. So in the future we get fleets of drones and autonomous shit zapping eachother from miles away. Shit if they get strong enough I can see them in a precision ground attack role, frying people and vehicles. Next step would be force fields but hopefully I'm dead before all this.
>waves upon waves of death ray wielding drones that explode your head before you even have a chance to react
>jeet scrap code causes cascading failures that send the drones into a genocidal frenzy killing everything on both sides.
the future is bright
> "China's armored transport"
Have military grade laser weapons been used on human beings in a conflict yet? I wonder if you'd see it burn holes clean through people or if they'd boil and explode instead. Does anyone know?
Lazers would become obsolete the same day they become a thing. That's how easy it is to apply thermal coating.
>Air
Moderately feasible as missile defence. However, range is a hard limiting factor, and the laser needs time to hard kill a missile.
>Sea
Highly feasible. While hard kill difficulties remain, ships provide effectively unlimited energy reserves, and the sea is the ultimate heatsink. Both of these factors together also allow higher energy lasers.
>Land
Low feasibility. A complete system - laser & detection - needs quite a bit of space. Energy and heat management limitations will hit hard. This doesn't make it impossible to use, but it sharply limits usefulness to defence against mortar rounds and small drones. And this defence would come from relatively heavy vehicles firmly in the 30- 40 ton range, or from vehicle combinations (detection, command and actual fire from three specialised vehicles, e.g. how the Wiesel 2 does air defence).