If just a small harmless beam is all you need, then there are lasers that can do that, really tiny handheld ones. But that's not a "sniper gun" in any way. Once you start talking about that, your power and heat requirements skyrocket. I'd say do the math on it, you'll see
how miserable do you have to be to think a 'hand held laser sniper gun' is a reasonable thing for a miserable person on the internet to want... most people enjoy their vision and dont want some butthole blinding them with a $50 laser pointer.
If just a small harmless beam is all you need, then there are lasers that can do that, really tiny handheld ones. But that's not a "sniper gun" in any way. Once you start talking about that, your power and heat requirements skyrocket. I'd say do the math on it, you'll see
You can get around one that fires pulsing beams rather than a constant beam.
Pulsed lasers might have very high peak power (megawatt, terawatt even for ultra-short pulsed lasers (USPL)) but the average power of them is just a couple of watts. They're great for interfering with sensors but not much more than that. Even a basic flashlamp pumped ND:Yag laser requires a pretty heavy power supply and a chiller to keep it running, it might blind a person in a single pulse but besides that it'll just take the paint off of stuff.
When you get into the ultra-short (i.e. pico/femtosecond pulse duration) regimes you get interesting non-linear effects that can help with distance lasing like filamentation that generates self-healing laser beams through turbulence, but outside of sensor interference I'm not aware of many combat applications of USPLs currently. I know when it comes to filamentation specifically there's been some ablation studies that might have applications for shooting down drones but I don't really know. Despite how interesting USPLs are though, they still probably take up an entire conex worth of infrastructure if you want to do anything useful with it.
If by pulsing you mean a Quasi-CW laser, where the power is modulated to help with heat, any Quasi-CW IPG laser you buy off the shelf is probably going to still require a chiller and a lot of power.
We kinda already energymaxed both chemical and battery storage.
I mean look at where lithium is on the periodic table, you can't go lighter than that. Hydrocarbons like gas are as good as it gets. Unless you can finger out a pocket nuke, it ain't happening.
Currently the troop size portable laser weapon systems like MCHEL from Booz Allen Hamilton are like a 12 kW system and it's probably more tailored towards stuff like taking down sensors or cameras from a distance and if you actually want to melt through stuff with it especially from range it probably a while.
While it's a portable system its probably portable in the sense that you can load it into the back of a truck and deploy it with a few people, probably requires a generator and chiller to run too.
Something totally hand held, even if it had like a heavy ass backpack to carry to supporting infrastructure, just wouldn't have the power output needed to be useful. Sure you could blind people handhelds easily but that's like a war crime, accidentally blinding people is probably a bring problem in actual deployment of HEL systems.
On top of all that you have optical turbulence to deal with, your power in the bucket is going to go down significantly due to turbulence and a hand held system won't have the adaptive optics to correct for it like a full HEL system would. I mean you could have a small deformable mirror with just a few segments to try and correct using just the low order zernike coefficients for the wavefront but it'd still balloon the price to insane amounts, but then you'd also need some sort of shack hartmann WFS to calculate the conjugate wavefront.
It's just not feasible or useful in such a small system.
Pulsed lasers might have very high peak power (megawatt, terawatt even for ultra-short pulsed lasers (USPL)) but the average power of them is just a couple of watts. They're great for interfering with sensors but not much more than that. Even a basic flashlamp pumped ND:Yag laser requires a pretty heavy power supply and a chiller to keep it running, it might blind a person in a single pulse but besides that it'll just take the paint off of stuff.
When you get into the ultra-short (i.e. pico/femtosecond pulse duration) regimes you get interesting non-linear effects that can help with distance lasing like filamentation that generates self-healing laser beams through turbulence, but outside of sensor interference I'm not aware of many combat applications of USPLs currently. I know when it comes to filamentation specifically there's been some ablation studies that might have applications for shooting down drones but I don't really know. Despite how interesting USPLs are though, they still probably take up an entire conex worth of infrastructure if you want to do anything useful with it.
If by pulsing you mean a Quasi-CW laser, where the power is modulated to help with heat, any Quasi-CW IPG laser you buy off the shelf is probably going to still require a chiller and a lot of power.
The Russians pointed a giant laser at the space shuttle Challenger in orbit in the 80s and all it did was annoy the crew.
The technologies are so advanced but goyim have no clue. This is nothing by the way, old tech.
I wouldn't think so. If you were going for sensor denial on a drone or taking out a drone you'd probably have a tracking mount already with all the necessary optics for tracking drones, and if you have that it'd need a power source (i.e. diesel generator) so you could use that same power source to power your laser and it's chiller anyways.
It'd be a novelty though to have a pulsed laser whose flashlamp is powered by supercapacitors though, I imagine it like a chain gun but with capacitors flying out.
>Why aren’t hand held laser sniper guns a thing ?
blinding weapons are against the geneva convention.
if everyone gets one, people will have to go to war wearing fpv goggles.
Not only that, but the tiny temperature changes in air and due to crosswinds create variances in the refractive index over the path you're propagating and it causes the beam to get distorted. It's not as bad if you're lasing above the horizon, but if you're lasing horizontally or down near the ground it's very noticeable.
Because you need a smaller laser to aim it, an even smaller laser to line that one up etc etc
You get caught in a fractal of increasingly tiny lasers just to kill someone you could have just walked up to whispered this one secret thing into their ear
Become a member to learn what it is!!
In terms of damage, kinetics are vastly more efficient than lasers, which do most damage by heating. Humans are basically only water and have a massive heat capacity, but we're soft and squishy so kinetics can easily go through and penetrate to vitals
I suspect he's clipping only the final moment when the laser gets through the last bit of wood
I didn't watch his full video, so maybe I am wrong
Look at this
I expect that could probably kill someone in quick enough time, but only at very close range (a few inches) and even then I'm not confident it would be all that quick
It's powered by a 5kW laser that runs down fiber into the back of the 'rifle', there's a unit elsewhere that generates
picrel is a 4kW laser generator, not quite as big as that tank I admit, but quite large
It's too much to lug around, especially when you consider the low range, but lasers might be used for something like defending a stationary target
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Beam
the military has 15kW and 30kW lasers that are far more compact for their new tanks. They'll be fielded in just a few years, so I think it's entirely probable that handheld versions could exist within a decade or so.
ignoring the actual laser and assuming 100% efficiency (and the lasers I work on are single digit efficiency in eletrical power to laser power conversion), what hand held power supply do you know of that is capable of 30kW?
6 months ago
Anonymous
>what hand held power supply do you know of that is capable of 30kW?
a 300Wh (e.g. 48V 6.25Ah) 100C lipo could fit in about 1 litre
that's gonna fit in a drum mag or a backpack
300Wh is 1MJ, and water has an enthalpy of vaporisation of 2.4MJ/kg, so with 0.42kg = 0.42L of water you could flash that into steam to keep your apparatus below 100C
the efficiency is still a massive problem, but it's not totally infeasible
6 months ago
Anonymous
modern ~40v ~10Ah pouch cell tool batteries are usually limited to around 5kW output (as far as I know at least) and 6 of them would be well over 1L in volume. It's absolutely doable as a backpack, but I don't think an onboard battery makes sense for any electric weapons with current battery technology. Same goes for those oversized toy coilguns- which are almost 80% capacitor, and for some bizarre reason the capacitors are integrated into the body and forward of the trigger which makes it stupidly front-heavy, instead of as a separate pack. >picrel
Welding machines already have super flexible cables that can carry >10kW continuously, it can't be that hard to handle a few times as much power for a pulse less than 1 second.
6 months ago
Anonymous
>modern ~40v ~10Ah pouch cell tool batteries are usually limited to around 5kW output
100C lipos as used by high-power drones are rated at significantly faster discharge rates. 100C means a 1Ah cell can output 100A. >which makes it stupidly front-heavy >Welding machines already have super flexible cables that can carry >10kW continuously
I suspect the short duration of the current spikes makes the inductance of the wiring quite significant, so wires to a backpack would degrade performance. But you could at probably put most of the caps in the stock, maybe even behind the shoulder akin to some of those man-portable rocket launchers.
why would anyone want a laser gun anyway? If you just want a death wand, why bother with light? There aren't a lot of tactical situations where you say
"Hey, could we make everything a lot brighter? Maybe make it super easy to find us, like say having a bright beam of light point at us?"
Do you have any idea how much power is required to run a laser powerful enough to go through someone's head at a thousand+ yards, and also do it in fast enough that they don't have the time to scream "my forehead is burning!" and get out of the way?
they require massive batteries to run for any length of time, require you to point the laser for a very long time to do any significant damage to non-eye bodyparts, reveal the exact location of the user, etc.
Tech Ingredients did a neat video on space-based death lasers. Looked actually pretty doable, if you ignore the thermal issues. Nowhere near hand-held though.
I think there are two somewhat promising methods to make a hand-held laser weapon:
The first is an explosively pumped gas dynamic laser. The energy density of the fuel makes it 10 times easier to get the same amount of energy as batteries can store, plus the thermal issues aren't as bad as they are inside a flash-lamp or LED or diode laser.
The second is a nitrogen air laser of some sort. Nitrogen air lasers aren't the most efficient or coherent, but they literally don't care about cooling because the laser medium can just flow out of the firing chamber and get replaced with other air, so there's little preventing you from just increasing the power level to arbitrary levels.
Both are intrinsically pulsed lasers that dumps all its energy in a short enough time that you don't have to worry about stabilisation. Neither would be nearly as coherent as the fibre laser talked about in the Tech Ingredients video, so they'd be short-range weapons at best. Not sure if you can Q switch them, or if you'd want to.
Practically, getting a laser powerful enough to burn a pinpoint hole through someone's head or heart (or set them on fire) is still a long ways off from a hand-held weapon. Considering blindness will set in at orders of magnitude lower energy levels, and blinding weapons are banned by many rules of law, I can't imagine major militaries investing much in anti-personnel laser weaponry. That said, they're definitely useful for anti-UAV and anti-missile purposes, but that defeats the purpose of going for man-portable low-range units. Maybe for anti-surveillance? I wonder if targeted laser weaponry can destroy the cameras that modern tanks use to navigate? I can see this kind of weapon being used for urban guerrilla warfare.
Why, theoretically, is it the case that you can put enough propellant in a cartridge to propel a bullet fast enough to kill someone, but you can't fit enough energy to propel light with the same force into a cartridge of the same size? I would expect there to be a way to convert a tiny packet of chemical energy into a laser pulse with the same energy as a bullet. Is it just that our methods of turning energy into light are much less efficient than our methods of turning energy into kinetic force? If there existed a way to transform gunpowder directly into light, like by channeling the explosion through some kind of magical lens, could that laser just explode a homie's head?
Kinetic energy is much more efficient at killing people than what’s basically thermal energy, for the same impact size. In particular, laser light will just turn to heat on impact with your clothing, while a bullet will retain much of its kinetic energy as it pushes through you. It doesn’t need to boil off all the flesh on its path, just push it out of the way. Penetrating power of projectiles will always be better than lasers at this kind of size and energy scale.
A few problems like power source. But the killer of laser weapons is the atmosphere and water vapor dilutes the beam. The Iron Beam defense laser shows it can't operate well in rain or cloudy days. It also has a very short range. Space on the other hand is perfect for lasers
That's why you pick a wavelength that isn't influenced so much by weather. A ~4GHz maser would probably ignore water droplets pretty well, and play havoc with electronics inside any missiles or drones. Too short a wavelength (<1cm) and droplets of rail will disturb it, too long a wavelength and it won't be able to focus its energy to a tight enough point to do any meaningful damage. Not sure about clouds though, someone should post a nice graph on the absorption of MHz through THz bands in clouds.
We can generate more than enough power/energy. But we cant STORE said power.
There is nothing on this planet that stores more joules gram for gram than petroleum (save fissile material which is problematic and too rare for widespread commercial use)
>too rare
it's not rare at all, there is more than enough uranium to meet our needs
https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28569/uranium-resources-production-and-demand-red-book
this report has details on uranium reserves at various levels of economic viability
there's a lot to be said about where the uranium actually is and the supply lines to move it into the west, but that's a whole other, non-laser, non-PrepHole thread
hydrogen and methane both store more gravimetric energy (gram for gram), in fact even LPG/propane is more energy dense per unit mass. Gasoline/Diesel are better for VOLUMETRIC energy density (size of tank) but they're both actually quite heavy for the amount of energy you get from combustion. That's not even getting into the wacky shit like borohydride.
the japs are unironically looking to ammonia for energy storage and usage in vehicles, it's just a matter of time before someone gasses themself.
anyhow, we're conflating grid storage (needs to be cheap, have a long service life, be deployable anywhere, have sufficiently high round-trip efficiency) with vehicular storage (needs to be sufficiently dense, safe, cheap).
grid storage will probably end up being flow batteries (fe2/fe3/fe(s) looks promising) or some other kind of long-lifespan cheap battery (molten salt/metal batteries maybe because the liquid cathode and anode don't change shape)
vehicular storage idk, batteries aren't seeming to be that cost-effective (up-front cost that is) without subsidies, maybe chemical storage with fuel cells
Two reasons: high power consumption and difficult heat dissipation. Juist these 2 ideas alone actually kills of most sci-fi ideas
Why is that? It just need to shoot a beam for few milliseconds at a time
If just a small harmless beam is all you need, then there are lasers that can do that, really tiny handheld ones. But that's not a "sniper gun" in any way. Once you start talking about that, your power and heat requirements skyrocket. I'd say do the math on it, you'll see
>do the math on it
Like someone this moronic can do that kind of math.
How miserable do you have to be to be a dick to random people on internet ?
How miserable do you have to be to be a dick to random people on the internet?
how miserable do you have to be to think a 'hand held laser sniper gun' is a reasonable thing for a miserable person on the internet to want... most people enjoy their vision and dont want some butthole blinding them with a $50 laser pointer.
gay
a laser that has enough power to do that is a relatively large machine
You can get around one that fires pulsing beams rather than a constant beam.
Pulsed lasers might have very high peak power (megawatt, terawatt even for ultra-short pulsed lasers (USPL)) but the average power of them is just a couple of watts. They're great for interfering with sensors but not much more than that. Even a basic flashlamp pumped ND:Yag laser requires a pretty heavy power supply and a chiller to keep it running, it might blind a person in a single pulse but besides that it'll just take the paint off of stuff.
When you get into the ultra-short (i.e. pico/femtosecond pulse duration) regimes you get interesting non-linear effects that can help with distance lasing like filamentation that generates self-healing laser beams through turbulence, but outside of sensor interference I'm not aware of many combat applications of USPLs currently. I know when it comes to filamentation specifically there's been some ablation studies that might have applications for shooting down drones but I don't really know. Despite how interesting USPLs are though, they still probably take up an entire conex worth of infrastructure if you want to do anything useful with it.
If by pulsing you mean a Quasi-CW laser, where the power is modulated to help with heat, any Quasi-CW IPG laser you buy off the shelf is probably going to still require a chiller and a lot of power.
We kinda already energymaxed both chemical and battery storage.
I mean look at where lithium is on the periodic table, you can't go lighter than that. Hydrocarbons like gas are as good as it gets. Unless you can finger out a pocket nuke, it ain't happening.
Currently the troop size portable laser weapon systems like MCHEL from Booz Allen Hamilton are like a 12 kW system and it's probably more tailored towards stuff like taking down sensors or cameras from a distance and if you actually want to melt through stuff with it especially from range it probably a while.
While it's a portable system its probably portable in the sense that you can load it into the back of a truck and deploy it with a few people, probably requires a generator and chiller to run too.
Something totally hand held, even if it had like a heavy ass backpack to carry to supporting infrastructure, just wouldn't have the power output needed to be useful. Sure you could blind people handhelds easily but that's like a war crime, accidentally blinding people is probably a bring problem in actual deployment of HEL systems.
On top of all that you have optical turbulence to deal with, your power in the bucket is going to go down significantly due to turbulence and a hand held system won't have the adaptive optics to correct for it like a full HEL system would. I mean you could have a small deformable mirror with just a few segments to try and correct using just the low order zernike coefficients for the wavefront but it'd still balloon the price to insane amounts, but then you'd also need some sort of shack hartmann WFS to calculate the conjugate wavefront.
It's just not feasible or useful in such a small system.
The technologies are so advanced but goyim have no clue. This is nothing by the way, old tech.
There are patents for free energy machines too, doesn't really mean much.
These aren't patents homosexual, it's reality, a fraction of it goy. Most of it is hidden from you loser.
Did you notice how that requires an entire fricking jumbo jet to store it's power supply and chiller? You all did.
>Why aren’t hand held laser sniper guns a thing
because lasers require a crap ton of power to do any damage quickly.
The handheld stuff the russians have is for taking out drones. Won't carve a hole in a wall, though.
Are laser machineguns (pulsed laser with ammo replaced by supercapcitor bank) viable for drone denial?
I wouldn't think so. If you were going for sensor denial on a drone or taking out a drone you'd probably have a tracking mount already with all the necessary optics for tracking drones, and if you have that it'd need a power source (i.e. diesel generator) so you could use that same power source to power your laser and it's chiller anyways.
It'd be a novelty though to have a pulsed laser whose flashlamp is powered by supercapacitors though, I imagine it like a chain gun but with capacitors flying out.
Portable energy density is too low to achieve resul
did anyone else see that flash befo
OH SHIT
Quick! Take cover in the Hall of Mirr
I broke a mirror, isn't that like seven year of bad lu
>Why aren’t hand held laser sniper guns a thing ?
blinding weapons are against the geneva convention.
if everyone gets one, people will have to go to war wearing fpv goggles.
Dust and humidity blocks more light than you think over a distance.
Not only that, but the tiny temperature changes in air and due to crosswinds create variances in the refractive index over the path you're propagating and it causes the beam to get distorted. It's not as bad if you're lasing above the horizon, but if you're lasing horizontally or down near the ground it's very noticeable.
The Russians pointed a giant laser at the space shuttle Challenger in orbit in the 80s and all it did was annoy the crew.
Because you need a smaller laser to aim it, an even smaller laser to line that one up etc etc
You get caught in a fractal of increasingly tiny lasers just to kill someone you could have just walked up to whispered this one secret thing into their ear
Become a member to learn what it is!!
In terms of damage, kinetics are vastly more efficient than lasers, which do most damage by heating. Humans are basically only water and have a massive heat capacity, but we're soft and squishy so kinetics can easily go through and penetrate to vitals
Why not go big and make laser tanks?
>armor penetration between a BB gun and a pellet rifle
Was it even designed for fighting armor?
I'd guess they wanted to use it against troops, trucks and emplacements, that would make more sense anyway
you need something about the size of that tank to make even a small cutting laser with low range
Nah a guy did it with a 12.000 dolaredoos laser (used) and modifications in his backyard.
?si=0lbN7WOhHrlhLlDH
I suspect he's clipping only the final moment when the laser gets through the last bit of wood
I didn't watch his full video, so maybe I am wrong
Look at this
I expect that could probably kill someone in quick enough time, but only at very close range (a few inches) and even then I'm not confident it would be all that quick
It's powered by a 5kW laser that runs down fiber into the back of the 'rifle', there's a unit elsewhere that generates
picrel is a 4kW laser generator, not quite as big as that tank I admit, but quite large
It's too much to lug around, especially when you consider the low range, but lasers might be used for something like defending a stationary target
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Beam
the military has 15kW and 30kW lasers that are far more compact for their new tanks. They'll be fielded in just a few years, so I think it's entirely probable that handheld versions could exist within a decade or so.
link?
ignoring the actual laser and assuming 100% efficiency (and the lasers I work on are single digit efficiency in eletrical power to laser power conversion), what hand held power supply do you know of that is capable of 30kW?
>what hand held power supply do you know of that is capable of 30kW?
a 300Wh (e.g. 48V 6.25Ah) 100C lipo could fit in about 1 litre
that's gonna fit in a drum mag or a backpack
300Wh is 1MJ, and water has an enthalpy of vaporisation of 2.4MJ/kg, so with 0.42kg = 0.42L of water you could flash that into steam to keep your apparatus below 100C
the efficiency is still a massive problem, but it's not totally infeasible
modern ~40v ~10Ah pouch cell tool batteries are usually limited to around 5kW output (as far as I know at least) and 6 of them would be well over 1L in volume. It's absolutely doable as a backpack, but I don't think an onboard battery makes sense for any electric weapons with current battery technology. Same goes for those oversized toy coilguns- which are almost 80% capacitor, and for some bizarre reason the capacitors are integrated into the body and forward of the trigger which makes it stupidly front-heavy, instead of as a separate pack.
>picrel
Welding machines already have super flexible cables that can carry >10kW continuously, it can't be that hard to handle a few times as much power for a pulse less than 1 second.
>modern ~40v ~10Ah pouch cell tool batteries are usually limited to around 5kW output
100C lipos as used by high-power drones are rated at significantly faster discharge rates. 100C means a 1Ah cell can output 100A.
>which makes it stupidly front-heavy
>Welding machines already have super flexible cables that can carry >10kW continuously
I suspect the short duration of the current spikes makes the inductance of the wiring quite significant, so wires to a backpack would degrade performance. But you could at probably put most of the caps in the stock, maybe even behind the shoulder akin to some of those man-portable rocket launchers.
only disco gays and their victims are still into lasers the year 1985+40
why would anyone want a laser gun anyway? If you just want a death wand, why bother with light? There aren't a lot of tactical situations where you say
"Hey, could we make everything a lot brighter? Maybe make it super easy to find us, like say having a bright beam of light point at us?"
Because bullets work much, much better.
Do you have any idea how much power is required to run a laser powerful enough to go through someone's head at a thousand+ yards, and also do it in fast enough that they don't have the time to scream "my forehead is burning!" and get out of the way?
It's a lot.
Your not aware of lazeranon? He likes to teach people how to make very dangerous laser guns. Look them up on /misc/ in archives
Oh and his guns are meant to blind, not like cook or burn
Recently arrested
that guy definitely wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed
For what?
Link? I’d like to read
they require massive batteries to run for any length of time, require you to point the laser for a very long time to do any significant damage to non-eye bodyparts, reveal the exact location of the user, etc.
Tech Ingredients did a neat video on space-based death lasers. Looked actually pretty doable, if you ignore the thermal issues. Nowhere near hand-held though.
I think there are two somewhat promising methods to make a hand-held laser weapon:
The first is an explosively pumped gas dynamic laser. The energy density of the fuel makes it 10 times easier to get the same amount of energy as batteries can store, plus the thermal issues aren't as bad as they are inside a flash-lamp or LED or diode laser.
The second is a nitrogen air laser of some sort. Nitrogen air lasers aren't the most efficient or coherent, but they literally don't care about cooling because the laser medium can just flow out of the firing chamber and get replaced with other air, so there's little preventing you from just increasing the power level to arbitrary levels.
Both are intrinsically pulsed lasers that dumps all its energy in a short enough time that you don't have to worry about stabilisation. Neither would be nearly as coherent as the fibre laser talked about in the Tech Ingredients video, so they'd be short-range weapons at best. Not sure if you can Q switch them, or if you'd want to.
Practically, getting a laser powerful enough to burn a pinpoint hole through someone's head or heart (or set them on fire) is still a long ways off from a hand-held weapon. Considering blindness will set in at orders of magnitude lower energy levels, and blinding weapons are banned by many rules of law, I can't imagine major militaries investing much in anti-personnel laser weaponry. That said, they're definitely useful for anti-UAV and anti-missile purposes, but that defeats the purpose of going for man-portable low-range units. Maybe for anti-surveillance? I wonder if targeted laser weaponry can destroy the cameras that modern tanks use to navigate? I can see this kind of weapon being used for urban guerrilla warfare.
In roblox.
on space lasers, have a look into the 'rope trick' if anyone here is interested in that kind of thing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur
if I had a real working lasgun I would recite prayers during maintenance for it too
Doesn't work like that though doesn't take much for it to be weak as sht
Why, theoretically, is it the case that you can put enough propellant in a cartridge to propel a bullet fast enough to kill someone, but you can't fit enough energy to propel light with the same force into a cartridge of the same size? I would expect there to be a way to convert a tiny packet of chemical energy into a laser pulse with the same energy as a bullet. Is it just that our methods of turning energy into light are much less efficient than our methods of turning energy into kinetic force? If there existed a way to transform gunpowder directly into light, like by channeling the explosion through some kind of magical lens, could that laser just explode a homie's head?
Kinetic energy is much more efficient at killing people than what’s basically thermal energy, for the same impact size. In particular, laser light will just turn to heat on impact with your clothing, while a bullet will retain much of its kinetic energy as it pushes through you. It doesn’t need to boil off all the flesh on its path, just push it out of the way. Penetrating power of projectiles will always be better than lasers at this kind of size and energy scale.
A few problems like power source. But the killer of laser weapons is the atmosphere and water vapor dilutes the beam. The Iron Beam defense laser shows it can't operate well in rain or cloudy days. It also has a very short range. Space on the other hand is perfect for lasers
That's why you pick a wavelength that isn't influenced so much by weather. A ~4GHz maser would probably ignore water droplets pretty well, and play havoc with electronics inside any missiles or drones. Too short a wavelength (<1cm) and droplets of rail will disturb it, too long a wavelength and it won't be able to focus its energy to a tight enough point to do any meaningful damage. Not sure about clouds though, someone should post a nice graph on the absorption of MHz through THz bands in clouds.
It's dilemma our entire race faces:
We can generate more than enough power/energy. But we cant STORE said power.
There is nothing on this planet that stores more joules gram for gram than petroleum (save fissile material which is problematic and too rare for widespread commercial use)
>too rare
it's not rare at all, there is more than enough uranium to meet our needs
https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28569/uranium-resources-production-and-demand-red-book
this report has details on uranium reserves at various levels of economic viability
there's a lot to be said about where the uranium actually is and the supply lines to move it into the west, but that's a whole other, non-laser, non-PrepHole thread
hydrogen and methane both store more gravimetric energy (gram for gram), in fact even LPG/propane is more energy dense per unit mass. Gasoline/Diesel are better for VOLUMETRIC energy density (size of tank) but they're both actually quite heavy for the amount of energy you get from combustion. That's not even getting into the wacky shit like borohydride.
the japs are unironically looking to ammonia for energy storage and usage in vehicles, it's just a matter of time before someone gasses themself.
anyhow, we're conflating grid storage (needs to be cheap, have a long service life, be deployable anywhere, have sufficiently high round-trip efficiency) with vehicular storage (needs to be sufficiently dense, safe, cheap).
grid storage will probably end up being flow batteries (fe2/fe3/fe(s) looks promising) or some other kind of long-lifespan cheap battery (molten salt/metal batteries maybe because the liquid cathode and anode don't change shape)
vehicular storage idk, batteries aren't seeming to be that cost-effective (up-front cost that is) without subsidies, maybe chemical storage with fuel cells