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Homing In On Laser Weapons
Bloodmoon1 writes "I just came across this article at GlobalSecurity.org that gives a very good summary of the current status of solid-state lasers as weapons. It gives you a good idea of where the JSF Laser system is at and just how much time, effort, and money has went into this project. Also has some basic, but very sufficent, explanations of some of the science behind the technology."
What happens if someone just gets a really really big mirror?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
I think ever animal deservers a warm meal mwahahhahahahah..
I like:
"To put it simply, in deference to Kent, it's like lasing a stick of dynamite."
justruss
A beam shined into the interior corner of a cube comes out in exactly the opposite direction. Send that beam right back atcha!
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
quote: "I have no doubt that by the end of the decade, we will have a laser weapon installed on a Joint Strike Fighter jet or an AC-130 gunship."
There is something distinctly humorous in having the JSF and the AC-130 in the same sentence, side by side.
And here's the question: can anyone tell me how exactly would lasers be effective against targets with very shiny surfaces? Silver-coated mirrors are able to to reflect 99.92% of the light - therefore, they absorbe less than 1/1000th of the energy. Does it mean that these lasers have to be built with a thousand-times overhead??
Sigged!
This thing will be great as an anti-ship missle countermeasures. Check out this new Russian Weapon, the Sunburn missle, supersonic anti ship missle. If you had one of these lasers mounted on a destroyer, no matter how fast the incoming missle is flying a computer controlled gunner could point the laser at this thing and fry it as soon as it comes over the horizon. A destroyer or an aircraft carrier has enough electricity producing capability and heat dissipation that this would work.