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Boeing Successfully Tests Anti-Missile Laser
dankinit writes "MSNBC is reporting that a 'Boeing Co.-led team has successfully fired for the first time a powerful laser meant to fly aboard a modified 747 as part of a U.S. ballistic missile defense shield.' The test called 'First Light' has a budget of $474.3 million in the fiscal year 2005 and is part of a larger $10 billion dollar missile defense system."
The official site about this laser is here
This is not designed with US based ABM. Instead it's meant to be used over the battlefield, as a replacement for the Patriot missile system.
No surface is 100% reflective. Even at 99.99% reflectivity, the laser is just too intense. This is one of the problems mentioned in the article, that the focusing optics are too absorbant and they will overheat and melt at the required power levels. If your laser is melting pure glass, I'm pretty sure chrome(which would definitely have dust/water/ice on it in flight) would buy maybe a few nanoseconds.
"The USSR is dead. North Korea has missiles..."
*sigh* Wrong missiles.
I haven't RTFL, but I do know off the top of my head that the ABL is intended for theater missiles, SRBMs instead of ICBMs (SCUDs, not Minutemen). And even then it's intended to hit the missile in the boost phase (while it's still launching, shows up like a flare in IR and is still loaded with lots of explosive fuel), which means the 747 would pretty much have to be flying over Pyongyang in order to stop a DPRK missile of any range.
It's not National Missile Defense, it's air superiority with perks. It can't even catch an artillery shell, let alone a MIRV, nor is it intended to.
In a battle between armor and firepower, always bet on firepower.
Thats not really an accurate assessment. Or rather, it is mostly accurate, but applies to all of Germany's early victims. Poland, France, Britian, the Low Countries, Norway, and Russia all had the same problem: no one knew how to fight the kind of new "maneuver warfare" that Germany was fighting (we all refer to it as "blitzkrieg" now, though ironically the German Army never called it that).
Britian survived because she was an island, Russia (barely) survived because of her size and willingness to throw away Soviet lives by the thousands just to slow Germany down a little bit. Now France's military did have its own problems, the fatal reliance on a static defense is the primary one, because this form of defense is what "maneuver warfare" forever made obsolete. This flaw was not confined to just the French however.
Now before the France bashers get to far gone on this thread, a few points (and I'm not French):
First, France had more tanks than Germany did, and French tanks were actually *better* than their German counterparts. The German superiority in armor didn't start until 1943, after a rude and shocking insult in the form of the Soviet T-34 tank. France's problem, like everyone else, was they didn't concentrate their armor, they, and everyone else, still considered armor an infantry support vehicle and therefore spread it out among the troops on the front. In the face of Germany's concentrated armor, that was a fatal mistake.
Second, France, although outnumbered in the air, did put up a ferocious fight. Most of the fight however was never seen as France relied on high altitude fighters for their defense, so most of the air-to-air war during the campaign was occuring too high for anyone else on the ground to know about it. Even French fighter pilots were frustrated afterward that so many of their own Frenchmen thought the Air Force had been destroyed or had stopped fighting so early in the battle. The truth was the French continued to fight in the air, but so high up, no one else knew they were there.