Akrasia said:
now I don't know much about lasers, but seein as they're composed of light, wouldn't you be able to defend against them by simply covering your missile in really shiny reflective material?
A laser beam is composed of highly focused light energy; and anything reflective still absorbs a certain amount of light as heat. I'm sure a powerful enough laser could burn through a reflective coating in a split second.
Helter said: waldo said:
Make them radar-directed and scan across the target aircraft. Anything that's powerful enough to kill a missile will screw your retinas big-time.
This is the beginning of the end of piloted aircraft, I think. It costs about five times the price of his aircraft to train a fighter pilot, I believe. (Sorry, no source at the moment.)
[Edited on Aug 26, 2005 by waldo]
But, why would you bother? If it's powerful enough to destroy a missile, it's powerful enough to destroy an aircraft (and I might add, do quite a bit more than screw with your retinas)? What prevents this from being a realistic offensive weapon is that it takes a huge amount of power to get a single shot. To use against something like a missile it makes sense, because missiles are very fast and hard to hit otherwise. Aircraft though, we're pretty good at destroying already.
Since retinas are a lot more fragile than missiles, you don't need as much power. If you can prevent the platform from launching, why bother killing the missile?
For the objective of disabling the platform, lasers can't compete with air-to-air missiles. The range on the ground-based high power laser system is something like 5 miles, I believe. The range on air-to-air missiles in the US arsenal is something like 6 miles to 125 miles, according to the information I could dig up on currently active missiles. And missiles don't just fly straight.
This is also important from the perspective that if you're preparing for a potential war with China, they will be able to fire missiles at US craft from considerable range - on par with the range that we can fire our missiles. As such, it's not realistic to expect that one could always disable the threat before they could launch their missiles.
Hell, if the military was really confident in the laser system, they could use systems to aid the enemy missile's homing, in order to make the missile's trajectory that much more easily identifiable in the fire control system.
The shot capacity of an airborn laser weapon isn't likely to be particularly high. The ground-based laser system has a single "magazine" kill capability of about 20 - and the magazine is 8' by 8' by 20', per the information published by Northrup Grumman found here: http://www.st.northropgrumman.com/media/SiteFiles/mediagallery/factsheet/MTHEL_Fact_Sheet_9-04.pdf I'd imagine that this small version wouldn't be capable of firing more than a handful of shots. Comparitively, if you're going to be shooting line of sight at short range anyway, it would make more sense to use the plane's cannon with its greater resource of ammunition, rather than trying to use the laser on an enemy craft, in a situation where their craft (and maybe yours) isn't necessarily moving in an readily predictable manner, like a missile or other projectile.
hylian42
North Richland Hills, TX
April 2004
AUG 27, 2005 01:34 PM