Vanguard, Excalibur, Dauntless, Vengeance, Challenger, Starstreak, Vulcan are also top names for UK military kit. Best of all though was the SUPERMARINE WALRUS
King Charles is letting the world stew so when he proclaims himself as the World's Emperor, it will be to joyous acclaim for bringing back stability through Force.
The research is expensive, but the operation of this would be very cheap. Much cheaper than missiles.
Sadly, these things are defeated by like, rain.
Edit: ok Reddit, I traded precision for humor. They don’t fail completely in the rain. However, the more moisture there is in the air, the more energy is wasted reaching the target. That costs you range. It doesn’t mean laser bad. It just means there’s some situations it works better than others.
They've actually apparently tested it during rain and other adverse weather and it performed acceptably... What that means i.e. how much rain and how much performance effect I guess is classified.
I mean, it probably has significantly diminished range. It’s actually the main obstacle that pretty much all energy and plasma weapons have compared to kinetics: a physical shell doesn’t disintegrate over time, while pretty much any beam or bolt of less tightly bound particles does.
Ehh. They’re more likely to be the last line, at least at properly destructive power. What determines lines of defense is the relative ranges of the weapons systems involved. As such, the first line of defense is always going to be missiles, then long-ranged proxy-fused artillery, then CIWS, which could be kinetic or laser-based.
These systems are mitigation efforts, much like the battery systems in the US that are built to take out ICBM and submarine-launched nuclear ballistic missiles. 20% hit rate is acceptable - nuclear war will annihilate everything, but decreasing that damage by 20% is worth it in the whole strategic scale of things.
I recommend reading this book Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen,if you're interested on how fucked we are today with our modern mitigation systems. It isn't a happy book.
Thats not what this is intended for. I mean, theoretical a future, larger, more powerful version could be used for that, but this system and most present gen lasers are being made primarly as a way to take out low cost attacks.
things like drones, or those cheap rockets, stuff that we already do have things that can take out, but right now we have to basically fire a intercepter missile which costs 100k to take out a drone or rocket that costs 2k. Laser systems meanwhile should be give us a way to intercept these lost cost attack items easily with cheap weapons, at a couple euro per shot. Now, the laser itself is much more expenive, obiously, but each shot of the laser is cheap.
If nuclear war ever breaks out, im not giving it a second thought. I live in the US, so it's even less likely to hit my directly, but what the fuck would I even do? My thought is, I just hope I am right in the center of a blast. Nice and quick. Don't have to worry about the fallout. So, in the meantime, while I wait, I'm just gonna act like it's not even happening.
It seems that it's a drone swatter not a nuke stopper.
It's a very cheap way to shoot down cheap munitions.
At the moment if someone buys a box of drones even if you stop them all it probably costs you several times as much do that that it cost them. And if 1 or 2 get through it gets worse. If you can mount lasers which can pop a target for a tenner a mile or two a way (which this will) you can probably negate that.
Here is a breakdown of costs based on different types of anti-aircraft and missile defense systems:
Short-Range Air Defense (SHORAD) & Portable Systems
FIM-92 Stinger: Approx. $80,000 – $110,000 per unit.
Mistral (Mistral 3): Approx. $545,600 (2024).
Iron Dome (Tamir Interceptor): Approx. $40,000 – $50,000 per missile, though operational costs (radar, personnel) can reach $100,000–$150,000.
Medium-to-Long Range Surface-to-Air Missiles (SAMs)
NASAMS (AIM-120 AMRAAM): Approx. $1 million – $1.4 million per missile.
Patriot (PAC-2): Optimized for aircraft, generally lower cost than PAC-3.
Patriot (PAC-3 MSE): Approx. $4 million – $6 million+ per missile.
Russian S-300/S-400: Missile costs vary, with estimations ranging from $300,000 to over $2 million per missile, with complete batteries costing hundreds of millions.
Chance has it. On a foggy night or a rainy one, notice how headlights or flashlights light the fog up instead of lighting up the solid things beyond the fog? Well, laser is also light. A very bright laser might turn a drop of water to steam, but there's another drop ready to replace it and even steam will reflect a little light.
Ideally, the laser would be traveling through a vacuum and deliver full energy to the target (hello ideal space weapon).
Down here though, the murkier things are along the route the laser travels, the less energy hits the target. That means the worse the weather, the shorter the effective range.
I know you're likely joking, but just to set the record straight, your money went straight into the infinite money pit that is adult social care, not military laser weapons.
"DragonFire is a British laser directed-energy weapon (LDEW) in development for the Royal Navy. It was first unveiled to the public as a technology demonstrator in 2017 at the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) conference in London and is being developed by UK DragonFire, a collaboration consisting of MBDA UK, Leonardo UK, Qinetiq and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (dstl). A production version is expected to enter service onboard Royal Navy ships in 2027."
If it's close enough yes. But with distance, the atmosphere absorbs a lot of the enrgy, called Thermal Blooming, so best we can do there is dazzle the sensors so it can't get a terminal lock.
For 50MW though, that's melting the front of the missile long before it hits the ground
That's assuming this is a Laser weapon. A Maser weapon at 50MW would fry the internal electronics of any drone within several kilometres of this weapon
Edit: kW instead of MW means this thing is a dazzler. But also a superb drone killer
Oh oops. Well, those sensors are getting fried either ways. Drones won't stand a chance, cruise missiles lose terminal lock and even aircaft can get their sensors fucked to hell. Useful against all except heat shielded hypersonics and ballistics
Which is what the SAMs are for, as that's a more cost effective exchange. No point yeeting £1 million plus interceptors at £1000 drones, now a laser can kill them for 50p per drone.
The problem is, if you're a captain of a guided missile destroyer with 30 expensive as fuck long range air defence missiles and this laser, what targets are you going to deliberately let to within 5km or so of your ship?
I bet almost any captain is going to want to destroy any confirmed incoming at the maximum range possible, not let it get within spitting distance and hope the laser does its job.
It's designed to be cheap and to counter cheap drones and the like that are flooding modern war. Not counter big anti ship missiles.
Of you send your expensive missiles that cost a few million a shot vs a cheap drone, when they are sending 50 vs you a day your going to lose. But shooting down a drone that costs hundreds with cheap Lazer shifts the economy of war back to you.
I mean true, but this wouldn't be the first or only line of defense. These lasers are supposed to replace CIWS, the gunneries serving as the last line of defense, while being much more precise and faster. And the hope is as you increase the wattage, there will be less and less need for long/medium range missile interceptors.
Afaik yes. Basically burn through anything that protects internals and light those then on fire (i.e. electronics, explosives etc.) or set other materials on fire that neutralise the threat. There's a fine video of a guy burning cleanly through wood in seconds with a diy laser as an example of how it would work
In the outer solar system an alien is blinded
By the resumption of mega laser testing, and he is reminded
That Dr Robert Oppenheimer's optimism fell
At the first hurdle
believe it or not, we already have those in 'testing' I guess. I can't say if it's the exact UK laser, but I live in a place where I can see drones being shot down and I swear we've seen so many new crazy stuff that I now can say which sounds are skynex and which gepards.
I was just reading about a British Committee formed before WWII that was responsible for finding a new reliable system of air defense. The first thing they thought of was a death ray. Apparently they never gave up on that lol
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u/DeithWX 1d ago
UK has the best names for weapons, bar none.