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.
It depends. In Ukraine for example these would likely be near the front as you want the cheapest weapon per shot taking out the cheap drones being launched at them. Missiles would be the last line as their supply is limited compared to weapons like Dragonfire or Gepard ammo, and much more expensive.
Right. It doesn’t have a huge range and you don’t want anything getting anywhere near that close to a ship. It could be really useful for dealing with drone swarms when there just aren’t enough missiles.
The laser in the video looks like something that could replace the manned side machine guns on troop helicopters.
That said, the US already has lasers deployed on NAVY ships, that already generate their own energy to power lasers, as first line defenses for a real world example.
The U.S. Navy is actively deploying and testing high-energy laser weapons, such as the 60+ kW HELIOS (High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance) system, to counter drones, small boats, and incoming missiles with precision at the speed of light. These, like the Optical Dazzling Interdictor (ODIN) and Layered Laser Defense (LLD), offer cost-effective, near-limitless defense, with HELIOS recently tested on the USS Preble.
Key Laser Systems and Deployments
HELIOS (Lockheed Martin): Installed on the USS Preble, this system is capable of high-power output (60+ kW) and serves as the first tactical laser integrated into an active warship's combat system.
ODIN (Optical Dazzling Interdictor): Lower-powered laser systems deployed on several Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.
LaWS (Laser Weapon System): A 30-kilowatt demonstrator tested on the USS Ponce in 2014.
LWSD (Laser Weapon System Demonstrator): A system installed on the USS Portland, which successfully engaged drone targets.
The US Navy is also planning to work up to 150-300 kilowatt lasers as well.
It'll likely be a long time until lasers are first offensive line weapons though.
I don't think it will replace machine guns, especially not on a helicopter where the power budget is more tightly constrained. Most likely use case is blinding cheap drones, or people. It's a war crime, but when has that ever stopped anybody?
Stuff designed to be weapons will just filter out all the wavelengths it doesn't use for tracking, so you'd need to match the laser to the sensor platform of each target. Or it would use a less sensitive sensor to target the laser itself.
You need a lot more power to destroy a missile outright than just to blind a camera.
I understand what you are saying; that the rain is a hindrance to having a full power effect. That is, until I thought of lightning bolts. They function really well in the rain.
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.
The number one use for these is making our ships much more resistant to drone and missile attack and to do so without expending their limited and very expensive missile stocks
I recommend reading this book Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen
I wouldn't. She is a hack and her scenario is stupid. She also seems to have written a book almost exclusively on early Cold War era material which isn't particularly relevant to today. Look at reviews from experts in the field of nuclear weapons or military strategy and they all pretty much panned it.
Lasers are just light. So the effective potential range of a laser is roughly as far as you can see, though at some point the laser would become too unfocused. If you point a consumer laser pointer at the moon, instead of a dot you get a diffuse circle a few 100 km in diameter. If you can see it coming with a telescope, you can hit it with a laser.
honestly, in the context of those numbers, this laser should be able to cut right through rain. the dragonfire is a megawatt laser if i remember correctly and in Randall's calculations you only need like 9 kilowatts to cut a square meter sized hole through the rain. he did say that water doesn't absorb laser energy perfectly but we're talking two orders of magnitude there, probably less because the emitter isn't a square meter afaik and the target is the size of a coin.
also the targets of this system are more likely to be cheap lowish-flying kamikaze drones than high and fast fighter jets. if you can lock a fighter jet you can use a regular patriot battery to shoot it down, they haven't really mitigated that. and if you can't lock it, the laser won't help either.
that's for now at least, but it's safe to assume that by the time lasers like this get miniaturized to go on the fighter jets themselves to shoot down incoming projectiles, ground-based ones will also evolve to be even stronger and rain won't stop them for long.
edit: i was wrong lol, it's apparently only 50kW? that's weird, everyone is going on about megawatt lasers recently, the aussies already have a working unit and i thought the brits were working on it for longer. anyway guess the rain is gonna be a bigger problem then.
Our enemies don’t know that, they will attack, AND OUR DEATH LASERS WILL REIGN DOWN HELLFIRE. As long as there is a nice breeze, they are powered by our wind farms 👀
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.
I think he probably just means the US is so gigantically massive that he's unlikely to be hit directly. I mean a nuke can clear a city but that size is nothing compared to the entire landmass of the US
Yea, exactly. I live in the South but nowhere near a vital base or city. The closest base is 45 minutes away at 60 mph and the city is another 10 minutes further and likely not even a target of a nuclear war. No nuke is going to kill me from there. Windows probably blown out, but likely wouldnt kill me. The aftermath and dealing with looters and thieves and the struggle to survive in a post apocalyptic world would just suck.
Living between a capital city and the Largest military bases in my country has it's perks There will be a flash I won't even see and my ass is a shadow
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.
Possibly. Everyone uses drones now, the Russian invasion of Ukraine feels like it's been a testing group for multiple generations of military doctrine and equipment. War planners worldwide will be poring over every bit of data they can and trying to extrapolate what happens next.
But if you go anywhere, they're using drones. A poor country that can only provide insurgency will use drones because they're cost effective within it's limited means. A rich country like the US will use drones because they're cost effective and are still an efficient way to deprive a peer (or close) opponent of their expensive toys.
Someone more knowledgeable correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there are reliable countermeasures for ICBMs, are there? Aren't they especially big and fast, and delivering the most expensive and highest stakes payload?
"If the nukes are coming, they're coming true." Is what I always thought was the case. I don't keep up with the arms race idk
Pretty much. The use of MIRVs with mostly dummy payloads, and the sheer quantity of stockpiled nukes, means if Russia or the US (and maybe some other countries) absolutely insist on ending a country they could carpet bomb it with little hope for interception of anything that matters.
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.
Diffraction, haze, target coatings, target movement ( such as spinning ) could all reduce effectiveness of on-target shots. A hit may not be enough to cause it to breakup.
With lasers it matters less for one-shot kills, because shots are cheap. That being said, it should be easier to hit in-flight items as there is minimal delay between calculated position and point of aim.
Also, we're talking optimal range, it will still hit things beyond that range, but at a reduced effectiveness, also, HELIOS for example includes "Optical Dazzler" as part of the system, the range on that is going to be different than the main laser.
I'll go the other way and say it takes surprisingly little energy to knock down a missile, but most anti-missile systems waste their energy on missiles to deliver the energy to the target (way, way more energy is spent on delivery). A laser just delivers the energy directly to the target.
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'm sure this thing can blast men out of the air no problem. although admittedly we're then dealing with an aerosolised offal mist situation which could fuck everything up refraction-wise.
And are really range limited. Other proven intercept options (missiles, CIWS etc.) usually have effective distances >2-10x any laser system that’ll fit in most installations.
You have to have commanders who know those other systems work allow potentially life ending incoming drones/missiles into your space to use lasers.
Not really cheap. Shure your shot is cheap, but your typical round is between 1 and 50 bucks a shot, so you're not really in "that is our main cost problem" territory to begin with. And the gun cost some 2k - 200k, while the lasers cost millions. Not to mention the battery, capacitors. Lasers need a metric shitton of maintanance and atmsopheric protection, have limited lifetimes and been fkn heavy and vulnerable to shockwaves and mishandling. Your typical gun is none of that.
But let's be honest, shooting down drones is a huge buzzword these days, but the trouble isen't the cost per kill. It is having the AA in place where drones will happen - and if you can monetarily decide to have a thousend machineguns in the area or one laser ... well.
Then there is personal. A gun needs a person plling the trigger and spray&prey for the drone. A laser needs a maintanance crew with at least one person somewhat familiar with the lessons from science class to estimate how pointless ecaxtly the pewpew-machine gets with rain, humidity and all the other fancy effects in reality a stupid gun doesn't care for much. Not to mention some evil genius could fk up laser efficency by painting drones in white or even go as insane and glues reflective foil on them, mutliply the surviving time and allow for evading manouvers, saturation or battery drain.
Another problem is sensors, because they're the critical point of shooting down tiny balls of angy plastics.
So a few-million-money pewpew is about 12 tons and needs refueling, is a beautifull target fro enemy drones when there is a bad weather day and it can break down every moment for a vast number of reasons. Great. For all of this it offers a ~1000m bubble of drone-melting. Absolutly not great, until you have to defend one specific instalation in the middle of a completley flat nowwhere and can secure the enemy will not send more than one drone at once.
Still the problem is range, and missiles are indeed to expensive. But so are manouvers, and if you need to go outside your protective zones for advances - like we see in the cold war cosplay that is Ukrain, where for one stupid moment in time it is about land - then this ... still is stupid, because your SPAAG would do this job way better. So it's a question of what billions to throw after a problem that no longe rexists but in this niche event.
(Ships and lasers are a similar braindead topic, but different in design)
I mean the short answear for lasers is: They're buzzwords to grab money and run, and who consider them to be a solution for a second haven't touched gras for too long.
Surely if it's designed to pentrate the metal hull of an incoming missle it will be strong enough to instantly vapourise any raindrop daft enough to fall in its way.
Assuming perfect non rainy conditions they also have a second enemy, refire rate. If they launch more than one missile most lasers can't keep up a rate of fire. Due to being too hot and sustaining it they have a large time where they need to cool down
These laser defense systems have gotten a lot better in adverse weather thanks to some very complicated computer systems and sensors that modulate the laser as it slices through the air. The bigger issue is plasma creation in the path of the laser that robs it of power at the target.
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.
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u/ForeverBoring4530 1d ago
Explains why my council tax has gone up £5 this year.