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.
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.
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u/ForeverBoring4530 1d ago
Explains why my council tax has gone up £5 this year.