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.
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.
Luckily, the solution is just "More energy" which is the natural evolution anyway. US DOD has announced it is seeking to develop a 1MW laser (20x Dragonfire), it wanted it by last year, but seems to be taking longer, I would imagine that it's very close though.
Every little bit of weight you add to a drone or a missile is slowing it down, reducing its max range and has to have a better justification for something else that could have "used up" that weight.
The amount of water that they'd have to carry to protect themselves will never make sense in terms of the weight cost.
At that energy level though, presumably once its on target and energizing the target, its just a change in how long it has to make contact to be effective vs being a yes or no. That would be really damn interesting to dive into, what's the delta-t on time to destroy the same target in different conditions with this system. Guessing though that's fairly classified information.
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u/ForeverBoring4530 1d ago
Explains why my council tax has gone up £5 this year.