On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, Trei, Peter wrote:
> Lasers as weapons have 3 major modes of action.
>
> 1. Blinding sensors. This could be temporary, or permanent,
> 2. Burn-through. If enough energy is absorbed by the target, it
> 3. Ablative blast. A short, intense hit with a laser can cause the
2 & 3 are the same thing with different dwell times. Mirroring works
quite well as a defense against this, as does tessellating the surface. So
does rotating the target along the flight axis.
> > With the engines of a B2 bomber maybe...
Which would fit quite nicely in a modern jet liner body...
> Wavelength changing won't help with clouds much (that's why they're white).
Bullshit, IR is perfect for cutting right through the clouds as well as
hiding the laser from eyball mark 1 (which is a major drawback for -any-
visible optical weapon; as the Marines say, if you can see it, you can
kill it).
> Suspended droplets of water are going to disperse any wavelength they don't
> absorb.
Again, bullshit. As long as the wavelength of the laser is several times
the particle and inter-particle size the beam will experience very litte
attenuation. Again IR is the perfect band.
> At even higher powers, the air itself will ionize. The plasma is highly
> absorbtive.
And very conductive, if you've got power levels like this you then use two
laser to create a complete circuit and pass high voltage down the plasma
conduits. There is at least one stun gun on the market that is based on
this principle. It uses green lasers to ionize the air and then discharges
a current down the two plasma tubes. Works quite well.
> Some of these problems can be avoided by using very short pulses.
Again you get into dwell, the short pulses -must- be made up for by
increasing the PRR and this defeats the who purpose of the short pulses
since you need more of them (we're talking an integration effect here
so it doesn't take much to understand why duty cycle isn't as important
as you make it out to be).
--
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Anais Nin www.open-forge.org
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