NCD response: because US military budget needs to be tripled.
Too credible response: lasers still diverge over distance, and atmosphere is not helping with that.
Where there are measurements that look at retroreflectors on the moon, astronomers look for single photons of return.
having enough power to do any damage while being bounced off couple times is not really possible with even near future tech.
Titan (the OG Titan) ICBM lofted a rather spicy W38 warhead, packing in a mild 4000 (ish) kilotons of nuclear hellfires with which to send your regards, as it were, and the aforementioned W38 was gift wrapped inside an enormous AVCO Mark 4 Reentry Vehicle to ensure it was kept safe and sound while making the short one way express trip.
…now, what the fuck am I on about (?)
[**Mk4 is the REAL Dildo of Consequence.**](https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-media/NASM-A19660029000-NASM2018-00918)
My question is, how fast would the ICBM need to be going for a kinetic only version to be worth it? No warhead. Actually maybe some kinetic MIRVs? With their own little solid booster engines to use when they get close.
That doesn't seem right. I calculate 4.5GJ for a 1 ton object moving at 3000m/s (rounded mach9). That'd be a mere 1/4000th of the W38s yield of 19000TJ.
OP said that at Mach 9 your projectile would have the same pound for pound energy as CONVENTIONAL high explosive.
To match nuclear, I'm not gonna do the Math, but you'd probably need to be moving at relativistic speeds.
Oh! My mistake, I assumed their point of reference was the warhead.
I don't think you'd need to go into relativistic speed ranges if it's ok to scale up the projectile. Like a 100 ton projectile at a mach 100 should be in that ballpark already.
lol, yep. I was gonna say, I’ve read a ton of hard sci fi, and while I can’t swear it’s never been written about before, I have reasonable confidence that was the first time stealthed-out weaponized asteroids were used in a mainstream work.
Even NASA themselves waded in on this idea, and while it *is* possible to transmit a decent amount of energy via orbital laser, it's far too dispersed to be used as a viable weapon for ground targets (space targets however were absolutely screwed). Even giant microwave emitters would only nominally increase an area's risk of cancer by like, 0.2%.
If you make the emitter large enough, you could absolutely achieve a small spot size on the ground.
Space-based solar power just demands low intensity to a) keep rectenna cooling feasible and b) not fry everyone who enters the beam
Eh, if the intensity of the laser at the mirrors is low, then little holes in them due to debris impacts just slightly degrades beam quality and average reflectivity. Same for space debris in the beam path, that just absorbs and scatters some of the light, and if it absorbs a large fraction of the light it will soon cease to be in the beam path
Wouldn’t mirrors be easily made “inoperable» by hitting anything?
And to keep it NCD, just throw lots of gum on those mirrors to challenge their reflectivness!
We would need an even bigger budget. There also needs to be research into defence mechanisms against space lasers. Probably ways to increase diffusion in the atmosphere by saturating it with particles. It will be very costly. In fact, you could say that the entire military budget would be smoke and mirrors.
I am not much of an astrophysicist space weapons expert – I leave that to the Flork – yet I have seen a bunch of nerds pointing a household strong laser at the moon (from a rooftop in LA), shooting the laser and detecting its return. What did they register? Was that the single photon?
A LEO or MEO mirror grid is literal orders of magnitudes less distant than the moon, and adaptive optics mirrors could handle refocussing the beam. Loss on each mirror would be low, having the beam spread out over a large mirror keeps mirror heating small, and going through the air at a reasonable angle (encountering, say, the equivalent of 25 km of sea-level air in the process) would only lose ~35% of the beam power to scattering and absorption even for relatively highly-affected 532 nm light.
If you want credible considerations, wouldn't transmitting enough power in the laser to actually damage the target just push the mirrors out of orbit? There's a concept for using that for propulsion, and that's with the intended effect being just a push, not a deathlaserboom: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser\_propulsion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion)
You can intentionally spread a laser beam just as much as you can focus it. The space mirrors could be hundreds of meters in diameter, allowing very low intensity om the mirror
> Too credible response
Also, solar sails exist (maybe only theoretically?) and while i have absolutely no idea what im talking about and therefore have no idea how much force a laser, thats highpowered enough to do actual damage on the ground, would exert on the mirrors, with distances like that they would have to be incredibly precisely angled, so even the tiniest movement would cause the laser to miss by hundreds of kilometers.
The Too Credible Response runs true. There's a game called Terra Invicta I'm playing. Laser weapons are great in space. But cannot be used to bombard any target that is inside/through atmosphere.
To add to this, lasers actually produce a significant amount of thrust in zero-g and would push any mirror off course quickly.
Looked into solar shade a while back because I thought it was a no brainer for climate control long term, and apparently the sunlight makes station keeping difficult.
I'm going to drop a whole lot of non-credible buzzwords now for brave souls to read up on
Zel'dovich
Non-linear optical mediums
Phase conjugate mirrors
Light beam reconstruction through phase conjugation
Holographic lenses
Cesium Bose-Einstein condensate light beam compression
The Dugway Zapper
Happy hunting
Those young whiper snapers in this subreddit constantly underestimate our ancestors in arms industries. If there is an idea that you have, that sounds stupid but somewhat plausible, then there probably was a program or at least a study of plausibility already done for it.
This is actually one of the scientific discoveries by Dr. Futanaga. It's about a cycle of information being forgotten after an average of 34 years. Google rule 34 futa for more information.
Dammit Brittains already developing countermeasures to the weapons of the future.
Curse their weather manipulation.
I knew there was no way someone would want to live in such a foggy, rainy, and dreary place, for no reason.
In atmosphere they would be though. A 532 nm (green, frequency-doubled Nd:YAG) laser of 10 cm diameter and 1 MW beam power would shine with a surface brightness of about half of that of direct sunlight due to scattered light
Imagine a lance of green light shooting down from the sky, cracking like a bolt of lightning as it melts a tank into slag
Because it’s a massive waste of strategic assets. Suppose you burn out the orbital mirrors shining lasers powerful enough to do ground-attack missions on the opposite side of the planet, then a third-generation vampire shows up while the system is down for maintenance, what then? Do you think magic Neutron bombs grow on trees? The void engineers built those platforms for a reason, and it wasn’t so you could do the job of a B2 at 100x the cost.
>!/s this is a reference to the Technocracy in Mage the Ascension/World of Darkness if you’re wondering what the heck I was talking about. !<
We found out the most efficient way to transmit damage a long distance is by transferring explosive devices.
Energy weapons, contrary to scifi plots, are WEAKER over a long distance compared to solid slugs. Because the energy weapon might be moving faster, but their lower mass means they degrade MUCH faster than, say, bowling balls of tungsten.
Like it or not, Energy weapons, if they ever become practical, would likely be relatively short-ranged compared to bullets. E=MC^2 . Can't fight that.
It would be more practical to just grab random asteroids and redirect them to land where ever you want with attached rockets. (The idea being you saved money and resources in NOT needing to bring the rocks up into Space from Earth first.)
E=MC² has nothing to do with that, also all weapons are energy weapons.
By accelerating something at high speed you induce kinetic energy ½mv²,(mass and speed) this is why relatively light weight bullets can still cause damage if they go supersonic (lot of energy in a small object).
The idea here is using electromagnetic waves to carry the energy to your target
You can then either rely on energy transfer to cook your target, or if the energy is high enough, ioniose the tissue and have a cancer beam.
The distance travelled is the issue. And in that respect solid mass is superior. Hence i say you are better off using energy weapons in shorter ranges.
My point is that Solid Mass is concentrated energy. Using energy weapons sound cool because they are at or near light-speed, but their lack of mass means they are not actually as destructive as we like them to be.
Ima take my barbie mirror and defend my nation (cuz im cool like that) 😌😌from dum merica that spends too much money on cool flashy laser taech👹👹👹🔥🇬🇪🇬🇪🇬🇪🇬🇪
Reminds me think of the superweapon from Mobile Suit Gundam: 00 which was a massive particle beam built on the moon that is directed by a series of satellites that redirect the beam to any target on Earth.
Have to say, an orbital particle accelerator would be far more NCD then simple lasers.
Gundam is an absolute treasure trove of space based superweapons.
We could probably create an entire flair dedicated to non-credible Gundam weapons, chief among them being the Gundam that are powered by microwave transmitters on the moon!
If you're going to have some insane spiderweb of mirrors, why not just use them to make a solar death ray and have them reflect sunlight, instead of a laser?
The biggest issue is that the array is using terrestrial light sources. The atmosphere will bend and refract light, so you're losing a lot of potential energy getting to the first convergence mirror. Then there is a second trip into the atmosphere losing energy potential through de-fraction in order to immediately send it through the atmosphere causing a third de-fraction, which then somehow bounces to a final mirror (ignoring the earth's diameter) to be sent down through the atmosphere for a 4th time... 4 trips though the atmosphere will reduce the power of any beam weapon significantly.
A more intelligent counter proposal would be to utilize our Sun's energy to bounce the ray around and have it only enter the atmosphere once. Even moving the emitters into orbit and eliminating the 3 completely useless trips through the atmosphere will result in significant gains to the destructive potential.
The Troy series of books takes place when Earth makes First Contact and it does not go well, and with the broader galactic community fairly uninterested in helping us get the boot off until people discover that maple syrup is basically crack for certain species, once the money rolls in there is a frantic search for a way to defend the solar system and they happen on a brilliant low cost solution. A shit ton of mirrors scattered around the solar system which are mostly used for mining (the process was actually kind of neat they would take an asteroid and put it into a spin then start melting it at a certain temperature with the laser which would melt the metals, and the spin would cause the different elements to separate out from each other as it formed a sort of disc. Not sure if it works but it seems cool as fuck) which would then be combined into one giga laser that as of the end of trilogy was closing in on an exowatt of output
Hi I've studied this professionally. The difficulties are multi fold, the biggest being that it doesn't make sense yet for the cost. So you can space to space or space to ground, lasers would rule space to space if you can keep it from frying the target satellite. For space to ground you have the atmosphere and clouds which can straight up block the laser so for this microwaves are preferred. There are also inefficiencies along the whole chain from initial capture to conversion to RF or laser, then again in the capture side and so right now to get across the all these inefficiencies you would need a solar array about the size of a football field.
Oh I think misunderstood the assignment
Because earth is flat and the beam would go right trough...earth is also kinda flobbery its why submarines go missing all the time they dive to deep and plop trough into space
[https://youtube.com/shorts/D4X7CHaiyao?si=ak8jg5c7vhP5X5a6](https://youtube.com/shorts/D4X7CHaiyao?si=ak8jg5c7vhP5X5a6)
Also: light dispersion. Just for comparison, in space ultraviolet radiation is so intence, you will get radiation burn in a few minutes of exposure (maybe even less). On Earth -- not so much
Instead of normal lasers, why not use a solid laser beam made of artillery shells with tracers? It's making us look scarier to the enemies with psyops, and when they realize it's just ricochets directed at specific areas, it makes us even scarier than having lasers would, considering the amount of bullets that we sent them, and the amount of money keeping reflecting panels in a stationary orbit. (Lasers would still push them away, bit nowhere near a solid tracer would.) And we'd just be using Isaac Newtons law of motion to increase the range of artillery.
Below Average intelligence response: Just build more Nukes 4head
Average intelligence response: Yes! With SpaceX's starship we can do this!!!
Above Average intelligence response: Just build more Nukes 4head
Pretty sure they tried almost the same concept before. Except this was an anti ballistic missile laser. Some spies snuck behind soviet lines and shot off a nuclear missile. Didn't work.. laser missed. Luckily, the spies like us were able to divert the missile into space where it exploded harmlessly.
Even if you could solve the dispersion problem, mirrors are a reversible system so you run into the first law of thermodynamics - you can't use optics to transfer energy from somewhere colder to somewhere warmer no matter how many beams you focus in the same place, so at best you could increase the temperature of the target to the same temperature as your laser batteries.
You could of course have laser batteries that tolerate more heat than the target, but you're never gonna get an ion cannon like boom blast unless you're cooking something off.
You'd be far better off just putting giant magnifying glasses in space that focus the rays from the sun, since the sun is way hotter than your laser batteries are. Hopefully.
Okay, we can build superweapons from Gundam. But we need to at least build the mobile-suits first, deal? I want my Kampfer, then you can microwave some civilians.
NCD response: because US military budget needs to be tripled. Too credible response: lasers still diverge over distance, and atmosphere is not helping with that. Where there are measurements that look at retroreflectors on the moon, astronomers look for single photons of return. having enough power to do any damage while being bounced off couple times is not really possible with even near future tech.
Just put the lasers on the moon and replace the melted mirrors lol.
Just drop rocks from space. I feel like we've been here before though.
The tungsten dildo of consequences
Titan (the OG Titan) ICBM lofted a rather spicy W38 warhead, packing in a mild 4000 (ish) kilotons of nuclear hellfires with which to send your regards, as it were, and the aforementioned W38 was gift wrapped inside an enormous AVCO Mark 4 Reentry Vehicle to ensure it was kept safe and sound while making the short one way express trip. …now, what the fuck am I on about (?) [**Mk4 is the REAL Dildo of Consequence.**](https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-media/NASM-A19660029000-NASM2018-00918)
My question is, how fast would the ICBM need to be going for a kinetic only version to be worth it? No warhead. Actually maybe some kinetic MIRVs? With their own little solid booster engines to use when they get close.
If I recall correctly, Mach 9. At that speed, the kinetic energy of the projectile would be equivalent to the same amount of high explosive.
Just get them up to an appreciable fraction of c and let relativity sort things out.
That doesn't seem right. I calculate 4.5GJ for a 1 ton object moving at 3000m/s (rounded mach9). That'd be a mere 1/4000th of the W38s yield of 19000TJ.
OP said that at Mach 9 your projectile would have the same pound for pound energy as CONVENTIONAL high explosive. To match nuclear, I'm not gonna do the Math, but you'd probably need to be moving at relativistic speeds.
Oh! My mistake, I assumed their point of reference was the warhead. I don't think you'd need to go into relativistic speed ranges if it's ok to scale up the projectile. Like a 100 ton projectile at a mach 100 should be in that ballpark already.
As launch costs go down and we get better at on orbit manufacturing we are more likely to get the super long steel dildo of consequences
Wanna see my rods?
And make sure to give those rocks stealth coating.
What is The Expanse doing in my NCD?
Bro get the fuck outta here, rock drops are all Heinlein baby. 1966
The stealth coating is from the expanse bro.
lol, yep. I was gonna say, I’ve read a ton of hard sci fi, and while I can’t swear it’s never been written about before, I have reasonable confidence that was the first time stealthed-out weaponized asteroids were used in a mainstream work.
Timothy Zahn used it in *Dark Force Rising* (1992), a Star Wars novel.
It was actually in The Last Command, but yes you're right.
It's time for more Deep Thoughts with Heinlein.
Second time in a week!
Just thinking about Nemesis Games gives me a headache
Marco joins the chat
Mining operation on the moon make rockets there to colonize the rest of the solar system and use the rocks to attack dictatorships on earth.
actually i'm pretty sure the beginning part of SDI was called "smart pebbles"
Yeah. Opps, Tunguska 2.0. How unlucky.... Russia is the biggest nation on earth. Its just statistics thst it would get hit. Why not Moscow? Bad luck.
We can’t even predict where satellites with relatively controlled de-orbits land.
That's because those satellites aren't equiped with a JDAM set.
Find an Axis shaped rock then we will discuss about it
Just reroute all reserve power to the lasers!
So? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9rFta7UHQY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9rFta7UHQY)
Exactly we need to send this to biden asap.
It'd be like sneezing on the enemy from 50 yards away
Almost like farting in their general direction.
Even NASA themselves waded in on this idea, and while it *is* possible to transmit a decent amount of energy via orbital laser, it's far too dispersed to be used as a viable weapon for ground targets (space targets however were absolutely screwed). Even giant microwave emitters would only nominally increase an area's risk of cancer by like, 0.2%.
Microwave radiation is non-ionizing, so it wouldn't affect cancer rates at all. It might heat up the area slightly, but that's about it.
The main problem with the microwave transmitter was the rectenna would have to be \~10km in diameter for optimal recieving.
If you make the emitter large enough, you could absolutely achieve a small spot size on the ground. Space-based solar power just demands low intensity to a) keep rectenna cooling feasible and b) not fry everyone who enters the beam
Plus any debris or trash flying in orbit will disable whole system
I like random disco ball of space death
Who wouldn’t? That’s the intended use of space!
Eh, if the intensity of the laser at the mirrors is low, then little holes in them due to debris impacts just slightly degrades beam quality and average reflectivity. Same for space debris in the beam path, that just absorbs and scatters some of the light, and if it absorbs a large fraction of the light it will soon cease to be in the beam path
Wouldn’t mirrors be easily made “inoperable» by hitting anything? And to keep it NCD, just throw lots of gum on those mirrors to challenge their reflectivness!
Can we add big floating magnifying glasses between each mirror?
NCD response: We need a bigger mirror budget to defend against space lasers.
We would need an even bigger budget. There also needs to be research into defence mechanisms against space lasers. Probably ways to increase diffusion in the atmosphere by saturating it with particles. It will be very costly. In fact, you could say that the entire military budget would be smoke and mirrors.
Bomb-pumped lasers anyone?
Add bald eagle screaming, "wtf is a KILOMETER", US anthem, and it would quadruple
if lasers diverge use parabola mirrors and the sun indstead
So we build a space elevator, but there's no elevator. It's just mirrors redirecting a laser up into orbit! Ez fix
I am not much of an astrophysicist space weapons expert – I leave that to the Flork – yet I have seen a bunch of nerds pointing a household strong laser at the moon (from a rooftop in LA), shooting the laser and detecting its return. What did they register? Was that the single photon?
A LEO or MEO mirror grid is literal orders of magnitudes less distant than the moon, and adaptive optics mirrors could handle refocussing the beam. Loss on each mirror would be low, having the beam spread out over a large mirror keeps mirror heating small, and going through the air at a reasonable angle (encountering, say, the equivalent of 25 km of sea-level air in the process) would only lose ~35% of the beam power to scattering and absorption even for relatively highly-affected 532 nm light.
If you want credible considerations, wouldn't transmitting enough power in the laser to actually damage the target just push the mirrors out of orbit? There's a concept for using that for propulsion, and that's with the intended effect being just a push, not a deathlaserboom: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser\_propulsion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion)
So triple the space mirrors then
That’s why we need GRAZERs in space!
i think that keeping the mirror in place and not overheating would be the bigger problem, like the mirrors themself could refocus the beams again
You can intentionally spread a laser beam just as much as you can focus it. The space mirrors could be hundreds of meters in diameter, allowing very low intensity om the mirror
Lemme introduce you to the ugga dugga version aka tungsten rod from orbit (it still suffers the atmosphere but it’s kinda more efficient)
What if you focus the lasers? You can focus lasers on a point if you know the distance to the target.
You had me at "tripled."
> Too credible response Also, solar sails exist (maybe only theoretically?) and while i have absolutely no idea what im talking about and therefore have no idea how much force a laser, thats highpowered enough to do actual damage on the ground, would exert on the mirrors, with distances like that they would have to be incredibly precisely angled, so even the tiniest movement would cause the laser to miss by hundreds of kilometers.
You would absolutely need to compensate for the photon pressure, yes. But this is a quantity that can be calculated, and corrected for.
Just build the lasers in space then, I heard the jews already did that once
The Too Credible Response runs true. There's a game called Terra Invicta I'm playing. Laser weapons are great in space. But cannot be used to bombard any target that is inside/through atmosphere.
Short and easy response: Because Starship doesn't work.
To add to this, lasers actually produce a significant amount of thrust in zero-g and would push any mirror off course quickly. Looked into solar shade a while back because I thought it was a no brainer for climate control long term, and apparently the sunlight makes station keeping difficult.
I'm going to drop a whole lot of non-credible buzzwords now for brave souls to read up on Zel'dovich Non-linear optical mediums Phase conjugate mirrors Light beam reconstruction through phase conjugation Holographic lenses Cesium Bose-Einstein condensate light beam compression The Dugway Zapper Happy hunting
if you can make a beam or light that collimated you could accelerate creation of the Dyson sphere by a few eons
We can reasonably do it by the year 4352
[You are](https://space.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/QuickLooks/rmeQL.html) [about 34 years late](https://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/R/RME.html)
Those young whiper snapers in this subreddit constantly underestimate our ancestors in arms industries. If there is an idea that you have, that sounds stupid but somewhat plausible, then there probably was a program or at least a study of plausibility already done for it.
This is actually one of the scientific discoveries by Dr. Futanaga. It's about a cycle of information being forgotten after an average of 34 years. Google rule 34 futa for more information.
34, you say [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27\_heat\_ray](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_heat_ray) (but in space)
Bro stole the secret garmillon schematics.
Homie been watching a little too much space operas lately
Exactly what I thought. Tho I believe the Gammies used something more akin to plasma or phasers than a laser
I'm pretty sure its just a really big positron cannon like most if the garmillon ships use.
Ehh I feel that the beam is, at least, a lot more coherent. It seems concentrated and has a comparatively high MV.
My first thought went to C&C Generals Particle Cannon followed quickly by the Pluto weapons. Glory to General Townes and Gamilion
Beat me to the punch. Ghale gamillas 😐🤚
How do you hit UK when it’s foggy for 364 days out of 365?
Dammit Brittains already developing countermeasures to the weapons of the future. Curse their weather manipulation. I knew there was no way someone would want to live in such a foggy, rainy, and dreary place, for no reason.
Under megawatts of laser illumination, the fog will rapidly evaporate :)
Why use visible frequencies that can't pass through clouds if you could just go with fun, more dangerous, and invisible ones such as uv or x-rays?
You'd have to get rid of all that pesky atmosphere first. It's a price we're willing to pay, though.
I have just the thing sir, the boys in r&d have been working on this hydrogen fluorine rocket for a while…
Cyclonic torpedoes ought to help with that
I hear the Imperial Taiidan might have just the tool for the job.
It does work. Apparently according to some reports Jews are doing this already.
On behalf of the Jewish Cabal, I regret to inform you that we have a monopoly on lasers in space.
[THEY ARE IN SPACE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz7JGCj4Q5k)
Particles Cannon Activated
Big ass obelisk of light
Well, because the lasers wouldn't be visible going through the vacuum of space Meaning the spectacle wouldn't be worth the effort
In atmosphere they would be though. A 532 nm (green, frequency-doubled Nd:YAG) laser of 10 cm diameter and 1 MW beam power would shine with a surface brightness of about half of that of direct sunlight due to scattered light Imagine a lance of green light shooting down from the sky, cracking like a bolt of lightning as it melts a tank into slag
Inverse-square law likes to ruin things.
Because it’s a massive waste of strategic assets. Suppose you burn out the orbital mirrors shining lasers powerful enough to do ground-attack missions on the opposite side of the planet, then a third-generation vampire shows up while the system is down for maintenance, what then? Do you think magic Neutron bombs grow on trees? The void engineers built those platforms for a reason, and it wasn’t so you could do the job of a B2 at 100x the cost. >!/s this is a reference to the Technocracy in Mage the Ascension/World of Darkness if you’re wondering what the heck I was talking about. !<
What if the enemy has a comically large mirror of their own?
The system is already explained in [this documentary](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0090056/).
It did work, Tom Clancy documented it in The Cardinal of the Kremlin.
Also Dale Brown in Flight of the Old Dog.
That's some gundam Requiem shit.
We found out the most efficient way to transmit damage a long distance is by transferring explosive devices. Energy weapons, contrary to scifi plots, are WEAKER over a long distance compared to solid slugs. Because the energy weapon might be moving faster, but their lower mass means they degrade MUCH faster than, say, bowling balls of tungsten. Like it or not, Energy weapons, if they ever become practical, would likely be relatively short-ranged compared to bullets. E=MC^2 . Can't fight that. It would be more practical to just grab random asteroids and redirect them to land where ever you want with attached rockets. (The idea being you saved money and resources in NOT needing to bring the rocks up into Space from Earth first.)
E=MC² has nothing to do with that, also all weapons are energy weapons. By accelerating something at high speed you induce kinetic energy ½mv²,(mass and speed) this is why relatively light weight bullets can still cause damage if they go supersonic (lot of energy in a small object). The idea here is using electromagnetic waves to carry the energy to your target You can then either rely on energy transfer to cook your target, or if the energy is high enough, ioniose the tissue and have a cancer beam.
The distance travelled is the issue. And in that respect solid mass is superior. Hence i say you are better off using energy weapons in shorter ranges.
My point is that Solid Mass is concentrated energy. Using energy weapons sound cool because they are at or near light-speed, but their lack of mass means they are not actually as destructive as we like them to be.
Why doubt a majestic idea before trying it out?
It would and half of all the Starlink every launch are actually mirrors.
Energy lose
Brother this is just Excalibur from Ace Combat Zero but more complex.
No its the same level of complexity. That had satellites to help it extend its range too.
This is an Ace Combat Super weapon
Yeah its called Excalibur from Ace Combat 0. It even had a series of satellites that helped extend its range to OTH
why havent wwe build this yet are we stupid?
Because the Jews won't let us use their super cool space lasers 😡
Fun fact: Belka Excalibur
So, you're asking about the 80's era SDI [Zenith Star](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenith_Star) program?
Because if they had a mirror they could shoot it right back at you.
Dispersion. Unfortunately, lasers aren't perfectly coherent collimated light. They're close, but not close enough to set the Kremlin on fire.
I love that half the time some cookery insane shit is brought up on this sub it's already been dreamed by space battleship yamato
Wasnt this a whole ass weapon in that space battleship yamato anime
Because of Elon Muskovite
Military Industrial Complex be like WRITE THAT DOWN, WRITE THAT DOWN!!
Cats! We can't have anything really powerful with lasers!
Ima take my barbie mirror and defend my nation (cuz im cool like that) 😌😌from dum merica that spends too much money on cool flashy laser taech👹👹👹🔥🇬🇪🇬🇪🇬🇪🇬🇪
Don't cross streams
Oh it works. That’s how they measure sea level rise, glacier height, etc. Scaling that up to be super powerful is another question entirely.
It just wouldn’t
Reminds me think of the superweapon from Mobile Suit Gundam: 00 which was a massive particle beam built on the moon that is directed by a series of satellites that redirect the beam to any target on Earth. Have to say, an orbital particle accelerator would be far more NCD then simple lasers.
I thought they also had it in Gundam SEED but that didn't have mirrors.
Gundam is an absolute treasure trove of space based superweapons. We could probably create an entire flair dedicated to non-credible Gundam weapons, chief among them being the Gundam that are powered by microwave transmitters on the moon!
You're going to run afoul of the inverse square law and atmospheric scattering.
Fun fact With lenses you can just use the sun
If you're going to have some insane spiderweb of mirrors, why not just use them to make a solar death ray and have them reflect sunlight, instead of a laser?
The biggest issue is that the array is using terrestrial light sources. The atmosphere will bend and refract light, so you're losing a lot of potential energy getting to the first convergence mirror. Then there is a second trip into the atmosphere losing energy potential through de-fraction in order to immediately send it through the atmosphere causing a third de-fraction, which then somehow bounces to a final mirror (ignoring the earth's diameter) to be sent down through the atmosphere for a 4th time... 4 trips though the atmosphere will reduce the power of any beam weapon significantly. A more intelligent counter proposal would be to utilize our Sun's energy to bounce the ray around and have it only enter the atmosphere once. Even moving the emitters into orbit and eliminating the 3 completely useless trips through the atmosphere will result in significant gains to the destructive potential.
The Troy series of books takes place when Earth makes First Contact and it does not go well, and with the broader galactic community fairly uninterested in helping us get the boot off until people discover that maple syrup is basically crack for certain species, once the money rolls in there is a frantic search for a way to defend the solar system and they happen on a brilliant low cost solution. A shit ton of mirrors scattered around the solar system which are mostly used for mining (the process was actually kind of neat they would take an asteroid and put it into a spin then start melting it at a certain temperature with the laser which would melt the metals, and the spin would cause the different elements to separate out from each other as it formed a sort of disc. Not sure if it works but it seems cool as fuck) which would then be combined into one giga laser that as of the end of trilogy was closing in on an exowatt of output
Larry Niven has high powered laser arrays for interplanetary communication. Man Kzin show up and someone remembers that lasers are *also* weapons.
Hi I've studied this professionally. The difficulties are multi fold, the biggest being that it doesn't make sense yet for the cost. So you can space to space or space to ground, lasers would rule space to space if you can keep it from frying the target satellite. For space to ground you have the atmosphere and clouds which can straight up block the laser so for this microwaves are preferred. There are also inefficiencies along the whole chain from initial capture to conversion to RF or laser, then again in the capture side and so right now to get across the all these inefficiencies you would need a solar array about the size of a football field. Oh I think misunderstood the assignment
Because earth is flat and the beam would go right trough...earth is also kinda flobbery its why submarines go missing all the time they dive to deep and plop trough into space
If only there already was some sort of high energy thing in the sky so we wouldn't have to shoot the laser from earth
It's expensive making a 50,000 square mile laser pointer, let alone 3!
We fucking up civilian flights with this one
[https://youtube.com/shorts/D4X7CHaiyao?si=ak8jg5c7vhP5X5a6](https://youtube.com/shorts/D4X7CHaiyao?si=ak8jg5c7vhP5X5a6) Also: light dispersion. Just for comparison, in space ultraviolet radiation is so intence, you will get radiation burn in a few minutes of exposure (maybe even less). On Earth -- not so much
Before get into how it works, can we discuss the thermonuclear tampons and why we need to bank shot them into other countries via space reflectors?
Is this a fucking star blazers reference?
The problem is that [you're thinking too small.](https://robotech.fandom.com/wiki/Grand_Cannon)
Getting high powered lasers through the atmosphere is a bitch and a half. You’re better off investing in ways to get those lasers in orbit.
Instead of normal lasers, why not use a solid laser beam made of artillery shells with tracers? It's making us look scarier to the enemies with psyops, and when they realize it's just ricochets directed at specific areas, it makes us even scarier than having lasers would, considering the amount of bullets that we sent them, and the amount of money keeping reflecting panels in a stationary orbit. (Lasers would still push them away, bit nowhere near a solid tracer would.) And we'd just be using Isaac Newtons law of motion to increase the range of artillery.
not enough mirrors or lasers TRIPLE THE MOTHERFUCKING DEFENCE BUDGET 🦅🦅🦅
Why not just focus sunlight while you are at it with a huge magnifying glass lol
Below Average intelligence response: Just build more Nukes 4head Average intelligence response: Yes! With SpaceX's starship we can do this!!! Above Average intelligence response: Just build more Nukes 4head
Why don't we just build a Dyson sphere around Earth and bounce lasers from it?
face raiders reference?????????
Pretty sure they tried almost the same concept before. Except this was an anti ballistic missile laser. Some spies snuck behind soviet lines and shot off a nuclear missile. Didn't work.. laser missed. Luckily, the spies like us were able to divert the missile into space where it exploded harmlessly.
pew pew.
You joke, but.... >w>
This is the macguffin from Cardinal in the Kremlin
Even if you could solve the dispersion problem, mirrors are a reversible system so you run into the first law of thermodynamics - you can't use optics to transfer energy from somewhere colder to somewhere warmer no matter how many beams you focus in the same place, so at best you could increase the temperature of the target to the same temperature as your laser batteries. You could of course have laser batteries that tolerate more heat than the target, but you're never gonna get an ion cannon like boom blast unless you're cooking something off. You'd be far better off just putting giant magnifying glasses in space that focus the rays from the sun, since the sun is way hotter than your laser batteries are. Hopefully.
Okay, we can build superweapons from Gundam. But we need to at least build the mobile-suits first, deal? I want my Kampfer, then you can microwave some civilians.
US and Japan unite to laserbomb Ukraine ?
Look up Excalibur IV Ace Combat on youtube Your welcome
Relies on Musk not kissing Putin's ass. Sorry, "coming up with a solution to broker peace" that just so happens to be exactly the terms Putin wants.