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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

I don't get your reasoning? Lasers need line of sight and hit a very small area, missiles can travel long distances and hit a massive area.

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Even taking out a small area in today's modern combat fighters would do serious damage, and travelling at the speed of light there isn't much that maneuverability or current defensive countermeasure can do to deter a laser.

Go high enough, and you can have LOS to anything within half the planet of you. Wait for the world to spin a bit, and you have LOS to the other half.

Perhaps the catch being that if you have LOS to half the planet then half the planet has LOS to you and presumably its a lot easier to build and operate a high energy laser on the ground rather than in high orbit.

Missile-launched laser platforms.

You don't have to loiter for all time.

Loitering in space is near-free.

That said, I'm thinking pumped-laser-tipped missiles could be very effective as e.g. anti-ship weapons. You could launch one straight up from your territory, and have it snipe the enemy ship from far away. The enemy would have to monitor a large portion of the sky for relatively small objects and react instantly with lasers of their own to counter that.

EDIT: I suspect these could be made into pumped-laser shells; good luck countering one that's launched from beyond the horizon.

Ships would appear to have access to an idea anti laser countermeasure - spray lots of water into the air!

Water is also a good RF screen, so such shield would also effectively blind and cripple the ship. Even discounting the energy use, no way they could keep that up continuously. Ramp-up time is probably large enough too (on the order of seconds), making surprise attacks very feasible. Not an ideal countermeasure, though I'm not sure what would be, beyond packing more ablative armor.

If you're in a position to be aware of an imminent attack, ramp-time is probably within reason. Power reqirements are fairly modest by military standards -- a small fireboat can pump impresive quantities of water, and since the goal in defence / obscuring is to blind (and absorb energy), a finer atomised mist would be more effective. Filter and system fouling is likely a bigger concern.

True bolt-from-the-blue attacks are rare, though possible.

The spray profile could be modified to enable sensor detection, or alternative (off-ship, buoy, balloon, drone, ...) sensor placement could enable both eyes and shields.

Fog or smoke generators also.

The terrain offers few concealment opportunities, though it is high ground. Sort of.

More high, less ground.

Is this a weird way of describing satellites?

Well, missiles tend to follow parabolas rather than orbits - apart from the Soviet FOBS, but that required a very large ICBM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment...

Missile size varies generally with range. Tactical, short-range, cruise, and drone-based platforms can be modest and stealthy.

Suborbital missiles are not satellites.

So: no.

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