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Comment by Varcht | Hacker News Reader

It will be interesting to see what counter measures can be deployed against the lasers. Mirrors, heat shields?

On the naval side I'd imagine just pumping a ton of sea water mist into the air should work. And if a laser hits it then...it just turns to steam...which also blocks the laser.

Simply don't move into direct line of sight of an American ship and fire over-the-horizon weapons at it? Or torpedos. Or supersonic aircraft firing supersonic anti-ship weapons (e.g. the Indian BrahMos).

Lasers, unlike SAMs, have a very limited spear of effect.

Yeah, a mere 300 to 600 km range.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1

Nope: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon#Distance_to_the_horizon

Yep. Depends on where the laser is fired from, and it depends on the target. Lasers can absolutely fire 300 to 600 km.

The article and my post are about deploying lasers to ships. You're talking about aircraft.

Ships are limited to the horizon.

That's not much help if you're in a ship, where a) you'll be close to sea level and b) incoming missiles etc. will be flying low to avoid radar, rather than high up in the air where they can be convenient targets.

Lasers can fire all the way to the moon, and it might be a great idea to put military ones on top of mountains one day, depending on the weather, but if we're talking about lasers on ships...the USS Nimitz (the largest aircraft carrier class) has a height of about 36m above the waterline, so the distance to the horizon is something like 20km or ~13 miles.

> spear of effect

Don't you mean sphere of effect?

The Retroreflector (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector) would reflect the laser back. However, I guess that laser with 30 kilowatt power would melt a cheap mirror.

I guess smoke/mist, active surface cooling and ablative armour.

Gas and smoke probably.

Sounds reasonable, sort of a micro chaff. I'm thinking too, this will accelerate hyper-maneuverable unmanned offensive drone development.

High powered lasers 15 to 30 years from now won't be powerful enough to burn through gas and smoke nearly instantly? Wouldn't the laser just destroy the smoke particulate?

The goal is refraction not obsorbtion. A 100cm x 100cm lasor needs ~10,000 times the energy to penetrate 6 inch steel plate as a 1cm x 1cm beam.

Rotation is another one.

smoke

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