Admiral Valdemar wrote:The bulb lighting my room now has the same power.
Since the laser is hitting soft targets (lasers and armour don't mix) I don't expect the power output to be anywhere near that of the ABL or MTHEL which have longer ranges for a start anyway.
A 100W laser can actually do some pretty nasty things to you, but in a combat situation against missiles it seems pretty underpowered. It could be workable if it is meant to take out missiles at long ranges (after all, up to 10km ranges are referenced), if it continues to fire for a little while instead of "zap! it's gone!"
Edit: Eh... doing a quick calculation, it's pretty underpowered either way, even for very long ranges. Definitely unfeasible.
Last edited by Kuroneko on 2003-06-18 11:09pm, edited 1 time in total.
"The fool saith in his heart that there is no empty set. But if that were so, then the set of all such sets would be empty, and hence it would be the empty set." -- Wesley Salmon
Admiral Valdemar wrote:The bulb lighting my room now has the same power.
Since the laser is hitting soft targets (lasers and armour don't mix) I don't expect the power output to be anywhere near that of the ABL or MTHEL which have longer ranges for a start anyway.
A 100W laser can actually do some pretty nasty things to you, but in a combat situation against missiles it seems pretty underpowered. It could be workable if it is meant to take out missiles at long ranges (after all, up to 10km ranges are referenced), if it continues to fire for a little while instead of "zap! it's gone!"
Edit: Eh... doing a quick calculation, it's pretty underpowered either way, even for very long ranges. Definitely unfeasible.
You'd need that thing to be focused on a target at close range for ages, the idea is to have a single pulse either vape the thing completely or produce enough plasma burn off to throw the missile off course and screw the delicate electronics, even if the explosives don't go off.
The whole 100kW bit is based off a quote in which to speaker was simply giving an example of the efficiency, 10% or so, of modern laser systems using nice round numbers. He never said if that was actually the power of the laser.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
The whole 100kW bit is based off a quote in which to speaker was simply giving an example of the efficiency, 10% or so, of modern laser systems using nice round numbers. He never said if that was actually the power of the laser.
The NewScientist article indicated 100kW, and an old cooling article was also indicating a need to cool up to a megawatt or so of power
