The U.S. Military Is Freaked: Lasers are No Secret Weapon Against Hypersonic Missiles
The U.S. Military Is Freaked: Lasers are No Secret Weapon Against Hypersonic Missiles
The solution is shotguns with a rate of fire akin to a minigun. If you saturate the air and everything around it in a wall of bullets it's not getting through that.
But it's gonna cost ya.
Against hypersonics, this isn't really a solution.
The missiles are designed to force their way through thousands of pounds of air per second. Adding a few ounces of lead and/or hardened steel in the last few milliseconds before impact won't do much.
How to defend against hypersonic missiles:
I will need 600 billion dollars to maybe possibly build this.
Paint a fake picture of a military base on a brick wall to fool it
What about defensive zeppelins?
Maybe if they were filled with lead.
Is that header picture even one if thr US systems? I could swear I've seen that exact image before and it was the UK hyping their DragonFire tests.
Edit: yup, they pictured the wrong system
Well, the US would need to have a workable system for there to be pictures
Ha, true.
Us hardware can't perform any relevant tasks? Shocked pikachu.
no tasks, only profit
yea turns out lasers aren't magical lightsaber blades that immediately cut through anything, and actually need time to heat the surface of their target while having issues with penetrating thick or dense materials.
Just increase the power. Use a nuke to pump the laser or something
still less penetration less quick than if u used the nuke to propel a solid projectile real fast. photons have like negligible/arguably nonexistent mass, the real fun with lasers (as weapons) is using them to target enemy optics (mechanical or biological). one relatively weak but rapidly spinning laser array could permanently blind an entire unit or crowd of people nearly instantly if they don't have specialized protective equipment like high-quality mirror goggles (implausible) or camera/sensor helmets with replaceable/redundant sensors (likely doable in the future but impractical currently).
Ah, so we just need to make lightsabers, got it, that'll be $400B.
Why don't they just use the Death Star laser? George Lucas built it in 1977. Are they stupid?
It's actually a cleverly constructed miniature and is mostly only good for grilling.
Wait, they were seriously looking into lasers for this? Because I, a non-technical person could've told you it's way cheaper to make missiles that spin, not to mention the ratio of power consumption per interception/number of cheap missiles to intercept
Yeah, you don't have to be an expert to realize this was never going to work. Just another grift by the US military industrial complex.
My non-expert opinion is there's no way you could keep a laser painted on a target manuevering at mach 13 long enough to actually melt it. How long do they even have between detection and impact? DEWs are appealing because they travel at light speed and don't need to carry ammo. ___ but you have to hold your flash light on the target until it heats up enough to fail. That's fine if you've got a cruise missile puttering along at a stately pace, but not a terminally manueverable hypersonic vehicle.
Why doesn’t the US military simply excavate the Ark of Covenant buried deep beneath Antarctica? Are they stupid?
It can, however, reliably pop balloons, which renders Xi's cutting-edge attack balloons useless!
Remember: when the usa accuses you of something it's actually confessing to that very thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Genetrix
Why would they even work in the first place. Clown military
"But it worked in Star Wars"
Hey now, they worked great as a tool for getting a bunch of taxes allocated to research the fact that they can't work as a weapon. :)
But they can absolutely free an entry-level consumer DJI drone operated by a local anarchist cell!...at least until they mount mirrors on the bottom.
haha carrier go glug
US sowing imperialism: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!
US reaping blowback: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.