On Mon, 23 Jul 2001, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
Seen some of this before. It's sexy, especially if one thinks of the propaganda value: it's basically "death from above".
You're saying it, "propaganda value". Missiles are only vulnerable during boost phase, while they still have fuel onboard. Chemical lasers are expensive, have limited operation time, are cranky, and laser tracking is a nightmare. Mirroring the surface of the missile is a cheap countermeasure, requiring orders of magnitude larger critical flux and thus driving hardware costs at the other end. You need serious energy flux and tracking precision to terminate a warhead. LEO hardware might be able to do it, but not without much, much, much lower launch costs. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBMTO : N48 10'07'' E011 33'53'' http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204 57F9CFD3: ED90 0433 EB74 E4A9 537F CFF5 86E7 629B 57F9 CFD3