On Mon, 23 Jul 2001, Steve Schear wrote:

I have a hard time imagining that a mirrored and faceted vehicle exterior would provide enough absorption to enable this mechanism, otherwise the laser's own mirrors would like destruct from the same exposure.

Not necessarily, if the beam is focused on the target but its intensity is lower at the source. If I'm not mistaken, the 747 stuff does precisely this, even incorporating adaptive optics to combat atmospheric distortion. But on the whole you're probably still probably -- this does sound more like starwars than efficient anti-missile technology. But I also think the question Choate posed is a valid one: what happens when the target is *not* a ballistic missile, but people, equipment and vehicles on the ground, normal aircraft, or air-to-air missiles? One would think that the lower velocity differentials and expected distance-to-target make aiming much easier, and that effective counter-measures would be significantly more difficult to erect, considering that such conventional targets have properties very different from those of ballistic missiles (e.g. aircraft raise questions of aerodynamics and payload efficiency, wearable materials with albedos high enough are difficult to come up with, rotation and aerodynamic engineering cannot be used to dissipate the heat generated by a hit, people/cars/tanks/whathaveyou often need to be difficult to spot using aerial and satellite imaging, and so on). Such weapons capability could be *quite* useful, especially if the 747 can be effectively defended against anti-aircraft missiles, and the laser has a range and targeting capability on par with anti-ballistic missile applications. Hits on critical infrastructure, control over a nation's airspace, death-from-above FUD, that sort of thing. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy@iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front