Air Force Turns 747 Into Holster for Giant Laser (washingtonpost.com)

Eugene Leitl Eugene.Leitl at lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Mon Jul 23 02:10:28 PDT 2001


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>
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