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

[Sampo Syreeni]

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 at iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front