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DragonFire: UK fires high-power laser at aerial targets for first time - with 'intense beam of light' able to cut through drones
(news.sky.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
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You can build lasers that can change thier wavelength (such as an electron wiggler). With a wide enough bandwidth most materials won't be reflective at some frequency. It's easy to find this frequency by sweeping the vehicle and detecting reflections. This could be done prior to destruction levels of laser power.
This technology is for use against small and cheap drones. If you fire costly missiles at a 2k drone. The people sending the 2k drones will eventually win out as the defending country can no longer economically support the war. These laser weapons bring the cost down to pounds not 10/100s thousands of pounds per missile. As the target is small drones their ability to carry large deflectors with cooling is limited (payload and range will be diminished).
These small drones couldn't carry such a weapon. The best they could manage is a one shoot retro reflector. This is a mirror that reflect in the same direction as the source light. Most would burn out in a very short time with this type of weapon.
The instantaneous power would be hard for many aircraft to generate. So this type of systems would be limited to ground based, large ships and possibly well configured jet engines aircraft.
The countermeasures will be interesting, then.
The offensive potential, terrifying.
This of weapon will inspire very creative counter measures. If it's deployed in Ukraine I think we would see another big leap in how small drones are used. Lots of innovations happened with drones there, whilst exciting from an engineering point of view the human cost is scary.