this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Palestine

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A community for everything related to Palestine and the occupation currently underway by the occupying force known as Israel.

Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Existence is resistance for Palestinians.

Please refer to Israel as Occupied Palestine, or occupied territories. The IDF is a fascist and ethnonationalist occupying force. Israelis are settlers. We understand however that the imperial narrative (which tries to legitimise Israel) is internalised in the imperial core and slip-ups are naturally expected.

We always take the sides of Palestine and Palestinians and are unapologetic about it. Israel is an occupying power whose "defence force"'s (note the contradiction) sole purpose for existing is to push Palestinians out so they can resettle their rightful land. If you have anything positive to say about Israel we do not care.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Wonder how effective that is, actually.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You remember back in WWII when Nazi Germany was making goofy ahh weapons

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Frantic, delusional, desperate. As good a sign as one's knees buckling.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly laser defenses against rockets are not the craziest idea in the world, you definitely reduce the amount of debris. However, they just started deploying that system like this week I believe, so it is basically untested in real world scenarios. I doubt it was ready to be used yet.

It could be a surprise success but I doubt it. Might work a bit better against slower moving targets that are easier to track, like drones. I also would wonder how often it can be fired. It's pulling a lot of power per firing, I doubt it can be rapid-fired in the volume they'd need to intercept the volume of Hamas rockets being fired.

Even if it worked perfectly, it would still cost several times the cost of a hamas rocket per firing.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

The main issues tend to be that lasers need clear weather conditions, which likely isn't a problem there, the power consumption, and heat dissipation. The other two problems are kinda hard to solve. If you're intercepting one or two missiles, it works fine, but if you have thousands coming in then the system either overheats or it needs more electricity than you can produce.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Even extremely hot lasers, you have to keep trained on a single spot to have them burn through anything. The idea that you could reliably do this on a spinning, flying rocket in realtime seems pretty incredible.

Laser beams are also generally easily defeated by fog or smoke or clouds, which is already abundant in any warzone but which could surely be easily added as a countermeasure.

If these things work at all, there are likely many caveats.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

To add to this, the alternative to trying to slow burn through a rocket like you mentioned is to use pulse lasers, but not only do they still suffer from blooming, they're also a massive power drain by comparison and unlikely to be viable for long because of that