137
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
137 points (95.4% liked)
United Kingdom
4038 readers
420 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in [email protected] or [email protected]
More serious politics should go in [email protected].
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Grab some popcorn and search YouTube for "mirror vs solar death ray."
Spoiler: magnifying glass plus sunlight obliterate mirror within seconds.
Yes, a small, stationery, "Walmart mirror" would be destroyed easily. Probably without using a death ray.
But military grade glass and cooling (i.e. heatsink) can do wonders.
I'm sure some creative anti-laser technology exists, or will exist, if these laser weapons become more common.
Even infrared reflecting paint + additional cooling might be an option.
Keep in ming that the "target" could have a weapon like this to fire back... No one wins.
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.