The ship is powered by diesel engines, not nuclear. New surface ship classes being designed now will have increased electrical generation capacity to support lasers and railguns.
all sorts of Project Crossbow news these last couple of months. after what happened with Hathaway at Pac Tech back in the 80s I thought it'd never come around
According to a professor at University of Texas, "It would take about a 1kW laser to boil through someone’s eye to their brain in a reasonable amount of time." This laser is 150-kilowatts.
Seems doubtful. Unless the drone is stationary, it would fly right out of it's own smoke cloud.
Even with smoke, it's a pretty good bet that the total thickness of smoke particles in the path of the beam is less than that of a coat of paint. No problem for a 150 kW laser to cut through.
Water vapor might work. It takes ~3MJ to boil a liter of water from room temperature, so if the drone can put water into the laser path somehow, it may slow down the process significantly. Also depends on how long the laser can keep up the firing.
If the ship-mounted laser is powerful enough to take down a drone, it's already delivering way, way more power at a distance than the cutter shown in the video does at a few inches.
Let's say if a mirror can reflect 99% of the light that hits it, and we shot it with 1kw laser. That means 100w is still heating the mirror and it might melt or shatter it.
I'd imagine "40 years of laser research" is exactly what has happened this time around.
You can already buy lasers off Amazon or Aliexpress that can set things on fire. I'm giving it 10 years tops before we have lethal man-portable laser rifles.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 81.7 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Portland_(LPD-27)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio-class_amphibious_t...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Genius
src: https://gizmodo.com/how-many-laser-pointers-would-it-take-to...
Even with smoke, it's a pretty good bet that the total thickness of smoke particles in the path of the beam is less than that of a coat of paint. No problem for a 150 kW laser to cut through.
Let's say if a mirror can reflect 99% of the light that hits it, and we shot it with 1kw laser. That means 100w is still heating the mirror and it might melt or shatter it.
Plus, depending on how much control the attacking drone has, that's also 99% of the beam being deflected back at the ship with the laser.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/reagans-great-lie-i...
You can already buy lasers off Amazon or Aliexpress that can set things on fire. I'm giving it 10 years tops before we have lethal man-portable laser rifles.