Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Curious About the Airborne Laser

Re: Curious About the Airborne Laser

As with any fixed or mobile weapon system, you need to have it in the right place at the right time.

Perhaps the plan is to recreate the magnificent flying circus that was Strategic Air Command and have permanent relays of these craft cruising the margins of the USA, with air tanker support. Probably cheaper to install large numbers of fixed ground lasers, although perhaps an important thing is getting above the weather, which justifies the airborne setup.

There will be limitation on the distance you can propogate a "killing power" laser through the atmosphere due to beam distortion and absorption, made worse if the beam energy becomes very high since it will then start to ionize the atmosphere as it passes.

Therefore you need a lot of them.

So it will be expensive to build, expensive to run, and may have some problems in application, but that's as far as I can speculate...

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