Counterargument:
The US military has in the past used some large vehicle mounted beam weapons that make your skin burn like all hell, such as the Active Denial System, and I wonder if those could be deflected as well or if they’re the part of the spectrum that needs more sophisticated shielding?
Those aren’t lasers, they’re millimeter-wave radio beams.
Yes, they can be deflected pretty easily, but you’ll need metal shield that’s big enough to entirely hide behind.
Laser tanks are impractical. What if the enemy wears mirrored shades? That laser goes right back and kills you instead. You don’t want your 100 million dollar tank to be taken out by a pair of Ray-Bans.
We can put shades on the tank to bounce it right back
Classic,but inappropriate. Tanks should not wear aviators, but big chunky goggle style Warby Parkers on sale $1.89
Str8 outta Fort Sill, Oklahoma BITCHEZ
WAR… is… disco?
Next your gonna tell me the raving rabbits are the ones driving them.
I guess war does change.
Disco Demolition Night. This type of war is not unprecedented.
The Army has officially deployed a pair of high-energy lasers overseas to blast incoming enemy drones out of the sky, the service recently confirmed, marking a major milestone for the U.S. military’s ongoing development of futuristic directed-energy weapons.
The 20-kilowatt Palletized High Energy Laser, or P-HEL, “is currently deployed to support the Army’s mission” in an undisclosed location abroad, a spokesman for the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, which manages its directed-energy portfolio, told Military.com.
I think the bigger concern is enemy UAVs wearing shades.
Big ass solar panels on the drone to capture the energy and charge the drones battery
Yay for undisclosed location! Slava Ukraini!
It could potentially be in the red sea.
I would be fine with that. I’m just a laser loiterer who thinks pirates need to be wiped off the face of the earth in a sizzling manner.
What if they do this
I HATE THIS SO MUCH
and its soo awesome
Doesn’t that cause a nuclear explosion?
The moment those mirrors stop being perfectly shiny they begin thermal collapse. Which is the real reason mirrors exposed to the atmosphere can’t be used as targeting optics.
That’s when you go back to explosives, you don’t even need shrapnel anymore, they are already wearing it!
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This was a real concept for the anti-ICMB 747. The idea was to loiter it outside air defense range and then send drones in as reflectors to target the lasers much closer to the threat.
Interesting! Yeah, I think in the right atmospheric conditions this could absolutely work.
Why it’s NCD, as drawn, is that shells already exist and do exactly this when fired on an indirect arc.
Buddy called inverse-square law
Inverse square law is just a geometric limitation, focus your lasers more, problem solved.
“You see, men, the lethal range is limited by this airy disk… stop giggling!”
I only we had something we could fire that do almost the same arc as that. That would be ballin’! So I’d call it ballistics
Ridiculous! You would basically need the mass of a planet for that to work.
Dangit! We won’t find that anywhere on Earth!
You fools. Look up!
It’s not a “moonshot,” it’s a 360 no-scope.
That would work if the earth wasn’t flat. As it is, you need to transport the artillery below their position and shoot them from there. Like Ender shooting through the ice clouds.
Aiming such a thing would be more than an art…
the tank is confused by its own reflection and attempts to fight itself
This is why certain Army weapons are not appropriate for the Marines
Sigh.
Because good lasers are red.
…the color of a blaster bolt (character-scale or starship scale) is determined by the quality of the gas used in it - higher quality gives you green, lower quality gives you red. The Rebellion didn’t have access to the highest quality gas, and had to make do with the lower quality ammunition.
Huh, I guess I wondered but never looked it up until now.
I mean, that’s how it was retconned, but it was originally just so viewers could tell if it was the good guys or bad guys shooting. Just like there were only supposed to be blue (good guys) and red (bad guys) lightsabers. As the Star Wars universe and lore expanded, things got retconned and added/changed/removed, and it’s still happening with the new stuff that comes out. Isn’t world-shaping neat?
Because Still Lasers aren’t lethal, duh!
This is also how you check if your ass is clean.
We don’t need Sky Ranger, mirrorbois or lasertank, we have shitballoons.
Mirrors melt and break when hit with a laser of more than “pretty lights power”.
This dude built a 2kW one with optics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNmbvaUzC8Q
mirror at ~ 4:30EDIT: I know where I am, that video is too good not to share though. Vote away.
I actually studied laser physics in university and still learn a ton of practical shit from styropyro videos
I rarely give my time to videos that long, but it was awesome for the full half hour. That guy’s having fun. Thanks for sharing.
It’s very important that we give him views before he kills himself doing a YouTube stunt
Laser artillery!
Queen of battle! Yasss
Alternately, polish every car window facing east.
Or… skip a step. Line of sight is irrelevant if your aircraft is already exploding!
There’s a building in central London that melted a car. Solar laser, so SEO friendly, so on fleek.
Porque no los?
Not stupid just single track minded. Doing as told with no deviation. The stupid ones are the officers driving the r&d battalions