Chit Chat

[Ayan Barat]

I don't think that's well know acronym. Please mention full form in brackets next time.

C'mon Sir, please don't do this to me
At this point it feels like you're doing it intentionally

So you are not aware that laser pods have already been tested?

Yes Sir, I'm well aware with everything from SHiELD to LANCE to STRAFE.
But are you aware that most of these programs are either in hold or under review citing multiple technical issues?

I'm giving you two specific scenarios, please answer in the constraints to those.

1. Loss of power due to attenuation
Using Beer-Lambert Model (in GPT) to calculate the loss of power for a 1kW Infra-red laser fired at an altitude of 12km (typical for fighters) at a distance of 10km...it comes to 18%. So a kW laser would be roughly 800W at 10km. Which in turn means you'd need to pump a surplus of power to account for this attention, which in turn would mean a heightened SWaP requirment.

2. Reaction time
Let's say two Meteors are ripple fired at a target equipped with a laser pod. The time delay is 1sec so the gap should be around 500m (max Mach 4). At 10km from impact the fighter starts illuminating the leading missile. (The reason I'm using 10km is because it's what the typical maximum range for way more powerful land based lasers are, for airborne it'd be less). During endgame a missile like Meteor easily reaches Mach 4 so 10000/(4*340) = 8sec; 8 seconds is the time the laser would have to heat the missile enough to cause a malfunction. But let's say you're lucky and the laser somehow illuminated exactly where the warhead is and in just 5 seconds it detonates. But during this whole time the trailing missile was also there so now you've just 3 seconds left to acquire this second missile and start heating it.
This is one of the key inherent challenges of a laser weapons, it's not a fire-n-forget system like missiles