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originally posted by: BettyHill400
originally posted by: MrSpad
Ad this to the US's other air defenses and sending anything in the air near US forces will no longer be an option.
except you take mirrors or polish you missiles
or find out laser wavelength and paint with material that reflects that specific range of wavelengths
Missile Shield ?
Shield penetration with better bullets.
it is called arms race
maybe they have something weird from the fringe like LENR or nucleonic batteries but if i understand it correctly fusion will not be viable in a small compact light weight design of the degree needed for a man portable weapon. fusion has a scaling factor that means that at least for now a reactor that can break even has a certain lower size limit. even the smallest oddball contenders for break even have lower scale limits and break even for these designs are actually extrapolated from the scaling factor math. some of these are about the size of a low boy truck bed or shipping container. but not backpack sized or deck of cards sized needed for a laser rifle or pistol.
originally posted by: pauljs75
I have a feeling that the "secret sauce" for these new weapons isn't particularly the laser design, but rather a new power source being developed. Not sure about man-portable, but something small enough to work from a Humvee or any aircraft they have. DARPA is probably sitting on fusion tech that would mean cheap power for the rest of us. Thing is, they want this ace up their sleeve where the Russians and Chinese can't have it, so the rest of us (outside the military) aren't going to see it anytime soon either. Basically the thinking behind keeping it secret goes back to what happened in the early 1950's when the U.S. was no longer the only one with fission based weapons.