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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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How much does it cost?
Also, it's a stationary target that announces its exact location with a laser beam fired into the sky when it is used. It will need to be mobile because pinpointing that exact location will be easy for counterfire.
If it's not cheap as shit then just send out a couple of bait drones. One that is getting a big wide overview of several hundred square kilometers of land and another that functions as bait. When the bait is shot down the second camera (designed to see the laser) picks up the exact location it was fired from. You now blow up that exact location with a ballistic missile or whatever.
I honestly can't think of anything worse than announcing your precise location with a laser pointer to everything within hundreds of kilometers, which must be the case because the power this laser has to have is going to be very high.
Not to mention they need to be supplied with electricity to function, so any attacks on the power grid supplying them will shut all of them down at once. (They might all have separate power sources, but then that just makes your point against them even stronger, they'll be far more expensive that way)
How does it give up its location?
Radar emissions are easily detectable.
This is an old problem and traditional cold war era SAMs for example have an alternative optical tracking mode to try and counter this for example.
Missed the fact that it has a radar attached.
Wouldn't the same solutions work here, though?
Radar is a type of electromagnetic emission, and this weapon would also emit EM radiation. I think they mean that the SAMs have an illuminator, and the SAM operation principle is that it works in conjunction with another operator stationed away from itself to illuminate the target using EM for the launched missile to lock. The vulnerability here is that the operator with the illuminator is vulnerable to being detected and targeted by anti-radiation missiles. Similar missiles can be reused in this case, since the only difference is that they would need to home in on a different wavelength of light rather than radar. The reason the switch to optical won't work is because the principle of operation of this anti-drone weapon seems to be fundamentally based on high-power EM radiation. I may be misunderstanding their point, though.
I think you’ve got it exactly right. Anything putting out kWs into the air is gonna light up the sky in its spectrum. Now, an ideal laser would be fully coherent with a perfectly planar wave and next to no spread. But even that would ionise the air in its beam, and with a very distinct fingerprint at that. I can’t really think of a way to make it truly invisible.
And you made a really good point that at this point you’re back to using cheap drones to expose and destroy million $ equipment
Yeah but how do you really know it's at the other end of that beam? They could use bendy light or mirrors
Point taken, although there is still room for doubt, given that the power of the weapon from the article is significantly lower.
By the way, is that photo in the visible frequency range?
The laser might be invisible to the naked eye, but it would still be visible in infrared or other spectrums, and so it will be fairly easy to watch and see where the laser comes from and then strike that location.
Wouldn't that still require for the scattering to be significant enough? If so, how are we sure that that is the case?
That's true, I was assuming it would scatter a fair bit, but it isn't an extremely high powered laser, it's designed to take down small drones, so it may not be as visible as I thought. I suppose it could still be worked out via good old fashioned triangulation though, but that would probably be quite difficult with a laser.
Fires a laser pointer with immense power into the sky. Under infrared camera that will point to its exact location. You could counterfire at this with very unsophisticated methods of just using a camera and a good enough map. A bait and wipe operation would actually be very very easy, you just need a camera with overwatch, a team using that information to map target coordinates then feed that information to artillery or missile launches. You could counterfire them with artillery within 30 seconds if you set the bait operation up correctly.
This means you need to fire this thing then move it immediately afterwards very quickly or get toasted. That would be ideal practice, but soldiers in the field do not follow ideal practice and get super lazy or overconfident. Counterfiring enemy artillery positions is a similar process but a little slower and works effectively for similar reasons as soldiers set up static positions instead of remaining mobile.