Laser weapons require some significant advances in materials science to take place, so the only country I think can do it is China. Like, you could build one that blinds drones, or that blows up exposed explosives or catches flammable stuff on fire, but there's no way 
of all countries fields the first laser weapon.
They actually have ones that can burn a hole through a commercial drone. I believe the bigger defense contractors already sell them, look it up.
But the problem is they're bulky, look ridiculously obvious, require weather ideal conditions, needs the targeting system to work well in those ideal conditions, needs to stay on target for a while and have dumb power requirements that Ukraine can't exactly supply. It's like the West™ wants Ukraine to lose, lmao
I feel like I'm a broken record, but I don't actually post about this very often:
Lasers will work in weather conditions that aircraft can't fly in. If the weather is too bad for lasers, it's way too bad for aircraft/drones/missiles. Like, maybe if an ICBM's target has bad weather it'll still work if it's got a large conventional or any size nuclear warhead, as you don't really have to worry too much about accuracy/getting blown off course, but any weapon that relies on atmospheric maneuvering will be grounded/crash before conditions get bad enough that you can't operate a laser.
The biggest issue is still laser power at the target. I absolutely do not have knowledge about classified laser weapons development (and I wouldn't share it here because we don't have a c/WarThunder comm), but they were only able to maybe blind UAV sensors and burn basically stationary objects at a distance a few years back. If the materials-science has progressed to the point where a stationary, ground-based system can burn a hole in a basic UAV at a distance (as demonstrated in a couple of three year old videos published by the weapons contractors, meaning performed under ideal conditions) than I wouldn't consider it a significant improvement.
https://www.dote.osd.mil/Annual-Reports/2023-Annual-Report/
DOT&E, the Department of Defense's Director of Test & Evaluation, has no reports to congress on any laser weapon system as of the end of last FY. This means they are nowhere even close to fielding any lasers, and are still in extremely early phases of development.
Lasers will work in weather conditions that aircraft can't fly in.
I was thinking more along the lines of dust/rain, it's not that it won't work but it won't be as effective, won't it?
All laser weapons used on Earth will operate in one of two bands, one in the visible green spectrum and one in the near IR spectrum, which have the lowest atmospheric impedance. This largely negates all but extreme weather.
Will dust storms impede lasers? Absolutely, but the density of dust in the air that would meaningfully attenuate a real, capable laser weapon would also effect radar and visibility, and implies wind conditions that would impede flight capabilities. Dust storms don't happen without wind.
If it's raining, and you can see an object, you can hit it with a laser. If the rain is dense enough that you can't see an incoming aircraft, the aircraft can't fly.
Now, if we're solely talking about the contemporary systems that the MIC ghouls are hawking as "laser weapons," then yeah, that Lockheed or Raytheon laser that shot down a drone in ideal conditions won't be able to.
China and I think also Russia have mobile lasers that are used for logging. It’s really cool how they can eliminate most of the danger by using those.
You got a link to somewhere I can read about those logging lasers? That sounds sick
I love lasers. There's times where I think I should have focused more on that and landed a job in the field. Also I'd love to have a laser harp!
I'll be honest with you, working on lasers is tedious as fuck. Maybe the research side is cool, but the industrial side is really tedious.
I can respect that. The grass is always greener.
i really think china is going to be the nation that makes huge breakthroughs with actual DEWs and coilguns.
stuff like that needs large, state managed projects to truly develop. each is like an Apollo program equivalent and we know the west just can't pull that off because the military industrial grift complex-vortex is just too strong now and the event horizon has been crossed.
china is going to: start a thorium-fission economy, possibly crack commercial fusion, and i bet even start mass production of solid state batteries before anyone else comes close
coilguns.
The main thing with those is just that there's not really a reason to use them over conventional firearms. Like gunpowder is ridiculously easy to mass produce and an extremely energy dense propellant to the point it doesn't really make sense to switch to less energy-dense batteries to launch slugs electromagnetically.
Railguns on the other hand seem to offer the potential to get projectiles moving at much higher velocities than the expansion of gunpowder would allow, if given enough power. The problem is that that would require a huge store of rapidly usable power and also getting velocities that a normal cannon can't do causes friction/arcing and oxidation of the rails after just a few rounds, meaning actually firing it totals the barrel in short order. So they have this theoretical "maybe this could replace over-the-horizon missiles for some tasks, if it could be worked out" but there's not much motivation to do that because the missiles are still cheaper and more accurate than a railgun would be and despite being a logistics hassle they're less of a logistics hassle than "this is the gun you get to fire like once and then replace the whole thing, we've got a few spares for that" would be.
Using my warehouses full of fast-reacting chemical batteries to power the laser that protects those warehouses from one singular threat vector, and which can't protect anything else because it has to be right there and they're such a big target that it would be insane to put anything else important nearby.
Modern high powered lasers are very impressive, but ultimately they're still comparatively short range with huge power requirements and have to spend so much time on target to damage it that they'd need an automated targeting system capable of maintaining almost millimeter precision on moving targets at a long enough range that that's an absurd proposition but also at a short enough range that it may not even have seconds to disable a single incoming threat. They're basically militarily useless, like coilguns or railguns which are also neat novelties but which have serious logistics problems that make them useless as weapons.
what if they used a thousand weaker lasers with overlapping coverage
Last I checked they were collimating multiple high-powered industrial cutting lasers together to make anything happen at all.
"IF WE CAN JUST TAKE THIS NEW WUNDERWAFFE TO PRODUCTION IN TIME, FUHRER"
"Good. Put Herr Steiner in charge of the lasers."
Insane/totally unsurprising that the BBC which pretends to be a serious and unbiased news source is pushing this pure fantasy.
making my short range air defense comically visible for everyone in a 100 mile radius while being forced to stay in one place because of the energy requirements. sure hope nothing bad happens to it
DragonFire? That's not exactly badass. It sounds like the name of a weapon in a fourth-rate b-movie called SAS Team Six.
The name was originally Bad Dragon
Sadly they had to change the name, because the GPT that they use to run the weapon system got confused with the Bad Dragon name and kept calling the soldiers “daddy”.
Also I hate that there probably really is a GPT somewhere in this weapon system.
How about Ukraine just uses normal human soldiers to fight the war instead?
Oh, ran out of those already? Just end the war then!
When I'm in a ➡️⬇️⬆️➡️⬇️ competition and my opponent is the NATO wunderwaffe brigade 
According to Grant Shapps, the weapon could have "huge ramifications" for the conflict in Europe.
So generous of the UK to deploy this wunderwaffe now instead of 2 years ago
Just one more wunderwaffen, I swear, that's all it'll take! Just one more!
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