31–40 of 250 posts
Will they start shooting rockets when it gets foggy ouside now?
The fact that they're having to develop a laser defense system to defend against lobbed bombs seems like it's time to reevaluate political solutions.
I will believe it when I see it. Focusing that much light on a small moving object, through layered and moving air, with an intensity to burn through metal would be an achievement. Burning through enough of that metal to degrade a falling rocket (as opposed to during boost phase of flight) is even harder. For all the talk about cost reduction, have a look at what realworld laser armor costs. Painting the nosecone of…
This tech will be the end of MAD and the start of WW3. The only thing holding back current super powers from direct confrontation are ICBMs and MAD. Once they can be reliably shot down via lasers, then full scale war is much more likely. I understand the current tech is for much slower, much lower rockets and cruise missiles. But the tech will evolve and get better. Israel is the current test bed for high tech defens…
MAD was a dumb idea in the first place. Everybody has known, since the first world war, that a major power confrontation is very likely to end your nation, even if you win . The French were so demographically destroyed they literally could not raise an army to fight in the second world war. The British were so broke their empire collapsed. The Russian empire, the Austrian empire, the Ottoman empires all collapsed int…
This isn't true at all. The French army at the start of WWII was over 5 million men, one of the largest in the world. It suffered from bad luck and being led by morons, but it certainly existed.
Per your other point, WWII made the US and the USSR global superpowers for half a century, and the US especially sacrificed far less than anyone else to get it. War is sadly not always a losing proposition, even total war.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But would it not be possible to build missiles that can intelligently alter route upon detecting detection ? I recall once working on a auto guided industrial machine based on Motorola 68000 microprocessor that could figure out how to route itself to its destination. So unless you can detect and eliminate the missile almost simultaneously, an intelligent missile could throttle it's velocity etc. to avoid predictable…
This is again a money play here, after all everything is a money play. Iron Beam (this system) is designed to intercept simple rockets, artillery, and etc for cheap. The total cost per shot is estimated at 2000USD overall (including life cycle of the parts, laser, etc) compared to 100000USD for Iron Dome missile alone. It is even more for more advanced stuff like Arrow 2, Arrow 3, or David's Sling (all, including Iro…
The space lasers were real /s (in reference to the Republican congresswoman who blamed the California wildfires on Jewish space lasers: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/marjorie-taylor-gree... )
I will believe it when I see it. Focusing that much light on a small moving object, through layered and moving air, with an intensity to burn through metal would be an achievement. Burning through enough of that metal to degrade a falling rocket (as opposed to during boost phase of flight) is even harder. For all the talk about cost reduction, have a look at what realworld laser armor costs. Painting the nosecone of…
So basically what I'm saying, this stuff is hard, and few people in the world can even verify your claim, never mind have access to the tech or AI behind it. But i'd bet with the Israelis.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As long as EMPs are viable MAD is still in effect.
An emp would knock out electrical grids.... sure... But that isn't annihilation... Say russia installed this in major cities (rural is acceptable loss), then manufactured super sonic nukes that could deliver a strike in under 5 mins... or even a minute... they could strike many of our nuke sites (not all because of subs) but our major military operation bases, then we strike back from subs, but these take them all ou…
This was in fact precisely Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s idea in 1991 to stop the Baltics from seceding