Considering we’re the guys who actually dropped nukes on civilian cities, it’s a deeply fucked up reflection on the human condition that, broadly speaking, you are actually correct that historically, out of all of the imperialist powers, we have been comparatively very good at winning wars while not killing things.

You don’t really need the metal to be transparent to your electromagnetic radiation, though, because a laser’s primary function for the foreseeable future will be to kill drones, missiles, and planes. All you need the metal to do is nicely absorb a huge amount of highly focused radiation in a small area, rapidly heat,…

I don’t get this post but I’m just going to assume I hate it

It may sound (or be) callous, but part of the idea is not to cause undue suffering and leave a bunch of permanently mangled people living in constant suffering and burdening the society that is compelled to take care of them. Survivors of shit like mustard gas and other horrid weapons used in World War I were often in…

We’re gonna need to build a bigger shark

So, you do correctly address a lot of lasers’ issues, and correctly identify that they will primarily be deployed as naval defensive weapons for the foreseeable future. The fact that lasers travel in a straight line and horizons exist mean that they’re inadequate for offensive strikes, but being able to ablate pieces…

Mechs would be a huge waste of money and development

Basically put something cheap on the drone to slow down the laser

Honestly, it really could be a panacea for ASBMs, it just depends on the tracking speed of the lasers and how reliable we can make the emitters. If the emitters can reliably fire multiple shots in succession, track the missiles in time, and you have the capacitors to support enough shots to kill all the missiles, you…

TBF, as a professional non-tankie who you routinely confuse for a tankie, I can back the tankies up in saying that gigantic fucking hydroelectic dams also look really cool.

then slowly pushed out the barrel by force demons or something

Agreed, retrofitting those old ladies is not in the cards. They were a design built for a different paradigm in another time. A new battleship would be a real naval terrapin, armored and redundant to a neurotic degree especially below the waterline, where any serious vulnerability would lie, heavily automated and…

Your info is just incorrect, which is clearly the source of your bad conclusions. I dunno who is giving you this info, but they’re wrong. The horizon from the deck of a Nimitz-class is about 15km. From the island tower it’s more like 20km. Even relatively low-draft ships will have horizon points in the 10-15km range…

...with the defensive weaponry and tactics of the day, and without the lessons learned in that wargame, and DEFINITELY without the benefit of lasers.

How do you expect wet rags to stay attached at supersonic speeds?

Hot take I’ve brought up before on laser articles: the maturation of lasers and railguns as a weapon is likely to cause the return of battlewagons as a naval weapon. Feel free to tl;dr this but I’m going to go on this rant again.

It’s not nearly as easy as just launching fast missiles.

And definitely, Naval task forces won’t be comprised of multiple ships that may even mount multiple lasers per ship, which could all communicate with each other through sensor fusion and coordinate fire to blow many, many missiles out of the sky as soon as they peek over the horizon.

For naval applications, a laser defense will still be useless against the biggest threat to carriers and capital ships: antiship ballistic missiles.

I’m 500 Days of Kitten Calamari, and I approve this message.