It happens to all of us when lots of zeroes are involved! I actually got dragged into a laser boosting discussion (lasers explosively ablating purpose-made plating off the butt of a launch vehicle to convert a lot of the laser’s energy into momentum) and I made a similar fuck-up and somehow my lasers, sans ablative…

Also, as an added bonus, since you’re asking about ablative aerogels, it can be hard to find figures, but I realized you could compare laser weapons to the rigors of what ablative aerogels are made for:

Apparently ablative shielding is SUPER EXPENSIVE.

Not really. When a photon is re-emitted, that’s where all the energy goes. It doesn’t stay in the metal, therefore the metal doesn’t heat up.

That’s fair. Some amount of the total energy of a chemical energy weapon is ‘locked away’ and only serves if the rest of the total energy of the attack gets it to the church on time. A laser, conversely, “uses” its energy both to travel and to inflict damage, in the sense that it has less and less usable damaging…

Neat effect: because the refracted, “curving” light image you’re receiving from the thing you’re pointing your laser at is also affected by refraction of the same medium you’re going to be shooting through and the same gravity your laser will be bent by, your laser will follow the exact same curve back to the target!

A good question, but nope, for a variety of reasons.

The reason flak and continuous ring projectiles are effective is that the wind does the work for you once a bit of skin is hanging wrong.

Honestly I’d surrender if they just sent a bunch of these dudes with jetpacks at us

Herein lies your problem. Also, while you’re correct about water being a good insulator, you’re invoking the Leidenfrost Effect, which has no bearing on a highly focused, collimated laser. The reason for the Leidenfrost Effect is because water near a hot surface will create a a vapor layer between itself and that…

That’s fair, though fundamentally they function in exactly the same way. The advantage of a true particle beam is that lighter subatomic particles, for a given amount of energy imparted into momentum, achieve a higher velocity.

You’re misinterpreting the statement. Whether an explosive missile or shell hits a target a kilometer away, a hundred kilometers away, or a million kilometers away, it’s going to release the same amount of energy when it explodes, and transfer the same amount of energy into whatever it hits. Compare this to a laser of…

Yeah that’s just material attrition, because naval vessels and fixed installations will be able to mount and power massively bigger, stronger lasers with far greater kill range, so you’d need to hurtle scads of drones at the target in the hope that some of them would get close enough for their smaller, weaker lasers…

Also will ours come in red, white and blue visible spectrum wavelengths?

This guy gets it

or a supercharged explosive gas

You use scare quotes, but we can actually have a Space Force once Trump is out of office. Nobody trusts the DonT with orbital kinetic kill vehicles.

This gravitational effect is also pretty minuscule compared to the refraction index of the gaseous medium it’s traveling through.

Uh, I mean, no, lasers do not work via momentum transfer to the target. A 1 milliwatt laser pointer produces about 3.4*10^-12 Newtons of force pushing on a target every second, which means a 1 megawatt laser, one million times stronger, pushes on its target with 3.4*10^-6, or 3.4 millionths of a Newton of force, every…