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Space warfare xv rocketpunk manifesto8/18/2023 ![]() ![]() Double the telescope aperture and you double the range at which the system can achieve a given spot size and zap intensity.īut a further proviso is that the largest practical laser installation and optical system are in fact large enough that you can only conveniently mount one aboard a spacecraft that is itself of practical size for war service. The general argument for all this is that the effective range of a laser is in linear proportion to the aperture of its optical system. Instead it is 'keel-mounted,' and gross aim is achieved by pointing the entire spacecraft toward the target. In either case, however, the optical system of a laserstar is implicitly too big, relative to the whole spacecraft, to be mounted in some equivalent of a turret. My impression is that the main telescope becomes long and narrow instead of short and wide. If you have lasers zapping in the far UV or X-ray bands, the aiming optics become quite different. It is this telescope, more than the individual laser itself, that provides the distinctive feature of a 'laser cannon' - if the available power is more than a single laser can handle you could easily have an entire bank of lasers all firing through the same optical system. In conceptualizing laserstars I chiefly have in mind classical-style lasers operating broadly in the optical band (IR through UV), whose beams are passed through telescope-style aiming and focusing optics. In their 'ideal' form they would be drones, robotic in the broad sense that includes remote control from a separate command ship (or ground station, etc.).Ī couple of provisos are needed. Laserstars, as the term has come to be used on this blog, are military spacecraft designed to carry and deploy a single powerful weapon laser installation of the maximum practical aperture and power. ![]() (And an arguably wretched pun in the title.) Much of the comment thread on Part XIII of this series, The Human Factor, turned into a discussion of 'laserstars.' While a thread of 631 comments (so far) might seem to have given this particular debate the full Rasputin treatment, I am instead going to use it as a pretext for another front page post.
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