Green, dude. Red for the good guys. ST < SW.
Really? I thought it was red for the bad guys, green and blue for the good guys.
You're thinking light-sabers. Also Bubble181 , I was talkin' more like G.I.Joe or Transformers. Or were those plasma blasters? Fleh, I don't even know any more.
Heh, lazy censorship.
Only good part of the movie. Although if the entire movie had been of that quality my head might have exploded from to much awesome.
They clearly blew all their creative energy on the opening, because the rest of the movie is pure WTF-Am-I-Watching.
I'm just grasping at straws here, but I tend to think that the reason they are to be mounted on a ship and not a plane or tank has less to do with the actual size of the weapon and more the size and strength of the power source. Like, the laser cannon itself might only be the size of a large machine gun or small defense turret, but it needs enough power to light up a city to effectively do damage at the range necessary to take out an aircraft or incoming missile. Furthermore, my guess at the actual weapon size is small also because they claim it can shoot down above fast-moving objects, and so a large ponderous turret or other such limited mobility solution would not be practical. They need to mount this thing on a fast, precise swivel, which means something of low mass and inertia. Unless its beam can be simply redirected by mirror or something, in which case the whole damn laser could be the size of a spinal mount cannon and housed deep in the bowels of the ship for all I know, and then they just reflect the beam up out of the hull and then off an agile "aiming" mirror or something, like the laser shows at planetariums.
IIRC that's how the majority (or all) laser printers work. The laser is fixed, the mirror directs it to where it needs to go.
I would think there'd be more to this naval laser though that might defeat mirrors. Perhaps the beam is not just in the visible spectrum, or maybe not in it at all like a maser or something. Otherwise... a chrome coating might render a missile un-laserable. Surely they've thought about that achilles' heel.
No mirrors are 100% perfect either. That's often the problem I've heard of with anything like this. (See Perfect Mirror for the theoretical, but look at the image in the Reflectivity article for typical mirrors) Let's say a mirror is 99.9% reflective (a Dielectric Mirror can hit this, and beyond, because it's single-wavelength), which means it's absorbing 0.1% of the energy. That means that for a megawatt (1,000,000W) laser, the surface has to absorb and tolerate 1,000W, or 1kW of energy. That's not massive, but still is non-trivial, and then requires additional cooling to the surface to KEEP it reflective (if it melts, obviously that's bad).
I suspect the numbers are classified, but at any rate, I haven't seen any.
Several as in 4, or as in 45?
