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Post by argonbalt on Nov 4, 2016 3:56:16 GMT
Not stock 100MW lasers. But ah, there were more posts in the 100mc challenge, yeah I think those ships in the challenge thread are better Although, the ships in the challenge thread will probably even better if you add a couple of small-lens lasers for burning through aerogels. Probably. Would necessitate a mix of lasers, though, which means you need to switch to a broadside configuration - which actually may be tactically advantageous, particularly if you use a design capable of high thrust, as it becomes more capable of evading kinetic return fire. OTOH the design text would not be as elegant. You know i was starting to wonder why this design was working so well, i guess that explains it then. Attachment DeletedAttachment DeletedAttachment Deleted
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Post by bigbombr on Dec 18, 2016 12:20:45 GMT
So, I hate to say it, because this game really is a blast, but laser design is completely uninspiring. Being limited to CW Arclamp-Driven designs puts a serious crimp in style when trying to achieve efficient designs, both because of the difficulty of matching up emission profiles of gases with absorption profiles of lasing mediums. Added to this is the limitation of only being able to use single-ellipse lasing cavities, which must often be of titanic proportions to achieve exactly the right major/semimajor ratio. Why can't we have more complex cavity designs like helical lamps with axial lasing rods? Or, even more exotic, hollow-rod lasing mediums with the lamp on the inside? Better still, when can we expect to see free-electron lasers? These are the only method known to modern science to be able to achieve far-UV wavelengths, which are perfect for space combat. Edit: also, why are we limited to putting the turret on the side of the laser cavity? This seriously hurts designs centered around putting a large laser on the nose of a ship. Bumping this. Free electron lasers, more geometries for cavities, allowing multiple turrets to use the same laser system/cavity and making laser range dependent upon an intensity threshold instead of an arbitrary range would make lasers even more interesting, and would allow us to properly asses their effectiveness in space combat.
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 18, 2016 13:08:22 GMT
Advanced laser design would be a fantastic subject for a DLC expansion.
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Post by bigbombr on Dec 18, 2016 14:12:01 GMT
Quoting the website atomic rockets: "This is one of those areas where progress is happening so fast that it can be hard to keep up with all the newest technology.
Two decades ago, everyone knew that laser weapons would use chemical lasers, like deuterium fluoride (DF) or chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL) lasers. The beam quality was abysmal, but that was the only way you could get the power levels needed. One of my professors described chemical lasers as more like a flashlight than any sort of focused beam.
One decade ago, everyone knew that chemical lasers were a giant steamping pile of crud. Diode-pumped slab solid state lasers were the way of the future. You didn't have to carry around huge vats of toxic caustic chemicals, you could just use cheap electricity to efficiently generate your beam. Slab solid state lasers lead to all of the issues described in the linked article but lab prototypes were developed that operated at ~10 kW with beams that were only about 2 to 5 times worse than diffraction limited (going by memory here, there's a chance these numbers may be off by more than I'm recalling).
Then about 5 years ago some folks bundled together a bunch of fiber lasers into a high powered laser weapon demonstrator that was cheaper and more robust and smaller than any slab solid state laser. They used incoherent beam combining — just shining all the lasers at the same spot, so the beam quality was total crud. But it worked. You could blow up boats and rockets and UAVs and mortar shells in flight at respectable distances and do all sorts of other nifty stuff. All this was made possible by advances in industrial fiber lasers used for materials processing that allowed outputs of multiple kilowatts from individual fibers. Each fiber is essentially diffraction limited, and because the beam is generated inside of a very long fiber optic cable you have a huge surface area available for cooling.
The next trick is figuring out how to put the high quality ~kW beams together into one single high quality beam with ~100 kW or ~MW power levels. Lockheed Martin started using spectral beam combining in the last few years to do just this with lasers initially starting at around 20 kW and now exceeding 60 kW of power. It is expected that spectral beam combining can take you up to ~100 to 150 kW power before you start hitting limitations of the mechanism.
But people are already looking in to methods to go way beyond this. Coherent beam combining techniques are being developed that allow near diffraction-limited combined beams by controlling the phases of the individual beams. One method that would provide the highest quality beams uses diffraction gratings with phase control of the incoming beams to interfere constructively on only one of the diffraction lobes and destructively at all other lobes. Using this, you could daisy chain an unlimited number of lasers together into a single high quality beam. The other method I've seen involves controlling the phases of a bunch of beams that exit side-by-side, making a laser phased array. The beam quality will be a bit worse, but you have the benefit of allowing instantaneous control over the beam wavefront so you can instantly tilt the beam without needing to slew your beam pointer around (in addition to doing all sorts of nifty stuff like adaptive optics and active focusing just with the relative beam phases rather than cumbersome optical elements). With some development, you might even get around the fill factor issues by getting component beams that are nearly uniform in power level across the beam-front to allow laser phased arrays with nearly perfect diffraction limited performance.
The first coherently combined beams will undoubtedly use fiber lasers, but current research is already looking beyond that. Coherent combination of diode lasers could get around the problems that have plagued high powered diode lasers for decades. This could get around a significant source of loss in using diode lasers to pump fiber lasers, going from 30% efficiency to 50 or 60% efficiency for wallplug-to-light conversion (some laboratory diode lasers have even achieved 70% efficiency). In addition, diode lasers allow some degree of frequency agility, so that you could shift the wavelength of your beam on the fly (within limits). I would not be at all surprised if, a decade from now, this was the obvious future of laser weapons. Or maybe it will be something else completely unforeseen." So there exist lasers with 70% efficiency (in labs, and presumably at low power, but still). Will free electron lasers and diode lasers eventually added or is there any reason not to?
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Post by argonbalt on Dec 18, 2016 19:14:09 GMT
70% efficiency, jesus scientific christ that is ridiculous. Feels like the 1950's all over again!
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Post by caiaphas on Jan 10, 2017 19:57:49 GMT
70% efficiency, jesus scientific christ that is ridiculous. Feels like the 1950's all over again! I am stealing that epithet, because that is absolutely fantastic.
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Post by argonbalt on Jan 11, 2017 1:31:57 GMT
Seriously though, i have started to realise that those living in the 20th century were blessed/cursed with so much novelty in regards to technological advancement over a hundred years, but certain eras just had such huge leaps in regards to certain fields. Like imagin being born in 1900 and by the time you are thirty an entire new form of Arial warfare has not only emerged but done so in revolutionary ways.
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Post by n2maniac on Jan 12, 2017 5:42:25 GMT
Seriously though, i have started to realise that those living in the 20th century were blessed/cursed with so much novelty in regards to technological advancement over a hundred years, but certain eras just had such huge leaps in regards to certain fields. Like imagin being born in 1900 and by the time you are thirty an entire new form of Arial warfare has not only emerged but done so in revolutionary ways. And here we are, merely dicking around with computers on the internet
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Post by argonbalt on Jan 12, 2017 9:00:00 GMT
Seriously though, i have started to realise that those living in the 20th century were blessed/cursed with so much novelty in regards to technological advancement over a hundred years, but certain eras just had such huge leaps in regards to certain fields. Like imagin being born in 1900 and by the time you are thirty an entire new form of Arial warfare has not only emerged but done so in revolutionary ways. And here we are, merely dicking around with computers on the internet Computers are lame! they don't go WOOOOOOOOOOOSH and PEW PEW PEW and KABLOW when their high energy density aviation fuel ignites!
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