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Post by nerd1000 on Feb 6, 2017 2:01:10 GMT
As I understand it, firing a laser beam at the primary mirror of another laser that's aimed at you would focus the incoming beam down into the guts of the laser and severely damage it. Obviously Children of a Dead Earth ignores this issue and simply relies on lasers piercing the turret armor, but I've been thinking: doesn't this make lasers self defeating? No matter how large and powerful your laser is, your enemy can always defeat it with a smaller and lighter one by simply firing first, ensuring that you cannot open the shutters over your mirror without risking having your beam generator fried.
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 6, 2017 2:26:01 GMT
I don't think it works quite that way, since our mirrors are not flat, they're part of the focusing system.
Ie, tagging a curved mirror with a laser won't give you a perfectly collimated beam backwards into the enemy laser system.
You might damage the enemy mirror with localized overheating, but there are a lot of variables with beam intensity, beam waist, focus spot size at range, etc.
In a lab setting, you might just end up with photons back at you, along the same path.
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Post by n2maniac on Feb 6, 2017 4:42:26 GMT
It always bothered me that the turret armor can be opaque, let the laser light out, and simultaneously protect the laser from both enemy lasers and projectiles.
The curved mirror of the targeted laser is intended to focus a small collimated beam into a point nearly at infinity (on the enemy ship). A laser from that ship would focus pretty closely to the system generating the beam on the target. That being said, it is not clearcut that it would damage the system. If it can focus to a spot smaller than the opposing mirror, it MIGHT be able to damage the mirror. Otherwise, it will probably be focused onto the outermost frequency doubler (or its mount) and likley damage it. If it makes its way all the way into the lasing cavity, it will be mostly reflected back out or absorbed and dissipated into what is often the ship's largest radiators (given single digit % laser efficiency). It may be that a non-frequency doubled laser is nearly immune to this type of attack (unless enough power comes in).
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