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Post by deltav on Mar 21, 2017 0:15:19 GMT
No takers huh? Well this is my theory in much easier to read form. The blue is facts, the red is my personal opinions backed by potentially faulty calculations. No focusing mirror can take an increase of more than 5-15 K before it melts, perhaps less just to mission kill the turret. Every focusing mirror can only reflect beams of a certain intensity and wavelength, and always absorbs some heat (5.3% min in the case of Aluminum mirrors). The outgoing beam is spread over the entire focusing mirror, but the counter laser's beam would be focused on smaller portion of that... .0078 mm in the case of the 400kw stock laser used as a counter laser.So all that's needed to mission kill the turret is to heat part of the focusing mirror to a few K very quickly, to cause it to overheat and its deformable parts to stop working properly. But even if you had to heat/melt the whole laser mirror, it still can be mission killed with less than 500 W total laser output power. buildlog.net/cnc_laser/laser_calcs.htm
The bottleneck would be designing a turret that can stay on target long enough without getting it's own focusing mirror melted. To that end the more laser turrets with the fastest turret speeds practical with the smallest apertures practical, the better. It means laser turrets have to be as fast as possible and as small yet powerful as possible ,in that order, or they get taken out. Edit: A holstered pistol is a useless pistol. Is shuttering our lasers is any solution? Overall like, like, like. I think once we get used to this change of laser sniping, it will be a good thing.
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Post by concretedonkey on Mar 21, 2017 5:04:48 GMT
Sorry this discussion is a bit out of my tech reach. However seems to me that you are missing one thing that tilts the advantage towards small apperature lasers - size and redundancy. A 5cm apperature laser with 11cm turret is very very hard to hit even with another wide beam and you can pretty much seed them on the hull in hundreds if you desire. I don't do it because there seems to be no need to do it - 10 is enough. Not to mention that its way easier to make it very fast. On the tech side, I really don't understand optics very well and I'd like to hear lawson 's take on damage to already working lasers, because he seems to be one of the few members that have practical experience with this. I mean blocking damage to your apperature from what I understand seems easy enough, especially for the flashlights that we use for counter-fire, however if it involves shutting your laser then its good enough for me. Edit: After a brief discussion with deltaV he convinced me that "wide beams" don't actually exist and what I see with small aperture lasers at large distances is really extreme case of wobble. it doesn't change my point however. The practical result is the same.
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Post by demetrious on Mar 26, 2017 18:23:32 GMT
Sorry this discussion is a bit out of my tech reach. However seems to me that you are missing one thing that tilts the advantage towards small apperature lasers - size and redundancy. A 5cm apperature laser with 11cm turret is very very hard to hit even with another wide beam and you can pretty much seed them on the hull in hundreds if you desire. This. This, right here. There's a whole thread asking if warships are viable in the face of the GigaWatt Death Rays people are creating, because even with the horrid energy efficiency of lasers, the insane radiator mass required is still the most cost-effective option if you can slag any possible threat at half a light-second's range. The issue is that those insane ranges are achieved via fairly wide mirrors (I believe someone mentioned a three-meter diameter mirror,) to overcome diffraction and also achieve a lethally tight spot-size to boot. That makes them terribly vulnerable to counter-battery fire from other lasers of much lower power. Of course the big doom laser can counter-counter battery snipe, but in the end the guy with more laser turrets will generally win, and smaller lasers are going to be more mass-efficient, so they'll generally win the laser duel. Optics damage is probably under-modeled at the moment, simply because the last patch is a first incremental step towards the final implementation, which will eventually prevent exploits like using a laser pointer to knock out Doom Rays from a hojillion miles (and allow for engineering more durable lasers at the cost of efficiency.) But even with this first pass, the consequences for combat dynamics are pretty clear and I doubt they'll change much. Lasers have gone from a "nice system to have for point-defense, sometimes, if you have bad railguns," to something you absolutely want along lest you get trashed at 250km by a Solar Lance. You could bring light laser-ships to poke out the enemy's "eyes," so you can close to fight with kinetics... or you could bring a few "big-gun" laser ships, escorted by more lasers of smaller size to knock out any counter-lasers, and thus decide the battle at very long range. Either way, the possibilities are pretty cool. It'll be interesting to see how different people approach the problem, both on offense and defense.
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Post by Enderminion on Mar 26, 2017 22:19:40 GMT
3 meters is not much demetrious, my big lasers have 23.5m mirriors and when not in use double as telescopes
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Post by bdcarrillo on Mar 29, 2017 19:54:20 GMT
So it looks like the baseline assumption is that our lasers use one giant final mirror...
Why not use a hex array like the james webb telescope for focusing, and utilize dlp technology at the emitter mirror (the one in the center of the turret, that we see the back of) to aim your beam at undamaged segments of mirror. Of course, you'd want to modulate output based on how many mirror segments are damaged.
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