Low rate of fire lasers

The arbitrary inaccuracy is a PIA.

I thought the purpose of pulsed lasers was to "shock" the target into cracking it's structure/armor. Granted that would be at higher intensity for the power requirement.

Regular lasers work by doing a continuous burn, and abating the target. I think if you can match the output intensity of a pulsed laser to a standard continously firing laser, the continuous firing laser should burn through the target faster, unless the pulsed lasers work like a HESH shell, like I think they do.

The advantage of pulsed lasers is that the little amount of armor material that they vaporize expands like an explosion. This imposes mechanical stresses on the surrounding material.

If the pulses contain enough energy, they can break apart and shear off large amounts of surrounding material.

Digging out armor in this way requires much less energy per kg than fully vaporizing the material. So, a pulsed laser will have better penetration rates than a continuous laser of the same average power. Luke Campbell states that 40x better penetration rate is possible, although I believe this depends strongly on how strong the armor is.

This is also why I do not believe some of the most effective anti-laser armor materials on COADE are not realistic. Aerogel is great in terms of vaporization energy per kg... but it is so weak that any plasma expansion will blow out huge chunks of it.

Pulsed laser beams are achieved by using a special optical element in a CW laser beam. Q-switching, Mode Locking and Gain switching are the three most used methods of creating pulsed laser beams. But they don't fire with delay of seconds or milliseconds. Most Pulsed lasers have repetition rates ranging from kHz to MHz. Their advantage is in their increased peak power. A laser emitting 10,000 one nanosecond 100kJ Pulses per second has a peak power of 100GW, but a average power output of 1GW. The laser pulse vaporizes materials within microsecond-nanoseconds which creates a explosion of the hot vapor/plasma. This way very high "vapor jet" pressures are achieved, they can also cause hydrostatic shock when the materials ablation rate exceeds the speed of sound in the material, the result are powerful shockwaves that when being reflected from the other side of the armor plate can cause chunks of the armor being turned into deadly projectiles. Based on Luke Campbell's laser calculator pulsing a beam can increase it's penetration factor by up to 5, but only in rare cases where the intensity per square meter is enormous. The main advantage in space based long range lasers lies in their ability to fire a quick intense photon beam. Which doesn't suffer from the ablated material of the armor being in the way, which can diffract or absorb parts of the laser light limiting effectiveness at high intensities in CW lasers.

Pretty much all lasers need to be cooled somehow. Even our dinky cat toy lasers need cooling, but that's usually done as a result of the air around it.

I guess you could say a pulsed laser would be easier to cool, but again that'd depend on the frequency of the pulsing (though that in turn depends on if the lasing cavity/generators is/are constantly used, or pulsing too). That's not even mentioning the mechanical stresses on the mirrors too.

Oh I never realised! So the pulse mechanism is storing the low power beam energy rather than electrical energy being stored to fire a more powerful laser generator?

Does the pulser have a mass ratio to the beam generator or anything for easy guesses to the mass of the whole assembly?