Guide to defeat Laser at the lowest cost.

Error: Mirror will melt

(Side note: if I had a reflective material that would melt upwards of 1800K, I would use it.  But sadly the 2400K exhaust temperature version of that laser loses half its output power, making the reactor radiators double.  1200K it is...).

The focusing mirror (the one at the aperture) is not part of the cavity, but part of the turret. As such, it is not subject to the temperatures of the cavity. It shouldn't melt.

The other mirrors should remain silver.

Holy shit! Guys! Ablative Armor totally works!

The idea is that you insulate your missile, then coat it in something that boils at a low temperature to carry heat away.


I took a bunch of my mini flak missiles, and gave them all 500um of Silica aerogel. Then 1cm spacing, followed by 500 um of amorphous carbon.  Then, with no gap I threw on 2mm nitrile Rubber.   (pointed nose is a must)

As a control group, I reduced the nitrile rubber to 500um, and devoted the spare mass to the amorphous carbon layer (1.30mm).  This missile is slightly lighter, so it has a touch more deltaV (20m/s).

For my testing protocol, I set up a fleet of 4x laser frigates (non lasers removed).  I sent in 50 missiles for a flyby @ 71ms +/- 1m/s  After each run, i reset the scenario and run the test again.

With every control missiles test 50/50 were destroyed, 
 With every ABL8+ missiles test, 38 to 41/50 survived to strike the laser frigates.  (with between 2 and 4 kills). 


This is far from optimized, but I think it demonstrates the principle!  Man this game is awesome.

P.S. my "miniflak"  gained weight as they became a testing platform.

Nitrile seemed like a good candidate for boiling off easily.  I was also thinking polyethylene, but I haven't tried it.   I need to do some testing to see if this is more mass efficient than other proposed ideas.   I tried the amorphus carbon-gap-silica-gap X3, but it didn't seem to do much for me.

I do not want all my platform to take the performance hit. So I developed a dedicated anti-laser missile and decoy for that specific reason. The decoy, wish I called "silver bullet", will pull much of the work. they are relatively inexpensive and light.

Nitrile Rubber Ablative Armor seems to be very effective against long range laser.

Aye.

Armor layout specifics.

Beryllium copper foil (500 micrometers). For coloration.
1 meter spacing.
1 cm boron layer.
10 cm spacing
2.5 cm nitrile rubber.
10 cm spacing
1 cm amorphous carbon.

Modules die if focused on.
The armor gets penetrated if the lasers get time to bore through it to get at a module.

But if the enemy doesn't focus fire, it works.
To get the enemy from focusing fire, I put a coilgun firing KKVs ever 67.5 ms. Had about 3 live KKVs flying at any given time, and only took some incidental laser damage.
 That did cut a hole in my outer armor layer, but that was cosmetic, and heated up the others.
Whether the success can be wholly attributed to the nitrile rubber, I'm not sure.
Disarmed ships with this armor layout sent in to ram the lasing boat run themselves out of deltaV without being knocked out by the laser.