With high-powered lasers, one of the important destructive mechanisms is blast - the outer layer of the illuminated object vaporizes, and flies away from the rest of the target. The reactive force of this gives the target a hell of a kick. Kicking off strict alignment with it's flight path, or putting a big dent (or even better a hole) in the side of a missile under several G's of stress traveling at a high Mach number is not healthy for the missile. Laser's have problems though - as they heat the air the refractive index changes, leading to 'blooming' or beam expansion. At too high a power density they can also ionize the air, which makes it effectively opaque. Dust, haze, and clouds are also problems. Using *very* short pulses eliminates many of these problems. Peter Trei > ---------- > From: Steve Schear[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Monday, July 23, 2001 1:34 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: Air Force Turns 747 Into Holster for Giant Laser > (washingtonpost.com) > > At 09:14 AM 7/22/2001 -0500, you wrote: > >Point this baby at the ground... > > > >http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27248-2001Jul20.html > > I wonder what the destructive mechanism is for this system? Heat by > radiant absorption seems an obvious but impractical method. If it is, > then > as the article mentions there may be some inexpensive and practical > countermeasures to such a system, such as making the exterior of the > missile body into a multi-faceted mirror able to reflect both IR and radar > > energy (although doing the same for the nose cone might prove more > difficult due to aerodynamics). > > steve
