Missile Defense

gisterme admonishes me to check things --- and since that posting, I've been doing so, to some degree - and that will continue. What I'll show -- and with more checking, this can be shown beyond any shadow of a doubt -- for people with any sensible feel for the "miracles" that can be achieved-- is that the lasar based weapons, that the Bush administration has been risking so much of our safety for -- are total frauds --- or, if you wish to be more charitable there -- examples of group incompetence to execute a task -- and self deception carried to a point where justice would be a harsh judge indeed, on the people involved...

After all, I've got to worry about some "High School trigonometry" that gisterme expects I don't know how to do. I'm worried that he may be right, after all, so I'll try to be careful...

Another question is how much energy gets delivered to do damage to the missile...

You're talking about enough energy, if it is all absorbed, to boil away about a 2.4 cm layer of water over the surface hit by the lasar -- quite a lot of energy -- if the beam, when it gets there, is that intense, has that time on target --and if all the energy in the beam is absorbed.

If you do have pictures, or data, that show that the lasars really can do impressive damage - under particular conditions -- that would be interesting.

"spinning an ICBM that needs to be guided to a very specific trajectory to release its MIRV bus would seem impractical. Remember that the inertial navigaion system for an ICBM controls a vectored thrust rocket. That guidance system needs to give constant feedback to the thrust vectoring system to assure that the booster is on just the right trajectory at the instant of payload release."

the spin of the rocket itself would be a small, and easily compensated complication -- and a pretty cheap way of making a missile immune to a boost phase lasar (assuming an accurate enough and powerful enough one was even available.)

VERY cheap, compared to the missile defense system itself, even if a lasar one could be built...

http://www.fas.org/rlg/20.htm

http://www.armscontrol.org/ACT/sept00/bpisept00.html

MD6676 gisterme 7/6/01 12:16pm ... MD6677 rshowalter 7/6/01 12:19pm
MD6680 rshowalter 7/6/01 12:53pm ...

So do the issues of distortion. Would better mirrors reduce distortion problems? Sure...

This system can't possibly work, and if the people building it don't know that -- they've carried self deception, and communal deception, very far...

To melt a piece of ice, you have to heat it to its melting temperature, and then add the heat of fusion -- everybody knows that...

Industrial lasers used for cutting 1/8" metal use power levels on the order of 200 W. So if the beam area is about 0.2 cm^^2 then it delivers the same 1kW/cm^^2 needed to destroy an ICBM...

Do want to repeat the question, gisterme.

Can the government now blow something up with a lasar, at short range , in ways that can impress a Congressman?..

What we were talking about, Robert was locating and tracking the target. According to dirac, a lower power wider beam laser would be used to illuminate the actual rocket body so that the high power narrow beam laser can hit it...

As terribly unattractive as "smart rock" approaches can be, for complicated or long distance targeting, "death ray" approaches are worse.