Coherent Beam Combining?!?
I'm sure that George Lucas will be looking into the copyright implications of that one!
DragonFire laser to be fitted to Royal Navy ships after acing drone-zapping trials
Britain's Royal Navy ships will be fitted with the DragonFire laser weapon by 2027 – five years earlier than planned – following recent successful trials involving fast-moving drones. The Ministry of Defence says it has signed a £316 million ($413 million) contract with weapons developer MBDA UK to deliver the DragonFire …
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Monday 24th November 2025 16:30 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: Coherent Beam Combining?!?
It's got funnels. Not sure how large they are in comparison to a womp rat though.
After typing that, I then had to look it up, as there were a few ships in WWII that took bombs down the funnel - which ended up being catastrophic. As that meant going straight into the engine room, and doing much more serious damage - plus without power damage control becomes a lot more difficult.
I had a vague memory that USS Arizona took a bomb down the funnel at Pearl Harbour. But that's apparently not true, though it was thought so at the time. Instead it took a direct hit to a magazine and exploded. However the destroyers HMS Keith and the unfortunately named HMS Grenade both did take hits down the funnel that led to their sinking. Plus the troopship Lancastria.
Of RN ships to be on that were worse than HMS Grenade, I can only think of HMS Decoy. Fortunately there wasn't an HMS Meatshield...
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Monday 24th November 2025 21:24 GMT NoneSuch
Re: Coherent Beam Combining?!?
Coming soon: Drones with mirrors...
Ooooo... Laser powered drones. The more laserer the betterer.
Or we go full Dr Evil and have sharks with frikking laser beams on their heads.
Yes, it's late and I can't sleep. My voices tell me I'm perfectly sane, however. And that I need more booze and ammunition for some reason...
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Monday 24th November 2025 21:45 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Coherent Beam Combining?!?
"I'm sure that George Lucas will be looking into the copyright implications of that one!"
Copyright is a civil matter. And when the defendant has armed navel ships with frikken lasers along with a supplier armed even more frighteningly with patent lawyers, I'd not be betting on George Lucas :-)
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Monday 24th November 2025 12:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: How long before ....
Sorry to ruin your joke ... BUT Laser weapons are able to ablate some/all ??? reflective coatings and go straight through !!!
The ablation is a result of heat buildup and/or impurities in the surface coating heating/transfering light at a different rate to the majority constituent of the coating which creates 'holes' by which the laser can 'pass' the coating towards the substrate it has been applied to.
[It made sense when I wrote it !!! :) ]
:)
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Monday 24th November 2025 12:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: How long before ....
That gets cooked off in a second. Even a mirror still absorbs enough of that energy to be destroyed, although you could maybe make a rotating body and redirect the incoming beam for a while (possibly even taking down something else with it) before it melts.
That said, I'm personally more worried about someone developing an algorithm to make the drone sit exactly between a plane and the laser so the incoming beam would commit blue on blue if it's not immediately switched off afterwards, or when the drone blips out of the way and the beam doesn't immediately follow. I guess it depends on how long it takes to take out a drone what is possible.
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Monday 24th November 2025 13:05 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: How long before ....
I'm personally more worried about someone developing an algorithm to make the drone sit exactly between a plane and the laser so the incoming beam would commit blue on blue if it's not immediately switched off afterwards
That would be incredibly hard to do - given that you've got to account for the different speeds and angles in order to be in the right place to make that possible. Basically it would require something with very complex sensors and with the ability to change speed and manoeuvre rapidly. At which point, you're no longer talking a cheap drone.
Also the whole point of these weapons is to have a very capable aiming system. You overwhelm your target by maintaining a beam on a fixed point, the more it moves around the longer it takes to do any damage and/or the more power you need to output.
Plus you're supposed to look at what's behind your target when you fire. At which point you wait, or use a short range weapons system. Wait to get into gun range, or more likely do no damage to the target behind, because being much further away it's out of range of the laser.
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Monday 24th November 2025 13:08 GMT Jan 0
Re: How long before ....
Can we now build lasers without internal mirrors? If not then mirrors can cope with the weapon's energy levels.
The issue with incoming mirror coated weapons is that they'll accumulate non reflective particles on their surface, as they fly. If you ablate the particles, you'll also ablate the mirror beneath and the ablation will grow until the weapon is destroyed.
This begs the question: what happens when a fly lands on the laser's front, or a seagull craps on it?
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Monday 24th November 2025 13:38 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Do not look into the DragonFire with your one good eye
This begs the question: what happens when a fly lands on the laser's front, or a seagull craps on it?
Possibly an expensive repair bill. But hopefully something that was part of the testing, and not just its effectiveness vs flying rats. But having heard the sound of exploding optics from mucky optics on ULH links, it could be a louder bang. There's also the issue of attenuation and dispersion if there's fog or just high humidity.
As for mirrordrones, mine's the one with a parabolic reflector!
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Monday 24th November 2025 14:27 GMT KittenHuffer
Re: Do not look into the DragonFire with your one good eye
A parabolic reflector would focus the laser beam down to a point.
What you want is a retro-reflector! These are what NASA left on the Moon so they could bounce lasers off the Moon to see how far away it is. They work but they only average 1.6 photons from each laser pulse arriving back to be detected!
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Monday 24th November 2025 15:12 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Do not look into the DragonFire with your one good eye
A parabolic reflector would focus the laser beam down to a point.
Yep, but has the advantage of simplicity, ie simpler mirror surface that can divert some of the energy back to a point in front of the target.
What you want is a retro-reflector! These are what NASA left on the Moon so they could bounce lasers off the Moon to see how far away it is. They work but they only average 1.6 photons from each laser pulse arriving back to be detected!
Yep, those are fun. Especially listening to flat-earthers trying to come up with arguments about how they don't work. Or just how the Moon's orbit is supposed to work in their theories. But also pondering some fun I had with Luneberg lenses a looong time ago for retro-reflecting and beam forming. One downside is fitting something with retro-reflectors would be kinda anti-stealthy and just make targetting easier. Which is also probably one of the advantages of DEW, ie less mass and recoil to manage than gun mounts, so quicker to get on target and keep focused on it.
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Monday 24th November 2025 14:08 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: How long before ....
phuzz,
Several ships in the Falklands took hits from "friendly" fire aimed at aircraft, as well as in WWII. In 1991, while liberating Kuwait, The USS Missouri fired chaff to decoy an incoming missile which had been reported (but didn't actually exist). This was the night after 2 were fired at it, with one shot down by HMS Gloucester. However, it fired its chaff almost directly at USS Jarrett. Which had its Phalanx activated (for obvious reasons) - and automatically fired at the chaff cloud. Hitting Missouri with several 20mm rounds. Not that they'd do much to a battleship, but not so nice for anyone on deck, or in an unarmoured compartment.
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Monday 24th November 2025 16:42 GMT thames
Re: How long before ....
More plausible is to have the drone fly low and keep a coastal city or a concentration of commercial shipping in the background. Using a laser to shoot down a drone under those circumstances would be like Assad dropping gas on cities because there happen to be some rebels hiding there.
I have a fair bit of experience with industrial welding lasers and they are an absolute pain to deal with because of the great lengths that are required to maintain safety. The beam can undergo multiple reflections and still be dangerous to eyes (the main threat) so there's simply no way to operate them safely in open air in a factory. This makes troubleshooting and maintenance very difficult and only the company's very best tradesmen had any hope of keeping them going. As a result of this laser welding was something we did only as a last resort if no other process was able to do the job.
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Monday 24th November 2025 21:54 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: How long before ....
The "kill" range of these lasers seems to be about 1KM. It makes one wonder what the attenuation is over longer distances and when something in the background if you miss is far enough back to be safe. I suppose it depends on weather conditions and what you might accidentality hit further back. I'd image someone quite aways further back looking in the direction of the "pretty lights" might be blinded but building and vehicles likely to be perfectly safe. I have a vague memory that there may be something in the Geneva Convention regarding laser weapons that are used to intentionally blind the enemy as being "not cricket", so operators might need to be careful and always have a plausible defence against "mistakes"
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Tuesday 25th November 2025 12:18 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: How long before ....
I have a vague memory that there may be something in the Geneva Convention regarding laser weapons that are used to intentionally blind the enemy as being "not cricket", so operators might need to be careful and always have a plausible defence against "mistakes"
There's this-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_Weapons
Article 3
Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this Protocol.
So providing DEW aren't specifically intended to blind people, it's fine. Ish. But care will still be neeeded to make sure there's no friendly DragonFire and the beam doesn't hit friendly ships or aircraft and burn out optics, electronic or human. Plus being a laser, this makes safety more complicated than just a simple inverse-square law calculation-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law#Light_and_other_electromagnetic_radiation
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Monday 24th November 2025 12:57 GMT lglethal
Field trials?
There just so happens to be a rather large area in eastern europe where there are significant numbers of drones being used in a warfare setting. Perhaps a few of these sent towards the front lines there to provide cover would make excellent field trials to prove that this tech works as well as claimed...
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Monday 24th November 2025 13:12 GMT lglethal
Re: Field trials?
That's true of some of the Drones, mostly those at the very front lines. The Iranian drones attacking Residential blocks in Ukrainian cities though are a very different kettle of fish. They fly pretty much like a missile, maybe with a bit more zigzagging. They would seem to be the perfect target for this sort of system. Remove those from the equation, and a lot of Ukrainian civilian lives would be saved, and Putin would have to rely on his very expensive missiles to continue his terror compaign.
As for the small ones at the front line, if this thing is as good as claimed it should be able to handle a relatively short warning period and a very small drone size. But I dont have the details tosay if that's true or not.
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Monday 24th November 2025 15:46 GMT Vulch
Re: Field trials?
Power supply and cooling can be limiting for land based laser defence systems. The article mentions 50kW so you need a generator that will provide that, and a fair bit of it will land up as waste heat that you need to get rid of. Ships have nice big engines with generators attached and sit on a relatively cool heatsink, or the ocean as it's sometimes termed. The army version mentioned is a fair bit less powerful as everything has to fit in an AFV chassis or two.
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Monday 24th November 2025 16:38 GMT cyberdemon
Re: Field trials?
> Power supply and cooling can be limiting for land based laser defence systems. The article mentions 50kW so you need a generator that will provide that, and a fair bit of it will land up as waste heat that you need to get rid of.
News from 2028: Google, Meta and Microsoft datacentres to get rooftop LDEWs to deter fleshy meatsacks from attempting to turn off the AI
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Monday 24th November 2025 13:23 GMT I ain't Spartacus
More missiles
Type 45 now has more missiles. And cheaper ones too. Aster (Sea Viper) is the long range version, of which there are 48. But Type 45 is currently going through 2 major upgrade programs. Most have already been through PIP (power-plant improvement - and upgrade) - while HMS Defender is doing both that and the new missile upgrade. Getting another 24 VLS cells for Sea Ceptor (CAMM) missiles These are shorter range but also much cheaper.
Sadly the 4½" gun on Type 45 isn't currently used in the anti-air role, as the ammo is no longer made. Although it also has 2 x 30mm cannon (which are excellent for anti-drone work - and can be either TV or radar laid) and 2 x 20mm Phalanx - for really scarily short range last-ditch defence.
The problem with all the shorter ranged stuff though, is that it's shorter range. Several ships in the Red Sea have had to expend the gold-plated multi-million moolah's-worth of missile, because they could easily shoot down the drone or cruise missile with their guns, but they're defending a ship that's 30 miles away and none of that stuff will reach. In self-defence they could just wait until the missile is closer, then shoot it down the cheap way.
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Monday 24th November 2025 16:54 GMT thames
Re: More missiles
If the drone is 30 miles away, then all it needs to do is to stay low and it will be below the horizon.
For anti-drone self defence work, I think 30mm or 40mm guns with time air burst anti-drone ammunition (off the shelf in both cases) will make mince meat of pretty much any drone in a self-defence situation. 20mm Phalanx is very outdated and being phased out in most navies.
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Monday 24th November 2025 17:29 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: More missiles
thames,
If the drone is 30 miles away, then all it needs to do is to stay low and it will be below the horizon.
My point was just that short range, cheaper defence weapons only work to defend you. Long range stuff is more expensive - but being longer range you can cover a larger area. Hence you sometimes shoot down cheap stuff with expensive missiles, because it's the only weapon you can bring to bear.
Also, remember that a drone hiding below your radar horizon, also can't see you. This is where you get to conversations about kill chains. To destroy a thing, you first have to find it. So something has to be flying at sufficient altitude to do the reconnaissance, and you can shoot that something down.
I'm not sure why laser weapons are preferred to just adding more 40mm canon. Which have similar ranges.
I also think that Phalanx has its uses. For example, when the Danish frigate Iver Huidtfelt had a radar failure while in combat in the Red Sea last year, that could have ended rather badly. I believe the problem has been tracked to the ship's combat system, the radar was actually working fine. But they weren't able to run it, and the weapons at the same time. Thus they had to shoot down the missile with cannon, but had to do it with optical guidance, not radar. Which worked, though defective ammo made this even more stressful, and showered the ship with fragments as half the ammo exploded as soon as it left the barrel. This was apparently because the ammo was time-expired (past its sell-by date)!
At which point a system like Phalanx, that has its own independent radar might save you, because it's independent of your CMS and still works if the ship's radar has taken a hit. So I'd like to keep it, as the old belt-and-braces, extra layers in the Swiss cheese defence.
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Monday 24th November 2025 22:19 GMT thames
Re: More missiles
Phalanx is becoming obsolete mainly because missiles are getting faster which results in shorter engagement times. So simply hosing the sky with metal is starting to be a losing proposition. Goalkeeper faces the same problem.
Stuff like 40mm guns with timed fuses allow for longer engagement ranges and so more time in which to try to hit the missile before it arrives.
This is why 40mm guns (Bofors, 40CTA, and others) are making such a come back in newer designs now. 30mm guns with timed fuses (e.g. AHEAD) are similar, but probably not quite as effective. Ships may have both 30 and 40mm, so it's not one or the other. There are self contained models which just need power and have their own radar or other sensors, and have non deck penetrating mounts. However, integration into the ship's CMS is more effective because it can take advantage of the better sensors.
These guns will also make mincemeat out of aerial and surface drones in self defence situations.
As for missiles, yes I agree that a million dollar missile is still cheaper than a billion dollar frigate if it allows a ship to effectively be in two places at once.
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Monday 24th November 2025 14:27 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: How fast can it kill drones?
AVR,
Upvote for the War Thunder gag.
From what I've read, we're talking a few seconds for the cheap, crap drones, to 10 or more for bigger stuff. Remember the ship also has a layered defence setup, with long range and medium range surface to air missiles, two 30mm cannon, two Phalanx 20mm Gatling guns, both heavy and light machine guns, plus a helicopter which can carry 20 Martlet short range missiles in a load. Plus the ship has various electronic warfare capabilities and both chaff and active decoys.
They also warn approaching fighter jets not to come within a couple of miles of their high powered radar, so I don't know if that's enough to bugger up smaller, non-shielded, drones at close range?
Remember that it's a ship, so while at sea you're not going to reach it with anything truly cheap and cheerful. Your basic quadcopter is going to run out of charge first. Once you're talking long range drones, you're into the tens to hundreds of thousands in cost, at which point using missiles is no longer an unreasonable expense. When transiting the Suez canal, or at some other choke-point, the risk is much higher of course, because the cheap stuff is within range. But the cheaper it is, the more vulnerable it is to electronic warfare.
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Monday 24th November 2025 16:49 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: How fast can it kill drones?
breakfast,
Everyone seems to be making sub-aquatic drones...
Ukraine have used several of them to sink Russian ships. They've got a drone that looks a bit like a small speedboat, but with a fibreglass cover over the top. And the idea is that it can loiter just underwater, which just a few sensors peeping above the surface, until the target comes within range. Then the engines come on, and I think it operates above the water. They've fitted them with missiles of all sorts, or just filled them with explosives and rammed them into ships. They've even shot down helicopters with a version with old heat-seeking air-to-air missiles on.
This is just a development of what's already been done with speedboats (either with suicide crews or drones) - but with the extra stealth of being able to hide underwater. Ukraine have tried lots of other drone-related tricks, to attack Russian ships or the Kerch bridge.
Russia have many different ones. Including the Poseidon that they call a nuclear powered torpedo. Well a torpedo is already a one-way attack drone, but this thing (if it works) has an effectively unlimited range, and is a nuclear weapon carrying drone. They've also got a large sub called Belgorod, which is specifically designed for special operations - including operating underwater uncrewed vehicles. As well as carrying the Losharik, which is a nuclear powered crewed deep submergence vehicle - which requires a mothership for support (the Belgorod or a surface ship).
There's also XULVs, which are small unmanned drone-submarines with lots of stuff in them. Some are supposed to have month-long endurance, as long as they're only doing a few knots, while listening with sonar - the idea being that a ship could launch a few of them to cover an important area - or they could be used for sneaky recce close to an enemy's coast.
Of course there's also loads of civilian unmanned
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Monday 24th November 2025 13:47 GMT Bebu sa Ware
"the size of a £1 coin (similar diameter to a US quarter) "
Què és això? — You will have to forgive me I'm from Barcelona. ;)
22.50 mm round £1 coin (<2017)
23.43 mm twelve sided £1 coin (>2017)
Anything like 50kW delivered to 10 mm circle at 1000m even for a minute is ~ 3MJ — that would devalue your pound faster than the Chancellor. ;)
At £10 a shot and the average retail price in the UK ~26p/kWh roughly 40 kWh (144MJ) per shot… more wholesale ;)
Which suggests the 50kW is the continuous supply and laser is operated intermittently with stored energy to produce pulses with considerably greater power.
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Monday 24th November 2025 14:11 GMT NXM
power cost
If they're paying £10 for 50KW in 10s for eg, they're overpaying. They ought to switch suppliers.
50KW over an hour at 25p/unit is £12.50, and in 10 seconds that's about 3.5p (not including the standing charge of course). Even accounting for the cost of gas, £10 is severely too much!
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Monday 24th November 2025 15:29 GMT Wempy
Re: power cost
> A laser weapon can continue firing for as long as the ship has sufficient electrical power, and costs just £10 ($13) per shot, according to the MoD.
You forgot the subscription charge - dragonfire probably give them the first 10 shots free, then a monthly sub of £100 for the next 10 (maybe with a free one for every 10 fired). Guaranteed to rise by the rate of inflation + 5% every April 1st.
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Monday 24th November 2025 18:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: power cost
This joke only works for the Brits on El Reg !!!
For the USA readers:
"Guaranteed to rise by the rate of inflation + 5% every April 1st"
This is a play on the standard 'built-in' cost uplift of our Mobile (Cell) Phone Contracts each year.
They always include a 'Inflation + xx%' line so you know the minimum price you will have next year !!!
The subscription charge comment is also following what WAS typical small print detailing the amount of calls you got for free before you paid. !!!
:)
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Monday 24th November 2025 14:38 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: All very impressive but....
Why do you think it takes so long? Because it's hard. We didn't have working laser weapons before. Now we do. That took R&D. Going from working prototype to actual deployable weapon also takes ages, and lots more R&D, plus large applications of time and money.
For example, lets say you want to make a new air-to-air missile. Easy job right? It's only going to get used once. Then it explodes into millions of pieces. However there's a problem. Fighter jets often need to fly around armed. But don't fire their missiles off every mission. Therefore you have to make your missile be able to fly 100 miles at mach 4 and then go bang, preferably near to its actual target. While also being subjected to temperature ranges from -80°C to +100ºC and forces of up to 9g while strapped to the wings of a jet going about its normal business. And to be able to do this for several years between refits. Because otherwise, when that fighter jet needs to fire a missile, it may just drop off the wing and do bugger-all.
Similarly Dragonfire has to sit on a mount on a warship, outside in all-weathers, in operating areas from the Arctic Ocean to the tropics - being subjected to salt-water corrosion, battering from wind and waves and stresses from repeated corkscrewing movement as the ship ploughs through rough seas. And then it needs to work reliably, and at very short notice, in order to protect the ship and everyone on it from explodey things being aimed at it.
As the joke goes, it ain't rocket science. It's actually much harder, just like rocket engineering.
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Monday 24th November 2025 14:41 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Too lazy to check, but didn't the article say a European first deployment of a laser weapon to a warship?
I'm pretty sure the prototype was in testing throughout the 2010s. But the UK had laser weapons deployed on ships in the 1990s. Although I think those were to blind the sensors on missiles and/or the pilots of aircraft.
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Monday 24th November 2025 14:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
I guess the key spec (absent from the reportage)
Is successful strikes per second.
Assuming you are using a low inertia aiming system (I am probing the bits that will be beyond top secret here) then I would be expecting something of the order of 5-10 ?
So 4 of these bad boys could rack up 40 strikes per second ?
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Monday 24th November 2025 14:48 GMT Zolko
whhhiiiizzzzz ?
DragonFire was able to shoot down high-speed drones
how exactly are drones shot down by a laser ? Lets assume that this device can target, follow, concentrate the laser beam through kilometers of atmospheric trubulence with adaptive optics, for several seconds on the exact same spot on the drone flying at 100m/s (that's 360km/h only, a slow drone), lets assume all that : what happens then ? I mean, a laser doesn't make anything explode like in Moonraker or StarWars, at best it burns a small hole through the composite shell of the drone. So what ?
The only useful scenario I can imagine if it burns its cameras making it blind, which would work against small FPS drones as used in Ukraine, but those are unlikely to target a military ship anywhere.
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Monday 24th November 2025 15:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: whhhiiiizzzzz ?
I can see several ways it could shoot down the drones
* Blind sensors (as you suggested)
* Overheat something critical, be it fuel, batteries, electronics, bearings, gaskets, explosive payload...
* Overheat structural components (what is the operating temperature range of a propeller or a wing?)
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Monday 24th November 2025 20:48 GMT Zolko
Re: whhhiiiizzzzz ?
the purpose of some military equipment is not to win wars but to make some people rich. So if a company can convince clueless politicians that it has electrolytes inside and therefore it must be developed, built and deployed – but heaven forbid used in combat – then it's jackpot for them. If they can make that equipment sound complicated enough – sharks with lasers ? – so that everybody will say "they must have thought this out " then they have nothing to fear from public inspection. Remember the F-35 ?
Sorry, but as it happens I do work in adaptive optics – for astronomy – and concentrating a photon beam through kilometers of atmosphere is extremely difficult for stars, and they don't move ! And their light is feable, while a high-power laser will modify the atmosphere it goes through making adaptive optics very difficult.
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Tuesday 25th November 2025 12:29 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: whhhiiiizzzzz ?
Sorry, but as it happens I do work in adaptive optics – for astronomy – and concentrating a photon beam through kilometers of atmosphere is extremely difficult for stars, and they don't move ! And their light is feable, while a high-power laser will modify the atmosphere it goes through making adaptive optics very difficult.
But not impossible, and this is a very high powered beam (relatively). But also videos show some neat atmospheric modifications-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juDxtapYsj8
where you can see the beam width varying as it passes through the atmosphere.
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Monday 24th November 2025 17:02 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: whhhiiiizzzzz ?
Zolko,
I believe it causes a build-up of heat, which overheats or melts the control wiring and processors. Dazzling or blinding sensors can be done as well - although that kind of tech has been deployed for literally decades - and doesn't need that kind of power.
It's probably a less good area defence weapon, but in order to hit you, it has to fly towards you, making it considerably easier to hit. You still have to worry about the tracking speed of the mount, as it can manoeuvre around to throw you off target - but that's still easier than hitting a moving target going across you at speed.
Also, the harder you make the drone problem, the more expensive and complex the drones have to be. Thus evening out the costs. You don't want to be wasting a million dollar missile on a $500 drone. But if you have cheaper systems to deal with them, then you don't mind using a million dollar missile on a million dollar drone. Or using your cheaper point defence missiles (or even cheaper guns) on $100,000 drones.
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Monday 24th November 2025 17:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: the tracking speed of the mount,
If you know what your are doing, you can get a sweep of 90 degrees in under a second. The weapon will struggle to keep up with the transit.
As a previous 'tard noted, the bits where the article (or disguised press release and warning to the Ruskies) is vague is where the secret bits are.
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Monday 24th November 2025 21:01 GMT Zolko
Re: whhhiiiizzzzz ?
it causes a build-up of heat, which overheats or melts the control wiring and processors
I'm sure that's the selling-point, but for that, you need first to blow through the shell. Make that shell shiny and good heat conductor to dissipate the local heat buildup – like aluminium – and your laser is suddenly useless. Have you ever touched aluminium seats in the burning sun ? They're actually cool.
in order to hit you, it has to fly towards you
so ... this expensive high-tech device's only role is to protect itself while it's useless to protect sites nearby ? That's genius marketing !
Also, the harder you make the drone problem, the more expensive and complex the drones have to be
again, I'm sure that's the selling point, and again I think that's genius marketing : produce some expensive whizz-bang laser right from James Bond, pretending that it's very expensive because it will make the other side even more expensive and you can have a lifetime of easy money. It doesn't even need to do anything useful, but it must be Flash Gordon-ish and you're set. And if some drunken Russian comes with a cheap weapon that turns circles around your device, pretend that they were lucky and propose an even more expensive device, that'll teach those barbarians.
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Monday 24th November 2025 22:16 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: whhhiiiizzzzz ?
"I'm sure that's the selling point, and again I think that's genius marketing"
Marketing bluff only goes so far. Did you miss the bit about sea trials up in the Hebrides? That's an area of see not known for nice calm sunny days on any sort of regular basis. Actual sea going military types appear have actually tested this to some degree and decided it works well enough to commit. Not some fluffy politician being wowed by glossy brochures.
Of course, that's no real guarantee that it will be successful in actual combat, but I'd put my money on it more likely working than not.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
