Huh, to what degree is this technology gatekept by battery advances?

A few decades ago lasers were dismissed because they involved chemical reagents for high power and explosive capacitors for even low-power applications.

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cogman10 14 hours ago | parent [-]

> Huh, to what degree is this technology gatekept by battery advances?

Not too much. The power delivery was doable even 15 years ago. It would have just been more expensive and heavier.

The bigger issue I believe would have been the lens and tracking capabilities. For the tracking to work you need some pretty good cameras, pretty fast computers, and pretty good object recognition. We are talking about using high speed cameras and doing object detection each frame

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Animats 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The power delivery was doable even 15 years ago.

Not really. It took a long time for solid state lasers to make it to 100KW. That's the power level military people have wanted for two decades.

Megawatt chemical lasers are possible, and have been built. But the ground based one was three semitrailers, and the airborne one needed a 747. Plus you ran out of chemicals fairly fast.

	▲	serf 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I took 'power delivery' to mean the systems that facilitate driving the energy into the weapon, not the beam itself -- although now under consideration of the technology I think we should probably avoid the use of the phrase 'power delivery', without a projectile being involved that's essentially the entire concept.

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galkk 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Wouldn’t they be able to just use radars?