By 2045 expect a couple dozen drones and anti drone missiles with your happy meal. :)

In all seriousness, I wonder aloud if blowing things up might be intrinsically cheaper than shooting down the means of said up-blowing.

I would wager that the floor is lower for s2s than s2a simply because there is so much s(urface)

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ElevenLathe 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Maybe we can come up with an atoms-vs-atoms way of making cheap drone interceptors, but IMO the smart money is on lasers. We finally have the technology we only assumed would shortly materialize when we started the Strategic Defense Initiative. We also finally have an economic (rather than "merely" political) rationale for doing so, which is an important precondition to birthing something new in a society ruled entirely by the market.

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1attice 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the smart money is always on "nope" but that has more to do with the laws of thermodynamics :)

Attenuation is going to be wild at any reasonable distance, and you can always just be reflective (or highly and harmlessly absorptive, eg self ablating paint).

Lasers are good for jamming sensors though, which could I suppose, matter, although fibre optic drones or swarmwork could make that less useful as well

	▲	Tostino 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I have seen reports of high-powered lasers being used to sweep an area, cutting through the fiber optic cables on drones that have passed by but not yet reached their targets. But yeah, they do seem to always be future tech that just doesn't materialize as a reliable weapon system.