this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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These small drones attack single people and small infantry groups as well as small vehicles up to heavy armor. With laser there is the issue of portability, especially power supply. Also cheap reflective coating requires very high power densities for a kill. Apart from detection and tracking which can use fused microphone array and camera array data the time to react is very short and it has to provide high density of fire on the cheap. I've seen some shotgun use with very limited effectivity. Ditto nets. Maybe antidrone swarms can work, but power limits loitering time. Swarm attacks can easily overwhelm protection.
It looks like a hard problem.
I haven't really been paying much attention, but last I looked, lasers ran into sustained-rate-of-fire issues, which is one of the things that you'd want something like this to be able to do.
They're nice in that they can counter very-fast-moving missiles -- can't outrun light or the laser's panning speed -- but I don't know if a powerful laser is necessarily a cost-effective way to deal with a large number of inexpensive drones.
There are cheap continuous operation 2 kW fiber lasers for material processing which could be enough for the flimsier slower drones.
Do those maintain the kind of beam coherency required for long-range use?
I think that the weaponized lasers I've seen in actual military use, like the AN/SEQ-3, are pulse lasers. I don't know why that is the case; if I had to guess, it might be necessary to avoid some forms of defenses, like producing so much thermal expansion so quickly that it tears apart ablative armor or prevents the target from rotating or rotating some form of shield to change the point exposed to the laser. I don't really follow laser technology, though. Are these capable of pulsed output?
The small drones do not require a long range use, since you are going to detect them only late, and need to terminate them within few seconds.
I have seen an improvised optics on a Youtube channel where a 2 kW continuous operation fiber laser had enough energy flux at 100 m or farther.