edit: actually, never mind the laugh cry gif. i lol’d and i think i needed that laugh 
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“I’ve never killed a man, but I’ve read many an obituary filled in their wiki death date and references with a great deal of satisfaction.”
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No worries:
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Lab mirrors, even with active cooling can be penetrated at high power, but in the field the air itself will absorb, scatter, and refract a portion of the beam. To be usable as a weapon it has to work at significant distances where beam diversion and atmospheric interference–and any defenses (e.g., mirrors) – will cut the power delivered to the target significantly. I doubt it would have any success against a supersonic target. For Chinese “weather” balloons or other slower targets, planes are a cheaper option.
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Nothing about military planes are cheap. They used an F-22 to shoot down that balloon, and those cost hundreds of millions of dollars. But more importantly, it was shot down with a sidewinder missile (which cost about $400k each) and they waited until the balloon was over water before firing to make sure that nobody on the ground was put at risk. If they could make a ground-based laser work at that distance (and that is a big “if”) then the unit cost of firing would be less and they wouldn’t be putting dangerous projectiles in the air, other than the objects being shot down.
(Then again, I’m probably being overly optimistic on the cost of firing a laser.)
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No one posted this gif yet?! For shame, Mutants!
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Lasers have been commonplace for most of my lifetime now, and lasers powerful enough to shoot down drones have been available for several years. I think it’s a stretch to consider them science fiction anymore. If nothing else, the fact that the Pentagon is spending billions on them puts them squarely in the realm of today’s reality.
Captain Kirk would blow a Gorn to get his hands on your 10 year old iPhone. Does that make it science fiction? I don’t think so.
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An acquaintance deployed to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War on one of two Bradleys fitted with an experimental laser “dazzler” weapon designed to interfere with enemy optics devices. So this would have been in '91.
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this is entirely off topic but, Pie Repair? “Kaboom! Laxatives”? LOL. That made my day.
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I see your paltry ground and air based lasers, and raise you with the Regan-era nuclear-bomb pumped orbital laser: Project Excalibur!
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What would it do to a human?
I think these were used in the Niven/Pournelle SF novel Footfall (published 1985, height of the Reagan presidency)
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There was a spaceship powered by nuclear bombs
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Yes, an Orion rocket. But there were also these single-use x-ray lasers powered by nuclear explosions. Been a while since I’ve read it, though.
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Seems like an ablative heat shield like spacecraft use would be another option to make airborne targets laser-resistant even if not entirely laser-proof.
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ISTR that nuclear bomb pumped x-ray lasers were an idea, but as it turned out, the physics didn’t actually work.
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Lasers against mortars or artillery is pretty impractical. They are relatively small so hard to track and hit. These munitions have dense, steel casings which take a lot of energy to cause even moderate hesting (Q=mCdT and all that). The fuse might be affected more, but just spinning the munition would allow for the munition to cool off.
Lasers against rocket bodies is a bit easier. They’re larger so easier to track, don’t tend to spin, and if you can just deform the skin via heating then aerodynamics will take care of the destruction for you.
Lasers would be decent against destroying nuclear warheads while they’re in the mid-course stage. While in space the warhead cannot cool off via conduction or convection, only radiation. With a few-minutes of flight time it could effect enough heating to cause damage or to distort the skin such that the aerodynamics in the terminal stage rip it to bits.
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These high energy laser weapons aren’t designed for significant distances. They’re short-range weapons for hitting drones, cruise missiles, mortars, etc. as part of a layered defense.
The atmospheric losses are why these lasers are so overpowered, but a 200 kW laser should be able to melt through a millimeter of aluminum over a kilometer out in a few seconds and these things are designed to dwell on targets for longer than that (whether they can for anything fast moving is another story).
Mirrors just aren’t as big of an issue especially as power levels go up (the goal is MW lasers) unless you were somehow able to get far higher levels of reflectivity and a higher melting point or higher specific heat capacity or mass for a reasonable amount of money. Mind, aluminum is already >90% reflective at the wavelengths involved.
The useful thing these things can deal with is low-cost threats - an alternative to launching million dollar missiles against $2,000 drones.
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