This is how you get very excited, very big cats
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My limited understanding is that at 150kw, thermal blooming issues have not been resolved. I think these solid state systems have to fire in pulses, making it harder to just burn your way through. I haven’t poked around in this area for a decade, so am not up on the latest news.
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Name of my new band; we sing songs about flatulence.
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So, do we just tell Donny someone hid some hamberders in the barrel of the weapon?
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That’s the next treaty we’re opting out of.
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Even easier. It’s probably not a barrel; it’s probably a mirror. 
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It’s hard to tell which way it’s traveling. Can’t the slow the video down, like they do in the movies?
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Ha! I did the same thing! I had a naked 6 mW HeNe laser tube in a wooden cradle that I built, with a jury-rigged PSU using two halves of a fuse holder for my contacts on the tube. I originally planned to use it for holography, but couldn’t convince my mom to let me build an isolation table in the basement. My buddies and I ended up using it to just horse around and see what the farthest object that we could target was…
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Reminds me of a video from one of favorite bands:
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Imma charging ma laser!
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The Navy’s development of DEWs like the LWSD, provide immediate warfighter benefits and provide the commander increased decision space and response options.
Them’s some mighty fine milspec buzzwords!
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Besides, that’s already taken by the DEW Line - c’mon milfolk, stop slacking!
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On a clear day you can see forever.
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Not that lasers aren’t cool, but did bullets stop working?
We could be researching high energy lasers to drive solar sails etc…, but pew pew shooting ships and whatnot…
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The thing that looks like a barrel basically contains six high-powered welding lasers focused on a single point of convergence (target) and containing noble-gas coolant likely circulated through the rest of the assembly (that rumpled tube in front is probably a coolant line. Each component laser will have a solid-state optical resonance chamber with a reflector at the back and an output coupler (basically a partially mirrored lens, like synthetic quartz glass) at the front. The visible mirror part Hair Shitler should stare into is probably another computer-controlled quartz lens used to focus the array of collimated beams on the target.
It also has a couple of other visible optical elements which I suspect are for targeting and a detector to tune the laser array in real time, which would in turn suggest they’re parametric lasers that shift wavelength as the aforementioned thermal bloom changes the refractive index of the intervening air and humidity.
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This stuff is not for shooting other ships, but for anti-missile and anti-drone purposes.
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