/sci/ - Science & Math

>>14516045
Not true at all. I can get a 50kw laser cutter. That is plenty to down a plain or satellite if coupled with proper adaptive optics.

The military is repurposing industrial laser technology for weapons purposes because it's far better than the military laser shit they used to use that no shit ran off chemicals.

It's all about the pumped fiber lasers these days. You take a little laser and run it through the core of fiber optic glass that's doped just right and and shine light into that fiber, the laser inside picks up the energy and gets more intense.

Problem is you can only do this up to a point where it's a couple KW in intensity before things start getting too hot to cool. Solution is you do it in paralleled a bunch of times and then couple the beams all still in fiber. This can get you to around 200kw, after that you can keep going but have to optically couple them in a vacuum (coupling in fiber is actually better than coupling it in the air).

IPG photonics is the world leader in this shit.