On Tuesday, 10 July 2018 7:52:49 AM AEST Lindsay W via luv-talk wrote:
This one of the more serious problems in using energy beam weapons, one cannot tell if one misses a target by a centimetre or a kilometre. Where as one has no difficulty in tracking a missile or a shell.
LASER light will exactly follow line of sight, including being refracted or reflected. If you see something and line a LASER on what you see then you will hit it. Unlike bullets which are diverted by wind that can't be seen and aren't diverted by optical effects. If you can see the frequence of your LASER then you will see some light reflected back to you from dust. For the distances over which hand-held LASERs are effective this does the job. For longer distances you could have a camera that reads IR (or whatever frequency isn't visible to humans) and has a display in frequencies a human can see. For autonomous weapon systems a beam weapon removes the need to predict the future position of the target and allows just tracking the current position. This should be useful for point-defence anti-missile systems. That said the US navy is apparently currently using rapid fire machine guns for such systems so they probably work. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/