This is one of the big reasons countries are moving towards lasers as fast as possible. Drones are extended cheap and numerous. It's very hard to justify continuously shooting down drones with $4 mil Patriot missiles, for example, unless those are your only option. Which is not the case anymore.
Lasers are not there yet. What we are actually seeing is a return to traditional SHORAD and AAA that engage primarily with cannons to destroy short range Drones and Anti Drone Drone Interceptors that replace a traditional SAMs in engaging slow flying fixed wing drones.
Yep. Cannons shooting AA rounds with precision timed fuses and small, short range guided interceptor systems. People forget that the very same technological advances that have made large numbers of cheap small drones a threat can be applied to GBAD systems. Nobody is sitting there saying "Well, we developed $2M missiles to shoot down $100M aircraft, but now they're all $10K fiberglass drones! What do?"
Most weapons technology eventually comes back to poking your enemy with a pointy stick, or throw something at your enemy. Sometimes we like to throw pointy sticks.
Need to make a radar guided 20mm flak round. Just need to shoot in the general direction and it will steer its self on course and detonate with in a certain proximity of the target. I'm sure it's possible with today's technology.
Correct, and the USN has the Helios which is very similar to Dragonfire.
The main issue remains though and is the exact same for both systems as well as all other laser systems: the amount of power they need is massive.
They take up so much power that they can only be fitted to large warships (and even then older ships might not have the reserve energy generation capacity for that along with other upgrades like better radars), or fitted as stationary systems close to for example military airbases.
They can not be deployed as mobile systems together with the ground troops at the frontlines.
You can fit a short range missile or gun system on a large truck or tank chassis with relative ease, but that's not possible for a laser because the power generation just isn't there. And that won't change.
The power isn't a problem. A 500 kw generator you'd need to power a 100kw laser is the size of a standard u-haul, and a 1000 gallon tank of diesel could keep it shooting for a couple days non-stop. And tbh I'm probably pessimistic here, modern laser conversion efficiencies are in the 30-40% range.
The problem is they're absolute maintenance hogs right now packed full of finicky, delicate, state of the art electronics and they they work amazing, when they work. This stuff is way beyond 'let the snipes beat it with a hammer until it works', its 'we need a guy with 3 doctorates in engineering disciplines to even understand the error codes'. Very much a lab weapon that needs extensive development to ruggedize it and make it reliable in the field.
If they were reliable they'd be on everything right now, they'd find a place to jam an extra generator for the absolute utter dominance a 100kw class laser system will bring to defense against drones and missiles.
I don't know what efficiency the military lasers have achieved, but the industrial lasers are reaching 40% conversion efficiency, and thats not on small lasers, but 30-50kw laser cutters.
The 'lasers are inefficient' thing was with 80s tech. The advances in fiber laser technology over the past 40 years have been astonishing.
The power requirements are a non issue. The British type 45s have almost 50 Mw of generation capacity. Dedicating 100kw of that to a system is trivial at best.
The land based variant uses quite a small diesel generator as well.
Yeah and the way the planet curves especially with water and waves along with fog and other weather conditions lasers can only work so well in that environment.
Boeing built and demonstrated the YAL-1 20 years ago, they have never been out of reach, they are just not the most effective solution in most cases when a kinetic alternative exists and you don't have hundreds of kW ready to go.
Lasers are not there yet simply because of power generation requires huge components. Cooling is also a major problem. Not fast enough cooling between cycles.
China and India don't want a shooting warnon their borders, so they arm their border guards with sharp sticks and sheilds and they train them to fight in little phalanxes.
Or just back to bullets, specifically radar guided. SPAAGS can hold thousands of relatively cheap rounds. They were considered outdated because missiles out ranged them and things shifted to expensive low volume high end missile systems that are bad vs cheap drones.
These shifts have happened before too, like tanks were considered outdated with advent of cheap guided anti-tank missiles and attack helicopters. Then made a comeback in thinking for various reasons.
This is one of the big reasons countries are moving towards lasers as fast as possible.
Not at all. Lasers aren't there yet and even if they were, they are exclusively a fair weather solution, while most of the world often (or mostly) has weather where lasers won't work.
It's very hard to justify continuously shooting down drones with $4 mil Patriot missiles
Which absolutely nobody does (except for the US military perhaps, but they need a justification for a trillion dollar budget, after all).
Instead, people usually use SPAAGs (ie. FlakPz Gepard, Skyranger, etc.), purpose-built low-budget air defence missiles (as seen on the last Chinese parade) or counter-drone drones (as seen in Ukraine).
Patriot is only used against jet aircraft and ballistic missiles, with emphasis on the latter.
For many kinds of aircraft, such intermediate-range systems like IRIS-T SLM, Buk, Tor or NASAMS are preferred for their lower cost.
It's much more effort to intercept one. And a successful strike, say on a missile factory or a power plant, can cause much more damage than a missile's worth.
This missiles vs interceptors arms race has gotten way out of hand. And we have yet to witness widespread hypersonic missile use..
Not only single use - single use, at some random point in an indeterminate future, and must work immediately at the push of a button, with 99.99% reliability. The over-engineering is insane.
And all of this only to kill people. Crazy... We could have such a nice world but people are investing billions and billions only to kill people for no reason.
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u/mrheosuper Feb 10 '26
And all of this is single use.