Navy Shoots Down Plane With Really Big Raygun

Every power-consuming device can only handle so much heat before it fails. If a laser could, say, run continuously with a power output of 1000 watts, it might be able to run at 3000 watts if on for only 1/6th of a second and then allowed to cool for 5/6ths of a second before turning on again. A Gatling laser gun with six of these lasers would be able to provide the equivalent of a 3000 watt continuous beam.

In a similar way, a conventional Gatling gun can provide a rate of fire that would MELT a single-barreled weapon. Each of the Gatling gun's barrels is used at a much slower rate; a six barreled 3000rpm Gatling gun only fires each barrel at the 500rpm rate...

Excellent!! Kill the baddies faster and more efficiently and raise the price of the weapon by at least 3x.

I'm guessing they're going with a 1.54 megajoule phasing transducer with the sensing capacitors arranged in serial and a nitrogen-freon laser.

You will always need combat aircraft. It's easy for a F-18 to go check out a bogey and report back. It can then fire or not based on on scene evidence. A lot harder to do that with missile/laser/railgun.

UAV > F18?

In the future, very likely. Still an aircraft controlled by man and on scene to make the decision.

To hell with all that.....

We should do it because it would look fucking cool!

Absolutely. Can't turn over that final shoot decision. It's iffy enough as it is.

The leaked documents from Afghanistan show a particularly high rate of failure in UAV's, both observation and combat. We won't be replacing jets.

From what I read and notice of the failures, it's basically a "crap, this thing just stopped responding to us."

Cynical me says the Russians are disrupting the com links to pay us back for the 80's. Cynical me.

The reason? It's not just the avionics that fail. There are devices on these birds to blow them up that can be activated from the command centers in Nevada and California, as well as signals that can be sent by theater command elements and teams up close. These are redundant systems.

The long range and theater systems are failing with alarming frequency, and the Taliban likes to hit the teams they send out to recover/demolish these birds.

No one will admit it, but there is a reason we lose contact with these birds. We'd be going nuts if our planes were losing connectivity with AWACS systems. Losing contact with a ground controller is similar.

Bad comm is common. Especially in rocky, mountainous regions. There's a pretty good WWII movie, "A Bridge Too Far", based on the nonfiction book of the same name. The movie stays pretty close to the book except for one thing: In the movie the furthest forward elements can't talk back to the rest of the operation because they have the wrong radios. In real life comm is just hard and they were too far forward to be able to talk to anyone.

Now that is some interesting stuff. Very plausible.

Yeah, those came directly from Starfleet Battles, which Starfleet Command was based on. Their main purpose was for drone (missile) defence.

You know once they get a true laser system up the Navy is pretty much going to go bye bye.

You can't hide ships from lasers in orbit. You can't hide anything.