What can counter Laser weapons?

[WestAir]

Quick question. Through the evolution of weaponry, mankind has always found a counter-measure to the latest technological weapon.

We can counter a sword with armor, we can counter a bullet with plating, we can counter missiles with bullets, lasers, or other missiles.

What can we use to counter a laser? Besides the line of sight requirement of a laser (a downside modern artillery lacks), is there any obvious deterrent to their success? If I build a missile cruiser and throw 20 laser guns on them, powered by magic super-conductors - can any other ship best my ship in combat? Can the State Department quickly conjure up a counter-measure to stop my super-deadly missile cruiser, or is this sort of an "end game" where whomever fires first wins the war game?

[sojourner]

Go about half way down on this page and start reading. Then clear your schedule as you spend the rest of your week reading the rest of that great site.

Edited August 15, 2013 by sojourner

[KvickFlygarn87]

Mirrors. That is all.

[palker]

mirrors. Reflect it back at thy foe.

[WestAir]

So if you build the next Aegis Missile Cruiser out of mirrors, it'll be laser-proof?

[DaveofDefeat]

In ground combat? put a mirror on a missile and shoot it at your laser ship. Or just torpedo it to death with a sub like normal people.

[KvickFlygarn87]

Yes... Providing that the mirrors are seamlessly mounted

[DaveofDefeat]

Or build a stealth missile invisible to radar. or just bomb it with a stealth bomber

Edited August 15, 2013 by DaveofDefeat

[andrewas]

So if you build the next Aegis Missile Cruiser out of mirrors, it'll be laser-proof?

Up to a point. Mirrors aren't perfect, so if you hit one with enough energy it'll melt and start to absorb more of the laser. It gets worse, mirrors don't reflect all frequencies evenly, a silver-coated mirror is brilliant for most of the visual spectrum but just below that it drops to about 50% reflectivity. Metals which aren't as bad at low frequencies don't have as good performance overall. Throw in dirt and damage to the mirrors, which will happen in any operational environment, and mirrors can only make it slightly harder for a laser to destroy a ship. And that's assuming the laser is in the visual spectrum.

[Seret]

Smoke works too. Battlefields tend to have lots of it, and it can in fact be customised to block particular chunks of the spectrum. The self-defensive smoke grenade launchers on armoured vehicles will block thermal imaging night vision gear, which can see through "normal" smoke. Lasers don't like any kind of smoke, bt if you knew the frequency of the threat laser you could optimise an obscurant for it.

Lasers aren't particularly well-suited as weapons, except in certain niche applications. Good old fashioned kinetic energy weapons pack a hell of a lot more punch for direct fire. If you've got a power source on your cruiser good enough to run 20 lasers with the power output to be dangerous to other ships I would suggest instead you find a way to put 40 rail guns on it and watch it slag any laser-armed ship that tried to go toe-to-toe with it.

[koshelenkovv]

Smoke, fog and heavy rain.

[sojourner]

In space combat even railguns are slow and their projectiles can be dodged. Lasers are near instantaneous by comparison.

Remember, space is BIG.

You guys need to read that link to Atomic Rockets I posted.

[wafflemoder]

Meta material cloaking could redirect the laser around the object, although you would have to know what part of the electromagnetic spectrum the laser is beforehand.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial_cloaking

[Seret]

In space combat even railguns are slow and their projectiles can be dodged. Lasers are near instantaneous by comparison.

Remember, space is BIG.

You guys need to read that link to Atomic Rockets I posted.

Ah, right, was the OP talking about space combat? I assumed since they mentioned a cruiser they were talking naval.

Nobody really knows how combat between vehicles would play out in space. The main problem with a laser in space is going to be lugging a power source powerful enough. I suspect a chemical laser might be best, but that means limited engagements. Targets in space are unlikely to be able to afford any heavy passive countermeasures, so active would be the way to go. You'd be better off messing with the laser-armed vehicle's search and targeting systems than trying to stop a laser beam.

AFAIK the only outright weapon sent into space wasn't a laser, but the 23mm autocannons on the Almaz stations.

[jwenting]

Mirrors are not going to work. A mirror will reflect a specific range of frequencies only, shoot at it with something well outside that range and it's not reflective at all.

Which effect you can notice by simply looking at a satellite dish for your television. that's a chunk of plastic of metal, grating even, designed to reflect microwave radiation in specific bandwidth ranges to a specific point (hense the shape).

They don't reflect visible light at all (well, except for the colours making up their paintjob, obviously), nor many other things. They get rather hot in direct sunlight, indicating they're good absorbers of UV and/or IR radiation, so shooting a laser in those frequencies at them might well burn a hole.

So you'd need a material that can reflect pretty much everything, perfectly.

[KOCOUR]

Lasers aren't particularly well-suited as weapons, except in certain niche applications. Good old fashioned kinetic energy weapons pack a hell of a lot more punch for direct fire. If you've got a power source on your cruiser good enough to run 20 lasers with the power output to be dangerous to other ships I would suggest instead you find a way to put 40 rail guns on it and watch it slag any laser-armed ship that tried to go toe-to-toe with it.

In space? Combat in space, if it even made some sense, would be so longrange, that any railgun shell would take so long time to reach its target, that the target would be long gone before.

If you figt in space it would be your orbital defence platform firing on interplanetary warhead milions of miles away, and thats where the laser could be good, provided the laser is powerfull enough, and your defence platform has strongenough powersource and big enough heat radiator.

Only thing that could resemble battleship in space would be some orbital bombardment platform that you send to enemy orbit, after you destroy all his defences, with your warheads.

The top combat tactic would be to be the forst one to fire, and shoot more projectiles than enemy defence can destroy before they kill it, and then send other warheads to destroy targets on enemy planet´s surface and maybe some """battle ship""" more like cargoship filled with deorbit capable bombs/missiles, that would bomb targets of oportunity. after that you just put your defence platforms on the orbit of conquered planet, and declare your rule over its inhabitants. Since you have weapons on theyr orbit, they will have no choice, than obey. You will probably not even need to send troops there, and your "army" wold probably be just bunch of fully automated warheads and gun platforms.

Or you have magic powers, and can teleport yourself close to the enemy. In this case it would make sense to have armed warships.

[Khrissetti]

Ablative armour, that is to say, a layer of foam or other easily replaced material which is designed to absorb the energy not reflected back into space and vaporise, protecting the more delicate hull underneath. NOT the magic ablative armour of Star Trek: Voyager - Endgame

[Fox62]

ninja'd, ignore this post for now.

[Seret]

In space? Combat in space, if it even made some sense, would be so longrange

I agree. I thought the OP was talking about naval combat. I don't think combat in space would fit into the existing sci-fi paradigm extrapolated from naval warfare. It'd be more like aerial combat, combat vehicles would likely be small, fast, and poorly armoured. They'd rely on countermeasures, speed and stealth for protection. Unmanned goes without saying. Weapons would likely be guided, at least terminally. It wouldn't be a case of hurling walls of lead at each other, but a small number of smart weapons. Carrying large numbers of reloads would be too expensive. Warheads would probably only need to be kinetic kill though. The vehicle itself might be the warhead in fact, a swarm of semi-autonomous microsat kill vehicles could occupy a large volume effectively, and you could pack a lot of them into a single launch.

[Charzy]

Mirrors can reflect light, yeah. But high powered lasers designed to melt steel simply vaporise the mirrors, since no mirror is perfectly reflective.

[Moon Goddess]

In space? Combat in space, if it even made some sense, would be so longrange, that any railgun shell would take so long time to reach its target, that the target would be long gone before.

I imagine Space Combat will be:

Detect enemy at super long range, fire off a large number of highly manuverable seeking missles, spend your time shooting their missles out of the sky, and hoping they don't shoot all of yours out.

[DaveofDefeat]

In space combat I am going to stay 1 light minute away from you can throw missiles at you till you die. Also the effectiveness in using lasers to actually kill something is doubtful...You gotta put a lot of energy in a very short time to leave a tiny little hole that somebody can put duck tape over. Missile defense? sure. ship to ship combat? nah. That is if you can even hit anything with a laser at a million kilometers out.

[Seret]

I imagine Space Combat will be:

Detect enemy at super long range, fire off a large number of highly manuverable seeking missles, spend your time shooting their missles out of the sky, and hoping they don't shoot all of yours out.

This, except that since everything in space is designed for minimum weight, so your defence against their missiles is likely to be more about ECM or other countermeasures than actively shooting them. Shooting an inbound kinetic kill warhead in space won't remove the threat it poses, it'll just mean you get hit by a cloud of debris instead of a unitary warhead, which isn't necessarily much better.

[Thaniel]

If you disintegrate the enemyprojectiles at a large enough distance, so the subsequent cloud of debris is dispersed enough, they could fire whole planets, and you'd still be safe. While the energy in total for the cloud of debris might be the same as for the original projectile, what decides it's penetrative power is the area each grain hits, and with what energy. That is why you throw tennisballs with your dog or cat, not steel ballbearings. The total weight/mass of the ball might be the exact same, but at the same speed, the more dense ballbearing will do more damage than the rubber ball.

So, lightweight kinetic kill warheads vaporized at 30 lightseconds distance may see it's cloud of atomized remnants stopped by a duraluminium bulkhead in the end.

[Seret]

If you disintegrate the enemyprojectiles at a large enough distance, so the subsequent cloud of debris is dispersed enough, they could fire whole planets, and you'd still be safe.

Sure, you could say that about any method of defeating an incoming projectile. The further away you do it, the safer you are. I still don't see some kind of uberCIWS as the first choice to stop incoming missiles. There's a reason aircraft don't use them, and that goes double for spacecraft: weight.