Explaining Laser Weapons in Space Combat

IMO laser weapons are best used as infantry weapons. Piercing a space suit will basically instantly kill whoever's hit, and modern laser weapons can disrupt tech which is basically a "fuck you, I win" against small enough vehicles.

I saw a Babylon 5 ship so I had to click. Was not disappointed as usual on Space Dock! :D

Reflective paint like white paint has been shown to negate a MASSIVE portion of heat thrown at an object, its quite literally what we use to shield our spacecraft from the sun.

Its limit is the thickness of the paint vs how hot the heat source is, if your reflecting 99% of all heat energy from a laser, but that 1% is still enough to fry your space craft, layering your paint is critical for survival from lasers.

Most importantly however, is the second issue with white paint or any contact defense, in space there is only one way to radiate heat, and that's by radiation not by absorption from outside sources like air, though space does have free-floating gasses, it's not enough to leak heat into at sufficient amounts, if at all.
so radiators and materials that can't hold heat very well or systems that knock off entering hot electrons will make sure that you don't store heat from a beam of light.
You can even run cold fuel through your shielding to spread out that heat, and pre-heat your fuel for faster burn and preform evasive manuevers with it from other weapon systems a enemy craft may have.

Here has this Channel been my whole life

While did these fools think of compressing gas in a air tank run it though a turbine and decompressing into the vacuum of space and than running it back though. Probably would require a computer controled value system. This would provide plenty of energy for lasers on a space craft

Can Agi space weapons speak and think like humans????

Agi space weapons can speak like humans .,.smiling

UpDatoll

I've been wondering about this for awhile, thanks for the comprehensive video

The Strategic defence initiative wanted to use X-ray lasers. These lasers have infinite range as the beam does not degrade over distance basically flying to the end of the universe.
The downside is that they go through everythign so is very hard to generate. The idea was to use a nuclear explosion that generated multiple lasers aiming at multiple targets in one go before disintegrating.
To me this has always been one of the coolest laser designs. It would also be one of the simplest designs that can generate a great deal of power in case we encountered aliens.

My sci fi concept if i ever could make a sci-fi movie is planetary defence battery of nuclear lasers in some unpopulated area like the high north in europe.
At the beginning of a movie this would be a great way for humanity to shoot down an alien spaeship without appearing to be equals, it would also be a useable weapon if nuclear missiles don't work.

Now I have a question, is Star Trek Phaser a Laser Weapon or a Particle Beam??

What about nuke pumped xray lasers

come on i think eve online deserve to get mention on this cool channel thou

Can you make a video on stiletto beams

The faster ships can move, the shorter the effective range of any beam weapons. If the setting doesn't have FTL sensing then there's increasing uncertainty of where anything maneuverable is. In non-combat situations, civilian ships, and usually military ships, would have their courses known and transmitted for traffic control so ships won;t have any chance of collision or other interference - despite how much space there is in outer space. If the ships have torch drives, everyone will have to watch out for everyone else's drive wake for quite a distance behind.

So should an enemy fleet come knocking on the door, one of the first things to happen would be taking traffic control offline to protect all ships in the system. Send out a al channels, all ships message to take evasive action so the enemy can't fire weapons timed to arrive at the places ships will be if they keep to the courses that were being transmitted.

This is why missiles able to do their own target seeking and terminal guidance would have a place in space combat. If you know the speed and maneuver capabilities of your target, and have its known course for X amount of previous time, you can have a good idea of the size and shape of the volume the target could be anywhere within at the time your missiles get into terminal attack range. You'll also know if that potential volume is too large for your missiles to have a snowball's chance on Venus of being able to possibly hit the target.

Oh, wow! The Battlezone II: Combat Commander music at the beginning of the video took me by surprise, how unknown and highly underrated the game is! Although of course, it could be absolutely wrong and more than one video game could have that music.

The solar array weapon only works until you drive an entire colony through it while it's dropping onto Earth.

6 months ago

> "Accidentally cause a war."
Looking at you Captain Michael Jankowski.

I liked seeing some space engineers game play in there

actualy range of lasers blooms with gass and dust and well space has dust in it

that last part about Laser Weapon Web reminded me a lot of Phased Array Radar.
Phased Array Radar uses a bunch of radar emitters that are slightly out of phase, along with constructive interference, to illuminate the thing they're trying to scan with radar waves. the major advantage is that there are no moving parts, to illuminate a different place, they just adjust the phases of the radar emitters.

so you could presumably do something similar with an energy weapon, it wouldn't be a LASER but with enough energy, a bunch of emitters, and the right frequencies, you could presumably have a light-speed energy weapon that you could aim without moving anything.

Do you think you can do an episode on the MASER or Microwave Amplified through Stimulated Emitted Radiation weapons.

"Thermal expansion" aka love making.

Please make some videos regarding the fleets from the Android SpaceRPG games. The latest SpaceRPG 4 is great, but still being added to. SpaceRPG 3 is finished and is an incredible game

Spacedock,
Big fan of your videos, especially ones like this and your particle weapons video.
Please consider uploading your transcripts to a wiki or discussion board(if you haven't already done this). This is all great information for writers, future engineers and scientists, etc.
Also, please consider videos that discuss where we are currently with technology and what areas we need to reach to achieve certain science fiction propulsion, weapons, etc.
I think these things will really encourage discussion and give you ample subjects for future videos, as well as being even more beneficial for writers.

Laser and particle beams weapons are the same type of weapon. Both shot particles to the target, both needs to focus on a spot to eat the target surface. Both produce heat.

Every sci-fi ship I have ever designed has giant radiator fins that look like wings purely for style points. I like radiators as well. As soon as I realized it was an issue, I turned the wing-looking-radiator slider on my ship designs to 11.

Do flack

why do videos like this sound like you teaching us how to make a laser weapon and less how to write a laser weapon

Interesting stuffs. I can't remember ATM, was it Bova or Brin that used massive water tanks for shielding?
Water that a crew would have need for in the recycling system.

"different lasers can be combined together given their wavelengths don't cancel each other", now ask yourselves when does a wave cancel each other? and now realizing that's why you were taught Prime Numbers.

Lately it's always Hujiwana (who does well). What happened to Daniel?

I've got a question.
A while ago I read a Enemy-Mine-type story where soldiers on opposing sides of a conflict get stranded and has to put aside their differences. The aliens were essentially akin to Germany during the second world war, relying on technologically advanced weapon systems and defences while humans were more rudimentary - the aliens used plasma weapons while humanity used rail weapons, firing physical projectiles.
This discrepancy becomes a major theme in the story.
There's a scene where the alien examines the human's weapon and compare it to a plasma weapon and arrive at the conclusion they deliver roughly the same kinetic impact. But why would plasma have a kinetic impact if it's not a physical object?
I'm asking because I want to know if there is a difference between plasma and lasers if they're both energy weapons.

You missed talking about StelLASERs.

Hey, is it possible to use lasers to "blow your own sails" or do they also have a sort of recoil that would negate the effect?

So a pulse laser is a lot like setting a bomb off at the surface of a target.

I have a setting I like to imagine things for, and lasers are the prime weapon system here. This is because shield technology makes ballistic weapons completely ineffective by displacing projectiles into hyperspace. It's the same tech that powers ftl, just used defensively. But it doesn't work as well on light, so shields have to be carefully tuned to block lasers, and usually are only partially effective. Generally ships wear each other down over millions of kilometers, trying to open holes in each other's shields to hit with torpedoes.

The laser web taken to its natural conclusion is the Nicol-Dyson beam, where you use an entire Dyson Sphere (the swarm kind) to collimate a laser beam.

I think it's strangely funny that Ace Combat, a series about fighter jets, has done laser weapons pretty well.
They're relatively short range due to the energy dissipating over distance and take a long time to cool down between uses.
But my favourite part has to be the nice detail of development and advancement of the technology over time.
The Morgan in AC0 which takes place during the mid 1990s has a huge pod that affixes between the engine nacelles and hangs on with 4 huge struts.
The Falken in various later games chronologically has a much smaller laser emitter inside its own ordnance bay under the nose.
And finally the Raven from Ace Combat 7 which takes place in 2019, has its laser emitter be roughly the size of a single missile, and without even needing to be deployed from a bay like the Falken, or attached to the craft like the Morgan. It's neatly tucked inside the craft itself, with only a small hole in the front hinting at it being there at all.

What would happen if you coated your spaceship in mirror armor retroreflectors similar to those reflectors on roads? Could that send the laser back to damage the source or create serious beam interference which reduces the heat received? I always liked the scifi media that had a bit more of a realistic beam effect for laser weapons such as the Harlock Space Pirate movie or games like Starfox. It feels a lot more realistic when the lasers do not look like slow moving colored "bolt" projectiles the way many shows and games portray them.

I wonder if people could fairly easily counter lasers in space using some sort of armor made from layers of reflective foils and ice such as frozen glitter so that each little mirror reflects a bit and resists the heat and then sheds into a protective mist that may help diffuse the beam a bit until the ship maneuvers and might help confuse targeting systems slightly.

I am still waiting for a scifi show to use a black hole or sun/star to curve their laser attack and achieve a hit on a target that was hiding or front shielded. Just imagine a desperate captain who is hopelessly outmatched in other armaments bringing his ship dangerously close to an event horizon trying to keep it between him and the other ship and with them now being far too fast and close to the gravity for kinetic weapons to hit both fire beams in seemingly nonsensical angles which bend and nearly hit the other with each captain knowing that if either ship is even moderately damaged it could make escape impossible and if either tried to disengage they would be a much slower and easier target for the other. Fluctuations in the gravity would likely make it a mess to aim a shot in that type of situation so it would be suspenseful fight that may just be decided by luck. Maybe the underdog captain would be saved in the end by a usually-useless genius scientist or AI who is able to quickly make a rough map of the gravity field after multiple passes and helps calibrate the shots better.

The laser weapons in fiction is a thousand times better due to having different visuals that we might see in different forms of sci-fi and reality lasers are just boring as hell.

Wonderful video, thank you for that! I've been doing research on this topic for a while now and this video sums up pretty much what I've also found out in my searches.

Well, regarding knock-on effects on combat styles, I believe there's a lot of those that people overlook in space combat anyway. Space allows for pretty impressive speed, if you just give someone enough time to accelerate. That, in turn, limits the use of slow weapons - both because they may be too slow to reach a fleeing target, but also because a slight change in the traveling vector makes for a big difference in position in no time - and when your weapon takes a few seconds to reach the target, that's ample time to divert course and be far from the point you aimed at.

Space also allows for engaging at high distances, because there's a clear, unobstructed LOS and no surface or surface curvature to deal with. Depending on where you are, even the effects of gravity may be minimal.

That's why I personally see kinetic weapons as more of a point defence and short-range solution

What about gammaray lazar where the energy is emitted from the nucleous of an attom and the material is pumped to 99.9999% of the power needed to emit a beam thear loaded to get the rest and out pulse the beam all at once. It was discussed in the 1980s, and three materials were candidates, but nothing more was heard.