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Usernamenotta t1_ixma5k5 wrote

Reply to comment by Routine_Shine_1921 in Space travel Shielding by Actual-Macaroon8240

It kinda depends on how you design the stuff. I mean, light has kinetic energy as well. And here we are not talking about melting a tennis ball made of wolfram, but rather changing the energy of a speck of dust. A strong enough laser beam probably has enough kinetic energy to deviate that speck of dust and the laser beam impacting the speck would be the equivalent of a building taking a nuclear blastwave in the face.

Also, this is irrelevant for what I said. You missed my point. You could collide with that thing at 1m/h, meaning you could have the thing in the laser sights for quite some time, because you are travelling 'behind it', basically making it look stationary for your ship, or you could collide head on at 36km/s because your velocity vectors are opposed to each other.

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House13Games t1_ixmahh6 wrote

So at what range can you detect a dust particle? If you come creeping up behind it and gently nudge it, there's no need for lasers. And what if it IS a tennis ball sized bit of debris?

I posit that anything travelling at such high velocity as to endanger the ship, will not be detectable in time to get an energy weapon on it long enough to vaporize it and give it time to disperse.

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fencethe900th t1_ixmmz55 wrote

It all depends on how much power you have on hand for radar pulses. Provided you have the power requirements for the pulse you can detect anything that isn't made to evade radar, at pretty much whatever range you want.

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Routine_Shine_1921 t1_ixml7qe wrote

No. If you collide with it at 1m/h, then it doesn't bloody matter, that thing is almost in the same orbit as you, and it presents absolutely no threat to your spacecraft.

You care about micrometeoroids when they collide with you at any significant speed, at which point a laser can't do ANYTHING about it.

Unless we turn OP's idea on its head, and instead of trying to do something shield-like with passive lasers, we do an active system with just one laser, and some kind of tracking system that detects potential collisions, and then targets and eliminates those threats at a distance. Which is even more impossible from an energy usage perspective, and the detection and tracking would be insanely difficult.

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