No.
Small lasers can reach beyond a thousand km. If you want long range lasers you need large ships with large mirrors. This way you can reach up to around 1/2 light-second. Maybe even a full light second for some spinal designs.
For longer distances you'll need to use something like X-ray lasers but they are really hard to do without handwavium.
> I don't have the astrophysics background to do a mock up of an EP RKV for you
RKV are a matter of logistics, even we could just strap engines to something and let it accelerate for years to destroy that weird planet in proxima centauri that is looking bad at us.
>Sure, you could surround a planet with huge rings of matter.
I was thinking of satelites, in the order of tungsten blocks surrounded by powerfull engines, and not for completly stopping the RKV but at least diminishing its effects.
I know that a RKV with 4,5x10^14 J of kinetic energy is destructive, what I don't know is what happens when it simply finds an obstacle in the middle; does it vaporice turning into plasma? How much energy is efectively transferred? How much does the mass of the obstacle counts?
I know that if I hit a billiard ball with another billiard ball the energy will be transfered, what I don't know is what happens with these superhigh energy systems.
I think you're missing the point of an RKV. It's that you don't see it coming, not in time to act on it.
Okay, no, you're kind of fucked. Any 'satellite' or block of matter that is supposed to stop an RKV is either going to get annihilated and the RKV continue on, or the RKV is small enough that you could ignore it in the first place minus some small amount of damage. You can't really defend against them even if you can see them.
Laser drones in Chode seem to have other functions that require high precision but not high power; like specialiced radiator destroyers.
In fact I found that powerfull lasers fill pretty well the function of PD, but on the gigawatt range, making the 100 enemy nukes go pop at very long range.
And since range in space combat is king, you can bet that you would rather have high power lasers in a few battlefortresses in orbit with huge radiators, instead of a distributed killsat network.
Maybe it would be like that idea in projectrho of hollowing an asteroid and filling it inside with radiators.
It's one of the parts of the RKV. A really good part. The other is destroying everything on arrival.
In EP you probably can't make a full RKV without starting somewhere in Oort cloud and strapping a laser sail on the ship. Distances between planets are too small for ships to reach such high speeds.
Mmn... I see there is no whipple shield equivalent for RKV.
But there must be some way to be safe from such weapons, is either that or abandoning anykind of planet colonization and instead filling the orbits with space stations that can just avoid the RKVs.
>Maybe it would be like that idea in projectrho of hollowing an asteroid and filling it inside with radiators.
Radiators on the inside? Right...
Yes, its not so retarded when you have a lot of volume and mass to transfer that heat, which is exactly what an asteroid would give you.
And, yet again, I'll say it: There are easier ways to cause wholesale devastation than going through the rigmarole of building the infrastructure required to assemble something that can get close to that level of lightspeed. With EP technology, you'd need to go to another system. So you'd have something turning up centuries later to hit something that isn't there. Antimatter is common-ish. 10kg of antimatter would vaporise earth, blind every sensor in the solar system pointing at it, sterilize the face of the moon and wreck the habitats facing earth, probably shred Venus too. A grenade is enough for most habitats.
A laser sail? Really? Are you mad? Is this insane troll logic?