Is it feasible to buil an orbital laser weapon in the future?

Is it feasible to buil an orbital laser weapon in the future?

Yes. It'd be fucking massive due to all the cooling it'd need when firing. The ISS has a lot of cooling panels (bright white squares on either side of the center) and they don't create much heat at all in comparison.

It's possible now. It won't be very effective though. Better to send up small sats that ram into things.

Japan had plans to do it.

They wanted to put solar panels in space and beam the energy back via microwave laser as a form of clean renewable energy. Anyone who's played Sim city knows that it can "accidentally" nuke a city though.

Needs moar flying crowbars.

No technology barrier but expensive and not all that effective

>enemy puts mirror on roof

The mirror thing is a meme, they only reflect certain frequencies and don't reflect perfectly. Basically it'll get fucked like anything else

>how does the inside of a laser work?

I dunno. lol

Power density is so low that the worst you'd do is make a bunch of people very angry from jamming their wifi

For use against targets on earth, no. Atmosphere will fuck up the beam.

Mirror is designed for a frequency, also btw not all lasers use mirrors
I spent the summer doing laser simulations so fuck with a nigga honestly

Orbital rail gun is the way to go. Drop a 2 ton rod of tungsten from low orbit. All you have to do is give it a little push and boom.
Lasers are for fags and would never work at that range.

>100% reflective mirror.

No.

Even a standard mirror would work. It wouldn't be highly efficient, but it'd deflect enough to not give a fuck so long as it is clean.

A lens at la grange point

Prove this

Space weapons don't make any sense. Since the weapon is in orbit, you can know exactly where it will be all the time, making it easy to take out.

And by easy to take out, I mean you don't even need to go orbital. It has already been demonstrated that a missile on a suborbital trajectory can be used to destroy stuff in orbit. Pic related, an airforce anti satellite missile test.

Space is the common heritage of mankind.
Part of the UN treaties state we can not weaponize space, space stations, or any celestial bodies.
So no. Never going to happen. We would blow each other up before we allowed a country to put weapons in space.

The pragmatic reason for such treaties is to prevent space debris from blocking traffic/the sun.
Practically space weapons suck because it costs too much to put it there. For the cost of sending one 'rod from god' up to space, we could just as easily roll out a couple hundred missiles- and deploy them faster.

Is it technically possible to do? Yes.

Is it sensible (i.e. economically and practically)? No. There are better ways to kill people and break things than to build a giant death ray in orbit.

>space is a common heritage of mankind
Only at first. Once (and if) spacetravel becomes more mainstream, we will see much more activity from private companies.

I suspect that we will discover a way to get rid of space debris before this happens.

only if you're the USA and don't care about spending 80% of your GDP on "defense"

A retroreflector will send enough power back to the laser to destroy the tracking optics, or at least dazzle it until it unlocks. Atmospherics require a solid lock on the target to compensate.

>Part of the UN treaties state we can not
It is all well and good until WWIII opens up.

China has already overlooked treaties when it suits their needs, like taking geostationary slots without following the conventions. Angular resolution means that the slots are severely limited. except to those who just grab them.

Do not be naive, user.

Actually, missiles that we already employ with the same functionality have similar costs to putting one of those in orbit.

The thing is that we already have these weapon systems, an infrastructure to support them and have experience in using them.

We actually only spend 3.5% of our GDP on military budget. That's less than Russia does.

WHY would you even want there to be one? You are what's wrong with the world.