The article's rather nebulous on how the thing actually works; it almost sounds like an emf burst that detonates the incoming warhead early.
Either way, visions of nanotech-supercap-coated clothing are dancing in my head; I'll need to go give my kinetic barriers a workout in Mass Effect 2 to simmer down.
Seems just like a grenade. You time the throw so your target gets destroyed. Incredibly efficient, since unlike nuclear or fusion nukes 100% of the matter gets turned into energy.
Kinetic Bombardment has been a sci-fi concept for decades, and it's interesting to see a real, possibly cost effective, technology that could make it real. At those speeds, you don't need explosives, just a lot of mass to slam into something.
I feel the need to point out, in light of you calling this actually existing prototype weapon "comical sci-fi", that when one googles ablative armor, one gets nothing but literal sci-fi.
Don't these hypothetical countermeasures have to assume the weapon would be effective in the first place?
That's typically ion thrusters, isn't it? That's very low mass at very high speed, and would probably take hours to even leave scorch mark. It would feel like a slow breeze.
Of course, military use could do something different, but that's more along the lines of "pack a kilogram of explosives in a pipe bomb".
Directed energy weapons are still in their early days, they're not powerful enough to just shrug off all sorts of potential countermeasures the way a solid chunk of metal hitting the target does.
Ablation damage might not be a concern if everything is vaporized, i.e. turned into gas. Also, if you're getting bombarded with high-energy oxygen atoms, that's just called rusting! Anyway, it's all SF.
BTW, new crazy idea: a weapon that propels high-energy oxygen atoms toward the enemy, instantly oxidizing the enemy's rifles. Enemy combatants might also get killed as a side effect. :)
Nah, it’ll totally work. For one thing, you won’t be able to precisely track the spot at which energy is focused. For another, most rocket shaped targets can be made to spin (and some already do spin and rely on rotation to scan for targets), thus defeating your “directed energy” entirely. It’s a boondoggle and a waste of taxpayer money, easily defeated from a couple of miles away with a 50bmg rifle or a salvo of cheap unguided mines.
This sounds sort of perfect for rocket propulsion, instead of using the famous "Nuclear bomb out the back" method, why not hydrogen pellets and lasers hitting it? Sure, reading about this it seems extremely far off still, but the mode of operation with sort of pulsed explosions sounds perfect for moving a big rocket through space.
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