Incorrect assumption. It will lead you astray. There is an absolute wealth of information on the history. I can fill you in with the simple details.
I've done system studies on laser power beaming, and unless you have a unique requirement, it seldom pencils out. 10 kW = 13.6 horsepower. You wind up with about as much power as a lawnmower and you need three major assets to make it happen (2 airplanes and one ground station). Plus, it can't work in cloudy weather. Or through smoke. Or under trees. You lose 80% of the starting power, and need airplanes that can fly at 60,000 feet. Who is going to protect those airplanes from enemy countermeasures to take them out? How will the airplanes protect themselves from optical spillover of their input beams?
And what do you expect to power? An M1 tank needs 1,500 shaft horsepower = 1.1 megawatts. This is a weapon-class laser beam. How do you propose to catch the beam? This much power into a receiver of 1 square meter equates to an intensity of 100 watts/cm2. The equilibrium temperature of molten aluminum is about 1.4 watts/cm2. For titanium, it is somewhere above 10 watts/cm2. Do you begin to see the practical difficulties in dealing with such power beams? Plus, we never had any experience beyond ~1 megawatt propagating through the atmosphere, and it took fiendishly expensive and complicated optics to do that.
You can beam 1-10 watts of laser power across a laboratory optical bench and demonstrate all kinds of things, but once you start to enter the world of practical applications, the beams are no longer playthings. They are a serious menace to anyone who has to work around them. (Plus, existing electrical lasers have about 30% quantum efficiency. Optical relays might attain 90% per link under favorable conditions, maybe 70% more realistically. Conversion from light to electricity at the receiving end is seldom efficient. Optical cells do not bear up under heavy intensity loading. It's not like microwave conversion efficiency, which would actually be a better choice, as it will go through clouds.) And you will need a complete system for each beam you want to support. I think it would make more sense to devise more compact conventional systems that can utilize higher-energy fuels (like dicyanoacetylene, C4N2). It might be feasible to make a trivial improvement in the general picture---but that would be a bad cost-benefit outcome.
My reaction to this is like supplying ammo to a machine gun nest by flying trapeze artists going through the trees. Possible, but ultimately not a solution to the problem. This happens recurrently in the military, as generations of officers rotate through staff positions. They will take up (once again) an idea that had been examined and rejected...and will (once again) find the fundamental obstacles. This is the phenomenon of Lessons Unlearned.
That's off the top of my head. The devil is truly in the details.
Incorrect assumption. It will lead you astray. There is an absolute wealth of information on the history. I can fill you in with the simple details.
I've done system studies on laser power beaming, and unless you have a unique requirement, it seldom pencils out. 10 kW = 13.6 horsepower. You wind up with about as much power as a lawnmower and you need three major assets to make it happen (2 airplanes and one ground station). Plus, it can't work in cloudy weather. Or through smoke. Or under trees. You lose 80% of the starting power, and need airplanes that can fly at 60,000 feet. Who is going to protect those airplanes from enemy countermeasures to take them out? How will the airplanes protect themselves from optical spillover of their input beams?
And what do you expect to power? An M1 tank needs 1,500 shaft horsepower = 1.1 megawatts. This is a weapon-class laser beam. How do you propose to catch the beam? This much power into a receiver of 1 square meter equates to an intensity of 100 watts/cm2. The equilibrium temperature of molten aluminum is about 1.4 watts/cm2. For titanium, it is somewhere above 10 watts/cm2. Do you begin to see the practical difficulties in dealing with such power beams? Plus, we never had any experience beyond ~1 megawatt propagating through the atmosphere, and it took fiendishly expensive and complicated optics to do that.
You can beam 1-10 watts of laser power across a laboratory optical bench and demonstrate all kinds of things, but once you start to enter the world of practical applications, the beams are no longer playthings. They are a serious menace to anyone who has to work around them. (Plus, existing electrical lasers have about 30% quantum efficiency. Optical relays might attain 90% per link under favorable conditions, maybe 70% more realistically. Conversion from light to electricity at the receiving end is seldom efficient. Optical cells do not bear up under heavy intensity loading. It's not like microwave conversion efficiency, which would actually be a better choice, as it will go through clouds.) And you will need a complete system for each beam you want to support. I think it would make more sense to devise more compact conventional systems that can utilize higher-energy fuels (like dicyanoacetylene, C4N2). It might be feasible to make a trivial improvement in the general picture---but that would be a bad cost-benefit outcome.
My reaction to this is like supplying ammo to a machine gun nest by flying trapeze artists going through the trees. Possible, but ultimately not a solution to the problem. This happens recurrently in the military, as generations of officers rotate through staff positions. They will take up (once again) an idea that had been examined and rejected...and will (once again) find the fundamental obstacles. This is the phenomenon of Lessons Unlearned.
That's off the top of my head. The devil is truly in the details.
That's hilarious! "supplying ammo to a machine gun nest by flying trapeze artists going through the trees." I immediately pictured this beastie.