Comment by inasio

Comment by inasio 18 hours ago

11 replies

“It’s a lot easier to send a power beam directly up or down relative to the ground because there is so much less atmosphere to fight through,” Jaffe explains. “For PRAD, we wanted to test under the maximum impact of atmospheric effects.”

Super impressive! My only complain is that this was done at the White Sounds desert in New Mexico, at over 1200 meters of elevation. For maximum impact they should have done it in Florida on a hot humid day

AndrewKemendo 18 hours ago

There’s no range in Florida large enough for this test otherwise I’m sure they would have.

Even Eglin wouldn’t be large enough.

contrarian1234 14 hours ago

"maximum impact of atmospheric effects" would be simply a foggy day...

  • tnel77 11 hours ago

    Both your example and theirs would be better tests than a desert.

    • PaulHoule 11 hours ago

      The desert is bad enough. On a hot day you get convection which will vary the refractive index of light and spread out the beam. I wonder if they have active optics on the transmitter to fight this.

      • cap11235 9 hours ago

        Then you also have the day vs night weather patterns, resulting in intense sun-downer winds. I suggest everyone actually visit a real desert once in their life, where as people seem to think its like a beach, but bigger.

    • freeone3000 10 hours ago

      The US is always geared up and ready to fight the previous war.

    • sailfast 7 hours ago

      Unless, you know, we often fight in deserts that are remote?

      • tnel77 6 hours ago

        This is a good point. I just meant that a very humid climate might be a more challenging environment for this technology, but it doesn’t mean it’s as useful for real world fighting conditions.

madaxe_again 17 hours ago

Humidity would most likely attenuate the beam from 20% end to end to less than 1% - water vapour absorbs energy like nobody’s business.

This is a tech for arid environments - which seem to be where the US does most of its deployments these days.

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