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consumer451yesterday at 3:39 PM2 repliesview on HN

Lasers are not "all weather" weapons as far as I am aware. Clouds, snow, fog, rain, and just humidity all degrade their performance greatly.


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O3marchnativeyesterday at 3:50 PM

The recently announced "Golden Dome" project intends to get around this issue by putting a vast constellation of satellites into orbit. Each satellite would likely need a serious source of power in order to use its laser. Assuming that's just an engineering problem, then the issue becomes coverage. That is, depending on the adversary's capabilities, you'd need an absolutely massive constellation in orbit [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

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Voultapheryesterday at 6:43 PM

The linked article covers that in depth, it's not implausible to punch a hole through a storm with pulsed laser of that class. Honestly we don't know enough about these systems to know their operational limits but we know weather will play a role.