On Feb 8, 5:56 am, MacFrag...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
> Focus-wise maybe, but at that distance you will still have 2 seconds
> lag.
At long distances, the whole point may be to force the other guy to
evade. If he evades, he uses up propellant. Once he no longer has
sufficient propellant to complete his mission, you win.
> And an x-ray laser must produce enormous amount of waste heat, so you
> get only a few shots before the damn thing overheats.
Not necessarily. The 30% wallplug efficiency estimate I gave in
another message in this thread for free electron lasers is likely to
also hold for the x-ray regime, and there is no reason X-FELs can't
get close to 100% wallplug efficiency (other than grubby little
practical things like running the compressors to generate liquid
helium cryogenic coolant for your superconducting magnets that you
need for the electron accelerating resonant cavities, or the losses
due to not being able to extract the last few hundred keV from your
electron beam in the energy recovery step, or having an energy
intensive femptosecond electron injector for the main accelerator). I
fully expect x-ray laser weapons would be able to run full time (well,
actually they would emit a very rapid sequence of femptosecond pulses,
spaced apart by mere nanoseconds, so it would not be continuous on the
timescale of nanoseconds, but from a practical point of view it would
seem to be a constant beam).
Luke
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