A Ukrainian military commander has announced the successful use of the country’s first laser weapon on the battlefield.

A Ukrainian military commander has announced the successful use of the country’s first laser weapon on the battlefield, revealing that it has effectively targeted specific objects.

“I will repeat: laser technologies are already striking certain targets at certain altitudes,” Kyiv’s Unmanned Systems Forces commander Vadym Sukharevskyi stated.

No further details regarding the laser weapon’s deployment, including the date and location, were provided.

  • j4k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
    112·
    14 days ago

    This is scary. Such a laser could in theory render thousands of humans blind for life in a couple of seconds.

    Aren’t most drones still using ground based object recognition for location? Wouldn’t that be relatively cheap to disable with high-ish power consumer diode lasers in a curtain like configuration on the ground. Something like a nondestructive digital landmine that targets optical sensors. I mean, if an operations planning team were to do a self targeting exercise to asses the key landmarks required for similar drone flights, it should be possible to place such a system. You still have a blind flying bomb, but one that is far more likely to hit nowhere or crash. It would be easy to stop such a system with a lens filter, but the optics of a drone are hard to change and such a system is going to be in the near infrared for better low light conditions performance…

    For whatever reason that made me think, what if one of these was repurposed/scaled differently... and probably with deformable mirrors like astronomy (obviously far too expensive for practicality or usefulness)

    • Skua@kbin.earth
      15·
      14 days ago

      Bad news I’m afraid, major military powers havce been testing much bigger lasers for years

      But to my completely amateur guessing, this is probably less dangerous to humans than things like laser rangefinders specifically because it’s designed to be pointed at the sky. I don’t doubt for a second that it would really fuck someone’s eyes up if you actually did point it at them, of course

      I don’t think a non-destructive solution is particularly viable here, unfortunately. I mean, you came up with a defence literally within the same comment, imagine how fast a large and motivated military would solve it