I was wondering if we’d see pulsed lasers in anti-drone warfare… the power supply advantages aside, focusing on just the right point in time with the pulse seems hard.
The hard part is predicting atmospheric effects to get the focus right. It’s basically impossible without some form of just in time compensation. One idea I’ve seen is that you fire a physical projectile and use that to calibrate the focal point at arbitrary distance, almost like a laser tracer.
It might be hard, but with the processing power we can fit into microchips these days I’d say we fixed harder problems already. I mean, the controller needs at least two cameras or another methode of locating the target and estimating the distance, but I’d guess we could completely get rid of time of flight calculations as the light pulse would be instant for that matter.
I was wondering if we’d see pulsed lasers in anti-drone warfare… the power supply advantages aside, focusing on just the right point in time with the pulse seems hard.
The hard part is predicting atmospheric effects to get the focus right. It’s basically impossible without some form of just in time compensation. One idea I’ve seen is that you fire a physical projectile and use that to calibrate the focal point at arbitrary distance, almost like a laser tracer.
It might be hard, but with the processing power we can fit into microchips these days I’d say we fixed harder problems already. I mean, the controller needs at least two cameras or another methode of locating the target and estimating the distance, but I’d guess we could completely get rid of time of flight calculations as the light pulse would be instant for that matter.
But again: I’m just guessing here