Re: Further thoughts on hitting with lasers

On Wed, 25 Feb 1998, Darren Douglas wrote:

> One thought, would this not lead to stealth muntions, muntions which
are
> harder to detect and therefore intercept. Or muntions which on closing
with the
> target
> or being hit with a radar beam of a certain strength ( ie active
tracking vers
> passive search)
> deploy a large number of warheads, some decoys etc to swamp the
defenses.
> 
> Darren

Fighters would probably stay thousands of km away from th target.  If
anti-fighter defenses are so potent at ranges of .01 light seconds or
less
then the obvious answer is not to get that close.  I would predict an
increase in stand-off weapons that would allow fighters/bombers/attack
craft to remain outside of the most effective defenses a ship could
mount.
These might incude stealth munitions such as hyper-velocity stealth
missiles that would have a really fast burn, maybe something that
imparts
a velocity of several thousand km per hour and then coast into short
range
of the target before firing a single pulse x-ray or particle beam
(Needle
missile?) or detonating a large fusion warhead (normal missile)  Or
conversely since the fighter does not have as difficult a time in
tracking
a ship (just how fast can a 1000 ton craft move sideways...) you could
mount a fairly large laser on a fighter that would place it out of range
of the ship's AF lasers or at least force the opponent to mount bigger
lasers than necessary (c-batts instead of ADAF's)  
	Fighters would definitely have to be heavily stealthed to have a
chance to survive.  Although NORAD can track objects in orbit that are
about the siz of a golfball, these are metallic, highly radar reflective
objects.  The F-117A for instance has the same radar signature as a
metallic golfball a massive decrease in radar signature.  I would assume
that the B-2 has a similar reduction in radar profile.	The radar
profile
on these planes has been reduced so much that IR and visual aspects
become
bigger problems.  In space it would be much harder to reduce the IR
signature of a fighter, active missile or even a ship since there is no
easy way to diffuse the exhaust. Perhaps using multiple engines that are
baffled from all directions except the rear might be a solution but the
enemy is still going to know that you're coming - a heat source of
thousands of degrees kelvin showing up against a backdrop of 3 or 4
degrees kelvin is going to kinda hard to miss, unless you dive out of
the
sun...:)
	To sum it up, fighters of the future are either going to be
non-existant or basically small missile carriers with really short life
expectancies.

--Binhan