Re: More EW, the celebration continues!

>Assuming a 10 millisecond delay for processing, it will be on
the order of
>272 metres. Assuming an illuminating  drone is a full 3000 km
away from the
>firer, make that 274.
>
>It's actually harder to do fire control using 127mm main guns
in a naval
>application at the current time, as flight times of shells are
so large. At
>10,000 metres, a fast patrol boat has oodles of time to evade
between
>the time the gun ship fires and the time the shell lands.

Once the shell hits, though, the patrol boat has a serious
problem.  With the laser you either have to deliver quite a
punch all at once to get though the armor & hull, or you have to
keep hitting--not just the ship, but the same spot on the
ship--while it evades.	A little tricky.

Anyone know how much energy it would take to burn a hole
through, say, 1cm of aluminum?	And multiply that by a factor of
"lots" since the materials science people will be working out
ways to keep you from making ugly holes in their nice new ships.
Maybe ship hulls will be fiberglass--the cloth matrix woven from
superconductor thread--laminated together with a layer of
ablative material on top.