Star wars and powerful lasers

[Treehorn]

What happened to the star wars project that were thrown around a few years ago?

Were these laser weapons developed?

How powerful were or are these laser meant to be and what damage are they capable of doing?

( Any footage or links would be appreciated )

[ABerrant]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative

[rojash]

Its official title was the Strategic Defense Initiative.
If you google it you'll find loads of info

[dotty.]

.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e5CtbbZL-k

[jake-the-peg]

My goodness that's going back a bit!

There are a number of problems with lasers as weapons, one of which is range.

Although when you use a laser pointer it looks like a single poin of light, shine it over a moderate distance and you'll find that the beam does indeed spread out - this is due to diffraction effects.

The air has a lot of contaminants too that mess up the beam.

All of this means that actually weaponising a laser to do damage to a shiny metal rocket over a long distance is pretty challenging.

If you look at test footage you'll probably find cheats like target drones painted a helpful red and targets a pretty short distance away or slow moving.

Most of the anti-missile systems that have come though seem to be anti-missile missiles like Patriot or high speed machine guns like Goalkeeper.

[LazyGun]

Link here suggesting that the best use of lasers from the perspective of a weapon, might be in interfering with imaging systems, although such damage they could would likely only be transient.

http://www.princeton.edu/sgs/publications/sgs/archive/17-1-Butt-Effects-of-Chinese.pdf

[jomifl]

The main problem with laser heat weapons that operate in the atmosphere is that the laser heats up the air column through which it 'travels'. This results in the beam being refracted away from the less dense warm centre of the beam thus spreading the beam outwards. In space this wouldn't be a problem and lasers would be good at frying solar panels on enemy surveillance satellites. The inverse of this principle is used in fibre optic cables where an inner core of glass with a higher refractive index acts as a wave guide and keeps the light in the centre of the fibre.