“We can state that today Ukraine is, if I am not mistaken, the fifth country that can say that it has a laser. Today, we can shoot down aircraft at an altitude of more than 2 km with this laser,”

Is it really only 4 other countries that have this? I kinda expected more.

[–] DarkThoughts@fedia.io 1 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

UK, US, Germany, and Israel afaik. I highly doubt Ukraine's are that far advanced yet though. Most of those 4 countries still are mostly prototyping or just coming out of the prototype phase, meaning we'll see proper deployments probably within the next 5 years. Germany afaik still had issues with heat generation and battery capacity some months ago. Hard to imagine that Ukraine somehow surpassed all of them and completely out of the blue.

[–] Quill7513@slrpnk.net 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

you'd be surprised how when your life depends on it certain engineering challenges become easier to prioritize. i'm not saying this weapon is more advanced than the other four countries. i'm just saying Ukraine may have made compromises the other countries would have considered jank ass bullshit that out in the field for Ukraine have been successful enough for what they need to do even with considerable downsides

[–] DarkThoughts@fedia.io 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm not sure how many shortcuts you can make with such sophisticated tech like lasers. Afaik all those "small" mobile ground models are around 30-50 KW and I'd assume you cannot go too much further below that without drastically affecting the actual effectiveness against a target. At some point they just become too weak to actually destroy anything within a feasible time, if at all.

[–] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

It could be as simple as a longer cool down time between shots.

Made up numbers but let's say a US prototype could hit 5 targets a minute due to heating problems, maybe the Ukraine one is 1 per minute.

That's still 1 less expensive missle used per shot.

[–] perestroika@lemm.ee 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

To my knowledge, Turkey has also developed laser weapons, and they have seen action in Libya.

As for possibilities of fast development - when need is great, people do things faster.

But I'm skeptical of laser weapons myself. They depend so much on weather. Air defense is expected to be reliable, not "it is snowing, we can't shoot". They can be used, but they always need a backup option if weather works against.

The drone "motherships" are a real thing with real benefits, however. They get around line-of-sight issues (single FPVs cannot go beyond obstacles without losing singnal, but with a mothership they can even go beyond the curvature of Earth).