Hey Everyone,
Let the fight begin! Today we get to see another feature of the Dhuvalian ‘Dragoon’ Combat Limb. While the Outrider makes use of chaff to deal with guided missiles, the Dragoon uses an array of laser bafflers to defeat the sensors of incoming guided munitions, guiding them directly into the dirt.
This is about to get interesting.
Thanks for reading,
– Luther out
Edit: Due to weather related problems preventing Matt from working for a lot of this week(curse you Snow-mageddon!), this page will be delayed until February 27th. We apologize for the delay.
(Arnold Schwatzenegger voice) Bad Idea…
I don’t like that raised arm, either. I think this LIMB is packing some far nastier surprises than fancy point defense.
Lasers as a concept are quite fun, but it always struck me as a dead end for most applications because almost everything interferes with a laser, and just pumping in more power makes the weapon less efficient. Hence, I am sceptical about the weapon application (nevermind that taking nearly a minute to destroy an unarmored, slow-flying drone at short range is not a terribly impressive showing for that naval laser the US are developing) but only blinding and in your own “control zone” is definitely possible… well, until the missiles start to come with one way mirror-coated optical seekers or forgo high-energy EM entirely and become vulnerable to, say, Microwaves. Assuming they aren’t anyway.
But as those things are, the weapons will come, and for a while they might even go without hard countermeasures. Excepts for smoke. Though throwing smoke bombs on the enemy to disable their anti-missile lasers kind of aggravates the issue, naturally. XD
Well, weaponized lasers are still in their infancy, with quite a good amount of R&D to overcome their shortcomings like you mentioned. But it’s not really surprising, you just have to remember, that the older paradigms required quite a great amount of R&D in multiple scientific fields to get where they are today. Both oldschool firearms, and chemical propelled rockets/missiles have been in development for about 800 years, if not a bit more, and it mainly the scientific advances of the 19th century which made the firearms as lethal and effective as they are today, same with the development of electronics in the early to mid-20th century for missiles.
And smoke would be the low-tech solution, the more high tech would be floating reflective glitter like chaff, which would disperse laser more than ordinary smoke. Future laser battlefield would be a sparkling place …
“Fuck” was the first thing to enter my mind (and i suspect theirs) when the lasers blocked them..
Laserpointers? Curses, I knew we shouldn’t have taped cats to the missiles for guidance! Now we’ll have to spring for some o’ them fancy beam-riding missiles.
HA! Cat missiles! Perfect for taking out Battle Hamsters…
Cry havoc! And let slip the hamsters of war.
I wonder if the older Limbs have wire guided TOW weapons and if they would fair any better.
Probably a simple cannon would have worked.
At least today, most tanks use their main gun to fight other vehicles. With common projectile speeds how likely is it that someone dodges a cannon shell in his back?
TOWs are relatively slow missiles. First countermeasure is look for the backblast of the launch point and saturate it with fire. Like as not the missile would still hit home anyway. EFOG-M would be much the same, but have a much higher angle of attack. And it can serve as indirect fire, counter battery fire, and perform photo recon while in flight.