CDRMITTENSLasers won’t make noise and aren’t moving a physical mass that would create sound as it passes by.
FaceDeerA laser that is powerful enough to hurt a human target (especially a human target with body armor) is going to be powerful enough that it'll be ionizing the air to some degree. It'll be like a lightning bolt, there'll be flashes of light and sharp cracking sounds. That's also ignoring the fact that the random bits of terrain that the laser is hitting will also be exploding. Someone under "suppressing fire" from a laser weapon would be quite aware of the fact.
DimandThe pure joy of putting a single joule of optical power into a sub nanosecond pulse.
For those not familiar with lasers, that’s a GW of instantaneous power that you can focus down to a micron sized spot.
youtu.be/Z1Xky_ermd4?si=1Luz0fuzm4kcwIwc
All that said, the successful laser weapons right now seem to all be anti drone/aircraft and they are typically using tracked CW (not pulsed) lasers with heating over time to avoid atmospheric lensing. Lots of challenges to overcome in getting pulsed energy a long way through air.
Optical Air Breakdown with q-switch YAG laser
I was wondering if we’d see pulsed lasers in anti-drone warfare… the power supply advantages aside, focusing on just the right point in time with the pulse seems hard.
It might be hard, but with the processing power we can fit into microchips these days I’d say we fixed harder problems already. I mean, the controller needs at least two cameras or another methode of locating the target and estimating the distance, but I’d guess we could completely get rid of time of flight calculations as the light pulse would be instant for that matter.
But again: I’m just guessing here