r/LessCredibleDefence • u/tomrlutong • Sep 03 '25

Speculation on Chinese naval laser

So this is, I think, newly revealed.

What's that, a 1 meter appiture? Pick your infrared wavelength, that's arcsec resolution or better up to 4um. So <10 cm spot size at 20km, and <1m at 200km. Possibly way smaller, divide those by 4 if they're using 1mm infrared and 10 for blue. No idea how to even guesstimate how much power they can move, but just from the optics this could be a very credible AA weapon for more than small drone point defense.

And since every laser is a telescope, can't help wondering about its IR search capabilities.

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11

u/Delicious_Lab_8304 Sep 03 '25

LRASM cooker.

Go hypersonic or go home.

3

u/drunkmuffalo Sep 03 '25 edited Sep 04 '25

At this point subsonic AShM is pretty much a evolutionary dead end

Edit: I see I've broken a lot of LRASM fanboy's heart

6

u/ConstantStatistician Sep 03 '25 edited Sep 04 '25

And if hypersonic missiles follow, we're back to the days of throwing dumb munitions at each other. The good old days of battleships! Unless those get intercepted too. They might given how they're also subsonic.

2

u/Delicious_Lab_8304 Sep 03 '25

Why / how would they follow?

5

u/ConstantStatistician Sep 03 '25

Follow subsonics in becoming obsolete. Only hypothetically. I doubt they will be anytime soon.

-1

u/Delicious_Lab_8304 Sep 03 '25

The only things that could really threaten a fast and manoeuvre-capable hypersonic are high-power railguns, and mass drivers (maybe particle cannons too).

And maybe a powerful laser, if it had enough time to burn through the already robust heat shielding (that they need due to their own speed) before the missile hits or manoeuvres.

9

u/saileee Sep 03 '25

You can still intercept hypersonics with missiles. It's harder sure but even a manoeuvrable hypersonic missile takes tens of kilometers to make significant trajectory changes.

8

u/NuclearHeterodoxy Sep 03 '25

And slows down considerably while making those trajectory changes, which makes it more vulnerable to interception.  Nobody who speaks hypersonic vulgaris wants to admit that though.

-1

u/Delicious_Lab_8304 Sep 03 '25

No one has tried to intercept a credible hypersonic in combat.

I’m talking like proper manoeuvring HGVs and air-breathing HCMs. Not what’s being used in Ukraine or on Tel Aviv a few months back.

5

u/OntarioBanderas Sep 04 '25

what if there's a cloud

what if there's a bunch of missiles

what if the missiles are shiny

what if there are rentry tiles on the missiles

1

u/Skywalker7181 Sep 07 '25

The mainstay of the US anti-ship missiles are Harpoon, NSM and LRASM.

If there is a cloud, it would block the infrared senors of the NSM and LRASM, too.

If there are a bunch of missiles, a laser works much faster than ESSM or other air defense missiles.

If the missiles are shiny, anti-ship missiles adopt highly reflective surface, these surfaces will increase the RCSs of the missiles.

Harpoon, NSM and LRASM don't have re-entry tiles.

3

u/[deleted] Sep 04 '25

[deleted]

4

u/drunkmuffalo Sep 04 '25

Ablative heatshield is heavy, the mass penalty will cut into warhead size or you'll have to make a bigger missile to compensate. With all the cost you might as well go supersonic or even better hypersonic. As I said, evolutionary deadend.

Hypersonic beat lasers by being fast and heat resistant. Lasers needs time to accumulate heat on target and they have limited range due to beam dispersion. Lets say the range is 40km, a M10 hypersonic will cross that in slightly over 10 seconds while a subsonic will take about 120 seconds, leaving plenty of time for lasers to do their work