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A comment on U.S. Air Force has shot down multiple air-launched missiles in a test. Parent comment

Re:U.S. Air Force has shot down multiple air-launched missil... by electrograv on Tuesday May 07, 2019 @09:24AM (#19849082)
One would hope that they have made fundamental improvements / innovations to the tech in those past 50 years[1], and they’ll just be keeping that advantage secret for a while.

[1] Am I getting old or is it weird realizing that 1970 was almost 50 years ago?

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Re:U.S. Air Force has shot down multiple air-launched missil... by azernik on Tuesday May 07, 2019 @06:59PM (#19854227)
One of the big changes has been the shift to (mostly) solid-state lasers for this kind of work - it's taken longer to scale those up to weaponized power levels, but they're much easier to work with and miniaturize. The telecoms industry did a lot of the fundamental work in this area for fiber optics purposes. Back in the 70s they were using mostly chemical-powered lasers, which could get high powers without high-performance electrical power sources, but were a pain to work with (hence the use of large airliners).

Aircraft these days have much better electrical power systems (since all control surfaces and a lot more engine operation is electrically powered), and new aircraft carriers and surface combatants are being designed with about 50-100% margin on electrical power to make them compatible with these systems in the future.

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Re:U.S. Air Force has shot down multiple air-launched missil... by p1esk on Tuesday May 07, 2019 @09:45AM (#19849224)
It is weird! :)
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