Re:Raytheon High-Energy Laser
by creato on Monday February 13, 2023 @12:51AM
(#34770559)
If this were a real threat, laser safety goggles would be standard issue.
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They're not, because so far powerful enough lasers weren't used in the battlefield, in large part due to international ban on such use.
Anti-infantry lasers will likely continue to be banned for a while, but as anti-air and anti-armor ones get introduced, the risk of soldiers getting blinded off beam scatter will rise fast, so laser safety goggles might just become standard issue.
Or not. The problem is that laser safety goggles and screens are built to be opaque to specific frequencies. There may not be a way to have the goggles protect you from every laser frequency you're likely to encounter on the battlefield.
Typically these burning lasers are in the infrared spectrum and it's pretty easy to block the entirety of that. Visible lasers, particularly very powerful ones, tend to only fall in a handful of wavelengths due to the way they work so it's less of a problem than it sounds like it is.