COULD SATELLITE LASERS REALLY DO THIS?...

Comments · 7.1K

• SU

  @superdupergrover9857 · 3 years ago

  This is the only guy who can say &quot;Today, we&apos;re going to do a deep dive into directed energy weapons&quot; casually, who isn&apos;t a aerospace or weapons youtuber <b>*and*</b> I just take the statement at face value. This is entirely expected and the only weird thing about it is that it isn&apos;t weird.

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• DE

  @devjock · 3 years ago

  CNC Fiber laser cutter operator here (LVD Phoenix, 12KW IPG laser source). I&apos;ve personally witnessed the setup I&apos;m working with, be able to cut 30mm stainless steel and Aluminium (highly reflective and pretty &apos;abrasive&apos; to the head&apos;s built in safety windows). It&apos;s crazy what these things can do. <br><br>Every material has it&apos;s own sweetspot for efficient cutting. Sometimes there&apos;s a trade-off between speed and cutting quality (edge squareness, burrs forming on the underside of the parts, color change due to metal overheating, etc etc), but most materials can be cut quite nicely without losing too much quality. It&apos;s an art to cut parts with a nice accurate, sharp, glassy looking side, and me and my fellow lasergods take pride in delivering the shiny. <br><br>One of the things fiber setups can do that traditional CO2 lasers can&apos;t is store energy and release it as a massive but short blast. We use it to strike a hole right through metal, after which we switch back to &quot;normal laser cutting&quot; and spiral down the side of the &quot;Strike hole&quot; to enlarge the hole enough for sufficient amounts of &quot;helper gas&quot; to be able to blow through the plate (in our case either Oxygen or Nitrogen). After sufficient gasflow is achieved, we re-engage the laser and follow the cutpath while maintaining a set gaspressure. Laser does the melty bit, helper-gas does the material removal bit.<br><br>In a process similar to what the LHC does with particles, these laser sources can cycle photons inside a fiberloop and add on to them almost infinitely, and at a set time, they do a switchover into the cutting head, releasing all those coherent photons into the metal, instantly vaporising it, after which the helper gas can blow away the metal plasma (yes, it&apos;s turning the metal into a plasma). Some motion systems and head leveling sensors do the job of maintaining a set height above (and a set x,y position on) the plate to be cut, and the rest is just G-code. Most of the time, all you need is basic knowledge of how to draw a shape in Inkscape, and you can cut it on the machine.<br><br>Tldr; These laser sources may be advertised as having an output capacity of 12KW, but they can do MUCH MUCH more than that, for small fractions of a second at a time. And most of the time, all you need is a short blast to &quot;clear a path&quot;.

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• MA

  @markedis5902 · 3 years ago

  I worked on satellite systems in the past. &nbsp;When you’re designing your system be aware of the temperature differences between day and night at 400km &nbsp;then look at the thermal expansion characteristics of the different components. &nbsp;Things that are fine on the ground could rip themselves apart at 400km. &nbsp;Also consider operating temperatures of batteries and other components.

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• PA

  @paulamm-2 · 1 year ago

  Can you please do a video on why these &quot;wild fires&quot; in Maui, LA and around the world are not burning anything blue or anything plastic. You see plastic childrens play sets and toys, PVC fence, hoses, etc untouched while homes and buildings are incinerated into a WHITE ash not black like normal. Also why are the trees, shrubbery, landscaping and grass around these incerated homes and buildings still standing green and untouched?! Another anomaly is cars in total random places totally incinerated but nothing around them is burned??<br><br>All of this defies logic and does not go along with fires and fire patterns that have been established since the beginning of time.<br><br>I, and many other people, would love to see a video explaining these anomolies. And if anyone could do it it would be you!

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• RE

  @remnote-ffp · 3 years ago

  I used to work in a dance club with a water cooled argon laser from 20w, and because you can&apos;t cut off electricity suddenly from the laser tube, because these lasers has to cool down slowly, we had the possibility to redirect the beam outside. The green beam was visible for kilometers, without dispersing a lot. We used dichroic mirrors to achieve this. One time the beam was off and had to be recalibrated, but in place of shining on the dichroic mirror, it shined on the door jamb nearby, and burned a serious hole. So there was a fire hazard with this thing. That&apos;s why we had to check, every hour, the very big power supply, the water cooling and the laser itself. This was also a multicolor club laser. So if you see what a 20w laser can do, what about a 20Kw laser? Mind-boggling.

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• BO

  @bobstovall9570 · 3 years ago

  Not only do you continue to improve your delivery, you look as though you really do enjoy it more with each new release.

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• JC

  @jceddy1 · 2 years ago

  A nice follow-up would be to investigate if/how these lasers can be detected as well as if it&apos;s possible to defend against.

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• DE

  @deadwaters2786 · 1 year ago

  In 1963 my father was working for McDonald Douglas in Southern California, and one night he came home with a big smile on his face and said that they had touched a US satellite with a laser they built and programed. &nbsp;&quot;Touched&quot;, not damaged.

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• JT

  @JTamilio · 2 years ago

  I saw a fascinating documentary about this in 1985 where a young college student was able to beam a laser from low earth orbit to cook a bunch of popcorn. That prodigy later became the top naval aviator in his class and eventually a navy admiral.

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• NI

  @Nickscassera · 3 years ago

  You make tech and science so easy to digest, the first 12 seconds actually scared me a little bit.

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• RI

  @ricrid · 2 years ago

  When i was working on a farm as a teenager my boss was a older man who&apos;s dad was dead. I use to drive tractor 16 hours a day or longer . This was before cell phones but his wife had dementia and use to hide in her bedroom and call the sheriff saying someone was breaking into the house when my boss would go home . He would bring me a soda a couple time a day and i remember listening to Paul Harvey. &nbsp;I would plow so much that i would go into a trance and would not remember plowing whole fields , one time i stopped to pee and found a Buffalo nikle in the dirt and another time saw something reflecting the sun and got out to see what it was and it was a brass star badge like in the old days . I use to love going to the river and jumping in . &nbsp;That life was fun and simple . I hate the life our kids are living in .

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• MO

  @MorRobots · 3 years ago

  The No. 1 Challenge with a satellite is not distance. It&apos;s HEAT. The ISS has massive radiators just to deal with the heat produced by the power/environmental systems. As a frame of reference, the ISS has a peak power usage of 90 kW, with a peak production of 120 kW. When the USAF tested out the YAL-1 Airborne Laser the biggest challenge holding it back was managing the waste heat it produced. Getting rid of heat in space is very difficult and involves tradeoffs such as expelling coolant (a consumable), or having large radiators. <br><br>DE systems produce an insane amount of wasted heat, even chemical lasers like COIL have these challenges. (Also you would want to avoid using a consumable laser system on a satellite)<br><br>Just something to keep in mind when talking about satellite based Directed energy systems.

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