China enthüllt neue Laserwaffen und nukleare ballistische Raketen

They also showed off some quadrupedal robots which can mount machine guns on their backs.

*Or what? You’ll release the dogs, or the bees? Or the dogs with bees in their mouths and when they bark, they shoot bees at you? Well, go ahead! Do your worst!*

You ever think about how many problems we can solve in the world if we didn’t have to all worry about defending ourselves from ourselves?

Ah, this is going to get ugly 🙁

New? You mean they stole it from someone.

If you won’t develop the weapons of the Apocalypse you can bet your adversaries will.

Man we are fucked, best we can hope for is temu quality.

Imagine if people used technology to better society instead of trying to hurt people.

Those are way bigger than the warheads from Spies Like Us. Who are they even trying to scare with this?

Do new and now powerful nukes really matter? Like what it is a race to see who can save the most rocket fuel and destroy the world with less missiles? Unless your weapon is undetectable from launch it doesn’t matter. Whoever you fire at is going to fire back before your missile hits.

I mean, liquid-fueled ICBMs are… hunh.

They are generally considered old technology. I get that the claimed range on these missiles is impressive, but the cost is making these missiles practically worthless.

Liquid fueled missiles don’t sit around all fueled up. The fuel is incredibly toxic and incredibly dangerous to work with. Minimum hours to fuel up the missiles, more like 12 hours. That tends to get noticed.

Liquid fueled missiles are pointless as second strike missiles, since they would obviously be targeted by any first strike. That means their only use case is for first strike, and since their fueling is telegraphed, not even as a surprise first strike.

Even worse, after being put on alert and being fueled, after a certain amount of time the missiles have to be very carefully unfueled. That means there is a distinct period of time when the missiles are utterly worthless, because they have been unfueled and they can’t be refueled until after a pretty serious maintenance cycle. Seals, tanks, all those have to be inspected and possibly replaced after coming into contact with the incredibly toxic fuel. Offhand, I would say at least a couple of days when those missiles just sitting there, worthless. That makes the country that runs those missiles incredibly vulnerable in that period of time.

There’s a reason they switched to solid-fueled rockets right around the time that spy satellites became a serious thing. Liquid-fueled rockets were great (from, say, the Soviet POV) when the only way to keep an eye on Soviet missiles was via U-2 or SR-71 spy planes. Once every Soviet missile silo was under 24/7 surveillance by spy satellites, solid fueled rockets became the way to go. Especially because you could put them onto TELs that would go traipsing around the Siberian woods.

Trying to go into a liquid fuel ICBM is weird. You get some very impressive range out of it, or at least claimed range, but… why?

As to naval-based lasers, cool! There’s a lot of science fiction whiz bang about them, but realistically naval-based laser weapons are, best case scenario, a cheaper (per shot) and more effective replacement for the CIWS than anything else. Within Earth’s atmosphere, there’s only so much power you can pump through the air before you get some serious diminishing returns. The atmosphere doesn’t like absorbing that much thermal energy, and the more light energy you pump through it the more gets converted into thermal energy, and at a certain point the atmosphere has so much thermal energy pumped into it that you can’t pump more light through it.

Let’s say that the maximum is a megawatt. If you try pushing through a gigawatt, you’re not going to get two megawatts of throughput. You’re going to roil up the atmosphere so much that you’re going to get less than a megawatt even though your laser is pushing a lot more power out its front end.

I’m as big a Sci-Fi nerd as the next guy, but in atmosphere laser cannons are, as best as we can tell right now, going to max out as replacements for the Bradley’s 25mm Bushmaster. The limitation isn’t technology, it isn’t focusing the lasers better, it isn’t how much power you can push through your laser assembly. The limitation is the pesky breathable atmosphere around us. Unless you can figure out a way to create a vacuum tunnel between you and your target via some kind of force field, a replacement for the CIWS it’s about the max for lasers. Possibly ever.