Quote from: GI-Thruster on 07/01/2009 09:30 pm1. 150 kW is enough to protect our sats from attack in orbit, 2. especially if the HALLADS is in orbit. 3. A 50 kW BLP reactor is the size of a basketball1. That is 25% more than the ISS produces2. It is nowhere close to being fielded.3. when will that be available?
1. 150 kW is enough to protect our sats from attack in orbit, 2. especially if the HALLADS is in orbit. 3. A 50 kW BLP reactor is the size of a basketball
I think it is in a small sense already available.
Quote from: GI-Thruster on 07/02/2009 12:58 amI think it is in a small sense already available.Doubtful, it takes years to go from bench to space.
1. We don't know this. If it were being prepared for use in the military, it would certainly be classified. We would not have any idea how close it is to flight. Emergent technologies find their way into military application many years before civilians know about them. Think how many years we were flying F117's before the public knew what we had. T2. So for all we know, CIA has been flying BLP reactors for the last 5 years. If they were, we would not know about it.
Wouldn't it be possible to use high performacne capacitors that are chraged up over several days to produce some 150 kW for a few seconds, long enough to kill optics with a laser?Also I'd think that Russia (although not demeonstrated) definietly has the ASAT capability. With a launcher like this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start-1 how hard can it be to build a kill vehicle, I mean Russia should defimnitely have the capability to build an ASAT sysetm within a few months if they really want to, wasn't the Chinese ASAT test done on very similiar hardware?
All the Chinese did in their criminaly irresponsible sat destruction show was manuever close to a satellite and blow it up. Building an ASAT system that's a suborbital lob with closing velocities of several miles per second is like going to the gun range and trying to shoot a bullet out of the air. Except the speeds and distances with the sat shootdown are much greater.
but I think the kill vehicle was maneuvered
You have to have serious evidence to claim something is a fraud and lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.
Your argument is based upon the mistaken assumption that permeates much of post modernist society, that one is intellectually justified only in taking the position of the skeptic. However, anyone who understands real epistemology, or how we come to "know" or believe things, knows that the proper approach is to begin not with an antagonistic stance and requiring all positive evidence, but to begin with a neutral stance and weigh all evidence on its own merits.This is why I said others like you, are neither skilled nor capable of doing these sorts of evaluations, because you do it based upon your general temperament and psychological makeup rather than based upon reason.There is also the third option which we employ in courts of law, where one is forced to presume innocence until evidence of guilt is found (the "optimists" viewpoint.) That standard exists because of the ethical outcomes of incarcerating the innocent. We should take one small pointer from this: there is no onus upon anyone when evaluating evidence, to presume guilt. That's not a fair appraisal of the facts. Presuming innocence is likewise not fair, but it is at least merciful.However, in order to be fully rational in any appraisal, one needs to avoid both extremes, optimism and pessimism, because both of these provide blinders and filters that skew our appraisal of evidence. In critical thinking, these blinders equate to rhetorical and logical fallacies like slanting through emotional language. In any case, there is never anything other than a psychological basis for accepting the skeptics method and that method is certainly completely flawed.You don't know what you're taking about.
the caps could be charged by BLP reactors t
Point is, given what is expected the next few years, we could easily see laser combat capable spacecraft in less than a decade.