If it achieves the planned cost per flight of $2 million.Al the US needs to do is mass produce orbital lasers and create mass surveillance satellite constelation.Starship will make putting things in orbit cheap enough to weaponize the space.If is a satellite looking at 100% of the surface of the earth all the time. How could anyone launch a surprise attack?There will be no need for carriers and figthers too as the orbital lasers can destroy or kill anything anywhere.Kill maduro? Zap!Kill castro? Zap!Kill putin? Zap!>All putin has to do is hide in his bunkerKill anyone that tries to bring food or supplies to the bunker, eventually he will die of hunger.>B..but they can launch nukesAs the entire surface of the earth is being monitored, they can see where the missile is being launched, all the laser weapon has to do is destroy it as it is being launched.
>>64409544you're either retarded or underage
>>64409544>If it achieves the planned cost per flight of $2 million.lol>Al the US needs to do is mass produce orbital lasers and create mass surveillance satellite constelation.lmao>Starship will make putting things in orbit cheap enough to weaponize the space.Satellites are expensive period. No matter how cheap the launch is. Shartship is never gonna be that cheap anyway.Also Kessler syndrome says hi.
>>64409544>If it achievesIt won't. It's shit.
>>64409544>kill One satellite 200 more follow
>>64409544
>>64409601>Satellites are expensive periodSatellites are expensive because they're engineered to cram a lot of payload and many years of maintenance-free operation into little mass and many components are manufactured in small batches.Plus space-grade electronics.If launch costs go down you can also optimize the sats a little less, replace them more often, launch more of them, use cheaper redundant components instead of hardened ones, etc.That'll drive down costs.
>>64409544Putting anything else aside, orbital lasers of that sort just aren't feasible with modern tech. Even the most powerful experimental lasers are nowhere close to being able to punch through 250mi of atmosphere, weather, dust, etc. and still deliver significant effects on target, and those lasers require a massive amount of power and huge facilities full of capacitors etc. to power them. If we really want orbital strikes we're a lot better off hoping we get somewhere with railguns or maybe plasma cannons.
>>64409544It will cost a lot more than $2 mil per flight but it will be cheaper than Falcon 9 which is already allowing America to dominate space.
>>64409840Or just deorbit a rock with fins.
>>64409544Zap?Zap...Are you from the East coast, or have family on the US east coast? Maybe parts of newyork, or jersey? Ya know, not everyone, just some of em. Just wondering.Zap, fucking never refer to anything as being zapped again unless its electricity you fucking mongoloid.
>castronigger how old are you lmao
>>64411249Casto was the PM of Canada until their last election cycle.
>>64409544I haven't kept much with Starship development, have they solved the reentry problem?
>>64409544it's a big missilehow's that different
>>64411273Mostly. They got the last couple down to a safe hover over the Indian Ocean at the altitude the launch tower would normally have caught them at. The biggest remaining short-term issue is bringing one back to the tower and actually catching it. The recent one was the last of the v2 models, so expect another toss into the IO with the first v3 in a few months to verify that they haven't introduced any new problems, and if that works, the second v3 might try for a landing at the launch tower.The biggest longer-term issue is that based on the camera footage we've seen, the heat tiles still aren't "rapidly reusable", with some replacement/refurbishing actions required. Right now, it looks like StarShip will blow the Shuttle out of the water in terms of speed and cost to reuse, but it's not where they want it to be for the mass tanker launches needed to fuel up a large number of Mars ships.>>64409544Orbital lasers don't work quite like that. Best we can do is put one heck of a sensor grid up there, with MTI radars, SAR from throwing the feeds from nearby sats through some extra processing, maybe some telescopes for visual/IR scouting, etc. After that, there are options, such as orbital ABM interceptors, and *maybe* lower-powered lasers/masers if West Taiwan starts launching massive constellations of killsats or something. But planetary bombardment from orbit? The physics and engineering involved don't work very well with today's tech unless you're talking nukes.
>>64409544laser weapons will not work because of atmospheric dispersion and rayleigh criterionalso it will not cost 2 million but even at 100 it's cost competitive against cruise missiles and large fighter strike packages200t to LEO could mean obliterating an entire airbase with submunitions in one strike, the damage would exceed the capabilitiy of ADR teams
>>64409544Going to make fixed position USAF bases obsolete. CSGs will be fine
>>64411458>200t to LEO could mean obliterating an entire airbase with submunitions in one strike, the damage would exceed the capabilitiy of ADR teamsIt would also be no different from sending a giga-MIRVed up ICBM towards a hostile country. Might as well put nukes on it at that point, because it will be treated as such
>>64409840>>64409544A quick physics check says you'd need a 100MW+ laser to get about 15MW on target, which is ATGM level firepower. Definitely not putting that in orbit, but if you build a giant centralized laser on the ground and bounce it off focusing satellites, it's more practical than you'd think. The inefficiencies of atmosphere going up and back down sound bad, but compared to the logistics of shipping an ATGM over to the target, it's fast and cost-effective.
>>64412831>Definitely not putting that in orbit,We have 100MW solar farms. Unrolling a huge thin film PV sheet might be more feasible than a 100MW nuclear reactor in space given the same launch capacity.
>>64411401>but it's not where they want it to be for the mass tanker launches needed to fuel up a large number of Mars ships.It's still early. With F9 it took them several iterations to settle on a way to do fairing recovery, remember the ships with catch nets?In the most recent launch they left a tile off on the oxygen tank. Reentry heat burned through the hull and the ship managed to land anyway because the landing fuel/lox is in the header tanks, not the main ones. The shuttle with its aluminium structure would have been toast.
>>64413528This is what a 100MW solar farm looks like. A space-based one would probably be smaller since there are no atmospheric losses but it still seems impractically big to maneuver with. Unless you've got a way to store that energy it'd also be useless when the target is on the dark side of the Earth, which seems like a pretty crippling limitation, especially if you were trying to use it as a missile defense system or whatever.
>>64409544any retard can look at this and realize the mass fraction doesn't make sense
>>64413528>>64413696how would you even radiate the heat from something like that?
>>64413696Depends on the orbit, sats can still have sunlight when the ground is dark. most obvious one being a dawn-dusk orbit.And it appears that you forgot your image.>>64413729Short bursts? Just some thermal mass and small radiators.Continuous fire? You now need to dissipate about 50% (depends on laser technology) of the input power as heat. About 5 hectares of radiators at 300K. Those are a bit bulkier than thin film solar, so they'd add a considerable amount of launch mass.
>>64409544Elon bad
>>64411273the last test was a resounding success. Only minimal loss of tiles and no burned flaps next one will be version 3 though with the new Raptor 3 engines. Expect some temporary setback like what happened when version 2 was introduced after successful version 1 tests
>>64413696>>64413729>>64413775Shit I just realized I forgot the pic of the solar farm
LISTEN FAGGOTSIntercontinental rocket deployable...fighter jets or fighter bombers
>>64413775There would still be spots where you can't be aligned with the target and in sunlight, though, and it'd be pretty easy for enemies to work around those. Night is when you'd really want to use it too since that's when people's locations are most predictable and there's generally less dust in the air etc.
>>64413798Higher orbits with an inclination raising above Earth's shadow cone could target anything. But then with the same divergence angle you'd be painting a larger spot, so you'd need even more power.
>>64411273https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1978179844656480423
>>64409544>orbital lasersRetard.>mass produce orbital lasersAbsolute, subhuman retard.
>>64412807it won't because according to chinese and russian doctrine they will retaliate only after detecting nuclear explosions on their territoryunless this is being used to target nuke related infrastructure like strategic bomber bases everything is fine
>>64413797
>>64409544some company needs to make a dildo shaped like that rocket because that thing is hella penisy
Why nuke something when you can deorbit 200 tons of lazy dogs over it instead?
>>64409544>2025 America getting anything done in a reasonable timespan and budget
>>64409601>Also Kessler syndrome says hi.Is a meme. Objects in low orbits decay far too rapidly for that to be a real concern. You'd be hard pressed to create kessler syndrome that lasted longer than a year or two if you intentionally tried.
>>64415913>doing the impossible merely late
