When talking about aircrafts, a small cut is enough to cause significant deviations in the airflow.
Hmm, has a bit of merit there. I posted every single number I used in my calculations in the post, feel free to go over and see if I missed something. The only problem is that if you miss by even a little bit, and only blow a little hole and not cut the edge, it keeps flying. Aircraft remain airworth even if struck with bullets, so lasers may still have some work to do.
Scotty I believe you're off in your estimates...
...and it's not a miscalculation per-se, but the physical model you use for the damage mechanics involved.
Even lower powered (nowhere near 100kW) lasers were able to cook-off grenades and other combustibles/explosives in a couple of seconds.
Here is how others calculated:
http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/DamageAverage.htmlUsing his calculator we get this data:
Damage to Aluminum
Beam parameters
Beam power: 100000 W
Beam diameter at target: 0.01 m
Material properties
density: 2700 kg/m3
Heat of fusion: 0.397 MJ/kg
Heat of vaporization: 10.897 MJ/kg
Heat capacity: 0.897 kJ/(kg K)
Melting temperature: 933.47 K
Boiling temperature: 2792 K
Ambient temperature: 296.15 K
Material damage
Black body temperature: 12240 K
Rate of vaporization: 2.737E-06 m3/s
Vaporization front propagates at: 0.0348 m/s
The crucial date is the last entry 0.0348 m/s - this is the "drilling speed":
3.48 cm/s - that's one very fast drill. The wings of the plane are rarely that thick, so most hits *will* penetrate *into* the plane and damage internal structure and equipment. Doing it with even a single engines will be a *mission kill*, for all intents and purposes.
Drilling into explosives - the bombs or the missiles - will also rob the plane of its purpose as it will be no longer be able to perform air superiority or bombing missions.
Even better, with this thing you could shoot down the weapons even as they fall/fly toward you.
