- are cheap to shoot
- do not fall on someones head if they miss (unlike firing bullets and rockets at a drone that will come down again)
- do hit the target immediately if aimed right
Problems with lasers are, cooling, power consumption limiting mobile use - and indeed targeting and fog and clouds.
You need about 2 MJ (or 2000 Watt seconds) to boil away 1L of water. The Dragonfire ship class laser puts out 50 KW, so it would take 40 seconds to do that, assuming it can fire without pause, all of the enrgy makes it into the target, and none of it gets reflected.
This is a container sized system that needs to be mounted on a ship.
Meanwhile in Ukraine you have auto turrets made from anything ranging from heavy machineguns to old AA guns, with some added optics and/or radar, which are super cheap and you can carry them around in vans.
- are cheap to shoot - do not fall on someones head if they miss (unlike firing bullets and rockets at a drone that will come down again) - do hit the target immediately if aimed right
Problems with lasers are, cooling, power consumption limiting mobile use - and indeed targeting and fog and clouds.