Beam defense technology

[stepnoy (OP)]

Let's discuss about laser defense.  I know there are lot of talks was.  I will glad to hear why it shouldn't work anyway

What if the ship will spread around some kind of dust/gas/plasma, which have the  same temperature as a ship itself.  Can it build up some kind of protection against aiming system? In my point of view it can make a target more amorphous (in case when engine is off).  And aiming system will not quiet sure where is actual ship is.  It's true that if laser shoots at ship though this cloud it simply evaporate dust between.  But can it misses?

There are some cons:
- dust expansion will lead to lose some of energy, so that dust apparently will lose target temperature and reveals a ship.  It can be compensated with continuous spreading.  So cloud will have keep expanding but at the center will be pretty much coherent.
- energy will degrade by radiation as well.  But in this case it takes much more time.  So we will not take it into account.
- third and most major - center of mass will always be at the ship.  Unless we does not use some drones that is flying around and spreading this dust.

So what do you think, is that way can protect against laser aiming systems?

[Barkhorn]

In real life, aerosols are a consideration for laser weapons.  They've found that the laser will boil away some of the target, but if that small amount of surface damage is not enough to kill the target, the boiling metal will form a cloud around the target area.  The boiling material then absorbs much of the incoming energy, meaning less is getting to the target.

[niflheimr]

No plasma or gas - they would spread out way faster than you can release them. Dust (fine particles of this or that ) on the other hand could work.
If you are thrusting it won't do much - your drive flare will certainly be visible through the cloud - not to mention it would be a lot more like a plume than a cloud.

Stationary it might help against targeting systems and lower power lasers - but against a very high power pulse it might actually do more harm than good.
If the incoming beam is powerful enough and the cloud dense it will vaporize the dust so fast there will be a shockwave created - which , beside dispersing your cloud it might damage armor or more sensitive parts of your ship (like sensor arrays , cameras , laser mirrors/lenses/exit surfaces and so on).

Also , assuming you want to have a clear impact on their targeting capabilities you will have to release a lot of dust. You might be better off with replacing that with an equal amount of armor.

Now if that laser is something like an X-ray laser that's got one-shot capabilities at up to a couple light minutes well I suppose you might as well use it. Even if it degrades the accuracy by only a few percents it's better than nothing - and it's not like you can armor against something like that.

@barkhorn Pretty much , but it's easily bypass-able . All that you need to do is to time the pulses - one to vaporize a channel , one to go through it a few milliseconds later once the gas dissipates.

[MarcAFK]

One easy possibility for real-life energy shielding is using high energy plasma contained by magnetic fields. Incoming kinetic or energetic weaponry basically only serves to make the plasma enter a higher energy state which should eventually dissapate, or perhaps that energy could be shunted into weapons systems and sent back at the enemy.

[NihilRex]

Ice shields.  Layer on several tons of ice surrounding the ship, it will absorb pretty much any incoming energy fire.

[niflheimr]

Aye , ice works quite well. Incidentally , it would do just as good a job against kinetic projectiles too - up to a point. And unlike armor you can just shovel it in your reaction tanks as well so it's an elegant solution.

I quite like the sandcaster approach towards KK defense as well - the harder they intend to hit , the more effective it is.