Forest Green
ACCESS: Above Top Secret
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It is doable. A nuclear reactor weighing 10t can produce 50MWth, so about 25MWe.It's not doable now. You need around a megawatt, or more, just to take out an antiship missile from a few miles away. Nothing like that even being dreamed about for space applications and you'd need far more to reach down from orbit to take out a much heavier built TEL. And "under cover" could be something as simple as trees. Or just put a reflective aluminum "roof" on your TEL. This is trivial stuff.
Nuclear Thermal Propulsion
Nuclear Thermal Propulsion was resuscitated in the 2010s by the efforts at USNC to deliver more capable fuels and designs that use LEU and HALEU rather than military HEU. The work continues.
www.usnc.com
Scale that up to 40t and you have 100MWe. FEL lasers up to 30% efficiency are possible.
So that's 30MW from 100MWe.
Now 2 points of note:
1. FELs are frequency tuneable.
2. At 351nm there is an atmospheric window (near-UV):
3. The shorter wavelength also allows for better focusing of the beam relative to antennae size (as per radars).
4. The air is most dense at sea level, so 1MW gives you only about 10km (https://sgp.fas.org/crs/weapons/R41526.pdf) when using a longer wavelength laser, which produces a thicker beam. A satellite would fire down through space and thin atmosphere, the air below 10km altitude would probably produce more absorption than the air between 10-100km altitude, and 2MW is effective at 300km in space (http://www.projectrho.com/public_ht...aser_Bombardment--Martin_Marietta_Zenith_Star). So overall absorption would be minimal relative to a 30MW beam.
5. Al isn't that great a reflector. And after converting to gaseous phase after absorbing 30% of the remaining radiation (still of the order of tens of MW) it will be a very poor reflector indeed.
Case in point, lasers are used for machining Al. It's only a problem at longer wavelengths.
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