that's a common mistake actually, lasers, whether they operate in the visible spectrum or not, are still beams of light, and follow all the same rules and principles of a beam of light, excepting that they have been extremely focused and intensified. Thereby, shooting a laser through even a normal lens would cause it to spread or focus determined by the lens type, however, where normal light passing through a lens is virtually harmless, a strong enough laser would excite the molecules of the lens as they passed through it and if powerful enough or continuous enough would inevitably destroy the lens itself. The same goes for mirrors, sure you could reflect the beam, but unless the mirror is absolutely perfect it's going to absorb quite a bit of that energy and, eventually melt away as well. Obviously against this type of weapon these defenses would simply slow down how quickly it destroyed the missile, without actually preventing it from being destroyed, and therefor under most circumstances not worth the effort. There are other weapons that can be made similar to lasers that are not based on the photon, however, by it's very definition lasers are composed entirely of light. Many lasers of practical use would be of the Infrared or Red spectrum, the longer wavelength makes it easier to use and, the advantages are obvious, sci-fi likes to show you the beam, but while tracer fire can be useful in certain circumstances, it's a very rare one that you want your enemy to know exactly where you're shooting from every time you fire. Hell, it wouldn't be entirely impossible to build a PV cell designed for that end of the spectrum, it'd have to be able to collect all that energy and not burn up or explode itself, but if you could collect it fast enough, you could get your enemy to power your missile until they figured out it wasn't working XD
Haha, that missile idea is great. It works quite well if you're spinning your missile and able to cool it down fast with efficient heat radiators (big ass golden wings with coolant flow inside or whatever works). Laser weapons, just because the emitter devices themselves don't tolerate too much heat are very susceptible for incoming enemy laser fire. When a laser weapon is open and is hit by enemy laser it can be easily destroyed. On the note of enemy not seeing you when you don't use visible light, that's a moot point. Space ship detection is not based on human eyes if it can be avoided at all. In some cases a powerful thruster viewed too close could blind an astronaut viewing it with eyes even with a golden laminated visor. In most cases it would be ideal to keep the crew safe deep inside their craft, possibly in a room surrounded by water tank or something for the same effect. Since primary detection in combat would be based on picking up photons in infrared range coming from enemy ships, their heat signature, it would also make sense that the stray photons from a laser weapon would be very easy to pick up due to the high energy nature of such weapons. I was also going to make the point that all light is photons, but I'm no physicist and I noticed that a lot of people were complaining about the use of the very term 'photon' to begin with which prompted me to simply go and find some good reading on electromagnetism. It's a big topic and I'm sort of clueless with it, things like x-rays and gammarays being poor definitions since they overlap a lot and are inherently poorly defined. I really want to know more! Also, things like people complaining about infrared being talked about in terms of photons and so, I must study this subject so that I can at least know the electromagnetic model to give me slightest confidence in physics talk. Right now I suppose some of my thoughts are correct but possibly of wrong reasons and so. It is awkward.
well it's a complicated subject, all electromagnetic waves follow certain basic rules, and photons follow most of those rules, but are also considered to be particles. Those basic rules can only tell you in general how a wave may respond to outside forces, because certain factors of the wave itself may alter the results. Transparency is a good example, light passes through transparent material, and is refracted reflected diffracted and diffused by the passage to some extent, but in general simply passes through the denser material without significant loss. This is true of most waveforms, a material can be transparent to some forms of waves while being opaque to others, radio waves are a good example of this, as radio waves pass through many solid objects that block light. The principles of waves still apply the same way, the radio wave will be affected in much the same way as light passing through glass, however the waveform is so much bigger that it's more difficult to 'view' this, a 1m wave passing through a foot of wall is difficult to notice any change of direction without observing from a much farther distance. I love these charts, this one even compares soundwaves, which technically aren't electromagnetic waves at all, but pressure waves in a medium.
Yea, it just gets really complicated when you hit applied physics direction. Stuff like how arrays of emitters have weird rules about them and so, one can just toss common intuition right out the window. I've been so very wrong on so many things, I even used to think it would be good to paint ships matte black etc. Need to find a couple of good physics sources and really just learn the stuff for real. Tired of being so clueless.
