Well you are looking at baby lasers.

In the 70's - late - I saw a 8 'barrel' cut 1/2" steel plate like butter.

Lasers are for Engineering and Research are different than the
table top lasers used to study lenses.

All it has to do on an ICBM or MIRV is to create a bump or snag.
A high energy pulsed machine gun type would cause massive friction
burns that melt down by friction any ICBM or MRV.

This isn't new technology. The magic in this stuff is shoot
an ICBM with a shotgun and it kills itself.

Martin

On 9/25/2015 9:38 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Fri, 25 Sep 2015 08:40:25 -0500, Ignoramus32266
wrote:

On 2015-09-25, Randy333 wrote:
ICBM's are rather fragile things and I think a laser could do some
damage. An A-10 is a tank buster, what can a laser do to 10" plus of
armor plate?

500LB laser guided bombs might be the replacemnet for an A-10. They
did use these in the gulf war for killing tanks.

I thought that lasers only operate at a small radius, under a few
miles.

It takes an ICBM a few seconds to fly that distance.

i

Lasers are nowhere near capable of taking out an ICBM today, or a
tank. Maybe in the future. For now, as Randy says, it's the new
super-smart bombs that are the tank killers.