this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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Lasers Could Soon Power U.S. Military Bases—And Not Even Jamming Could Stop It (www.popularmechanics.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Lasers Could Soon Power U.S. Military Bases—And Not Even Jamming Could Stop It::We spoke to the project manager for DARPA’s POWER program, who explains how the wireless energy transfer technology will work.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

the end user converts that laser energy back into electricity using narrow-bandgap-tuned monochromatic photovoltaics

Is this specialized photovoltaic panels already exist or need to be invented first?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Well, photovoltaic panels are already only good at converting a specific range of wavelengths of light into energy. If you want to build more efficient panels (for normal uses), you often need to layer them, with different layers able to use different ranges of the spectrum.

Lasers (and LEDs for that matter) only produce a single wavelength of light, so there is some potential for using it to transmit energy. You just need to tune your laser and your panel to be on the same wavelength. So there's some tuning that needs to happen, but it's basically traditional photovoltaics we're talking about.

Although even then, I'm not sure what the theoretical maximum efficiency of these panels would be, there would probably still be a lot of energy loss. AND ALSO, I have some serious concerns with giving the military giant space based lasers strong enough to power a military base, that's generally called a death ray.

Somehow, I'm actually more comfortable with the military having small nuclear reactors...

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Somehow, I'm actually more comfortable with the military having small nuclear reactors

Good, cuz they've had them for years on submarines and maybe some boats too lol