I’m still stuck at either the object causing ignition (of the skin?) by lasing it through a cloud of oxygen (?) venting for cooling purposes or by illuminating it with same so it could be hit with something fired at great distance (which could be disproven if the area can’t be accessed at less than ~2 miles).
It may also be that from scale that object could have had enough mass and speed to not be affected had it actually fired a projectile itself.
Can you help me with this? I viewed the videos yesterday and quite can’t seem to pick out a projectile, laser or energy beam striking the missile. Granted the laser wouldn’t necessarily fall in the visible light range and certainly the energy beam wouldn’t. Where do you see something?
Long rod kinetic penetrators fired from the 120mm smooth bore guns of an Abram tank smoke along at around 5800 ft/s...4000 MPH. Would that be visible?
Problem: it takes a lot of iron and footprint to mount a gun of that nature. Not real easy to conceal the firing point if fired from the ground, and it would require a pretty good load carrier aircraft to do the same. High energy lasers of that capability also need a lot of infrastructure.
Of course, I’m speaking of things we KNOW about.