1. Set powerful lasers around the launching site
2. Use computer to concentrate them above the rocket
3. Beams of all the lasers heat up the air
4. Air directly above rocket becomes hot = less dense
5. As rocket goes up, the beams follow
6. Rockets can go further with less fuel
(my first post in Sup Forums so I don't know meta)
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>shine a laser at air to heat it up
You know air is an almost perfect lossless medium for em waves, right?
Shine the lasers at the fuel tanks instead and blow yourself up.
It's not. It's not even a completely terrible idea because of the thought to converge them which will make the air significantly warmer at the point of convergence than at any other point along a single beam's length.
The real outcome, though, would be an updraft that the rocket could ride in.
No, I don't. I had this idea today and I posted it here for discussion.
So pointing five ultra powerful lasers in one spot would not heat up air at all?
it would make much more sense to have a black metal cap on the top of the rocket on which to aim the lasers, which can far better absorb the energy
i'm not sure what kind of advantage it would provide, though
Perhaps we should talk a little about orders of magnitude. When launching a spacecraft, the sustainable power output of the rocket engine is in the order of gigawatts. This is far beyond any lasers that we have. Even if you could completely remove the drag (which you can't), it wouldn't make a huge difference.
Heating up that metal would do nothing useful.
You have to heat up air itself to make it thinner.
Idea is to prepare chimney of thin air, a kind of fast lane for a rocket.
Troll science thread?
the point wouldn't to be to heat the metal, it's there to absorb the laser beam and radiate the heat out into the air
I don't know if metal would heat up air quick enough to create a bubble of hot air around that rocket, but if yes, then that would be great.
It is kinda how super fast torpedoes work.
Wouldn't pic related (bottom right panel) work better than OP's idea?
How is giving rocket energy from outside source comparable to troll science?
Your idea is good too, but everyone knows that magnets are more powerful than lasers.
>You can do some cool things with lasers, tho.
That's funny, because when I was a kid I had that laser pointer idea, but I knew that mirrors are wasting way to much energy for it to work.
You could use the free money to buy more lasers.
Thank you for your constructive and not retard-tier contribution itt.
I'm pretty sure there was testing for laser propelled rocket.
Like heat the rocket's bottom to create a plasma field and boom rocket goes up.
There are a few small problems:
>area
>speed
>power
When you calculate aerodynamic drag you don't consider just a tiny bit of area in front of your object, you take into consideration an almost infinite amount of space that surrounds your object.
Drag increases with the square of speed, and only linearly with air density, meaning that the contribution of density is "less relevant" than the speed. Moreover the maximum aerodynamic drag is reached in the first minute or so of flight, after which air density decreases dramatically because the rocket reaches the higher atmosphere.
Speed and area also give you a flow: if you consider them combined you need to heat stupidly high amounts of cubic meters of air per second almost instantaneously, which leads to the following problem.
You need ridiculous amounts of power to heat enormous amounts of air in an infinitely short amount of time. This power has to be purchased and managed, the lasers must be built bought and maintained. The sheer cost of this operation far outweight that small amount of fuel that you'd save, which by the way isn't even the biggest cost of a space launch. Beside, launch trajectory is optimized to require the minimum amount of energy anyway.
t. AE student.
Make retarded thread, get retarded replies
Great answer, thanks, now I get it.
Will I get twice the money If I do this for both eyes?
Energy of the light is inverse square of distance right?
So to heat the air at 60km above ground at 100C, ground level would be insanely hot and melt your laser (not sure if lasers have falloff like that).
You would also waste so much of that energy becuase it would just pass through the air into space. And the amount that was absorbed by air before it got above the rocket and beyond that point, probably
>Energy of the light is inverse square of distance right?
No. Intensity is. Energy is conserved. Intensity, which is energy/area decreases with the square of the inverse of the distance only if it radiates radially. A laser focus all the energy in a beam, which has a constant cross section (ideally).
>All those (You)s
You're welcome. Thank you for your non-technology related thread on the technology board.
FYI, your shitty theories would be way more suited on .
This.
Yes, obviously.
Do it and post results.