Imagine how precise must have be servos to move laser optics to hit something like 1x5meters rockst coming with 1,800m/s say 10 kilometers away?
Very high precision, though as mentioned in the original post about it the guy said the very high energy means it does not need time to build up energy to damage the target...
A target moving at that speed will not be jumping around like a gymnast... it will largely be moving in a straight line with the potential for slight deviations... cameras can auto track targets already so it is not like someone has to manually track these things... computers can be fast and very precise...
just admit it, it's ugly
Your just a bully...
I am overweight too... so my doctor tells me... 122kgs isn't that bad is it?
Traveling at 20 kilometers per second, such giants pose a threat of obliterating all life on Earth.
That is probably where our friend got the 20000m/s from... a deep space object stuck in our solar system...
Regarding falling warheads... at about 400km altitude the orbital speed is about 7.4km/s so if it is travelling faster than this it will not fall it will move to a higher orbit. If it starts falling from that height at that speed... ie pointed downwards then its acceleration due to gravity will be 9.8m/s/s.
At 7.4km/s it will cover 400km in less than a minute... and a minute is 60 seconds, so 9.8++ times 60 is ... well 60 times 10 is 600m/s faster... so falling from 400km from a moving start at 7.4km/s when it hits the ground the fastest it could be moving would be 8km/s... except at about 100km altitude it hits the upper reaches of the atmosphere which starts to slow it down... by 30km or so the air becomes thick enough for some aircraft to fly so it probably generates enough drag to counter the pull of gravity... so it would be moving at less than 8km/s on impact.
Not only do you get to wipe out some exceptionalist cancer afflicting the planet in one stroke, you also can save the planet from an extinction
class meteorite.
Not really... there are different types of asteroid... if it is what is called a rubble asteroid... rocks held together by the mass of all the other rocks in the pile and ideal strike that detonates in the centre of mass will just spread the rocks out... but they will all be moving on the same trajectory as before and will fall back into the same but now radioactive pile... if it is 2km across it wont matter what it is made of the mass alone will be enough for a planet wide extinction event... if the bits are still coming together again then you get a shotgun blast instead of a single hit... it will just spread the damage over a much greater area...
Ironically it would actually be most efficient to land a vehicle on the problem asteroid and get it to dig up material from the asteroid itself and then launch it at a carefully calculated direction and speed... and keep throwing more mass until the asteroid changes direction and falls into Jupiter or the Sun, or just moves into a safe orbit...
Later on such technology could be used for mining... have a vehicle dig through the surface and find minerals and material inside to see if it has any value... then launch it at a speed to land on the moon... with the right calculation you might even be able to launch an orbital spacecraft to intercept and catch it... it might take 5 years for it to arrive...
Regarding explosives it really depends on the shape and spin and composition of the target... a warhead embedded in one side a few hundred metres deep could vapourise and blow off enough material in one direction to change the trajectory of the rest of the asteroid so that it misses this time... but unless the change is radical or makes it fly into the sun or jupiter or some other object then it will just come around again... whether it is in 50 years or 50,000 years...
Think of it as being very like a bullet... the problem is that while a rifle bullet will stop a human coming at you... it wont stop a train... and it would definitely not stop a mountain falling on you... even really big bullets don't really change things when we are talking about really big objects.