• AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Yeah that’s cool, but it’s so impractical. It requires other tanks for support, and to do any actual damage to enemy tanks. It would almost certainly be more effective to just shoot an enemy tank with an armor piercing shell than to try to disable its optics. The laser tank can be almost immediately rendered useless by a single foot soldier with a rifle who shoots out the lenses. If it were capable of disabling multiple enemy tank optics before being disabled itself, and those lack of optics turned the tide of the battle, then it would be a valuable addition to an army, but I have a hard time believing it would ever actually play out that way. It would get insta-targeted by everyone on the field, and promptly removed from the battle.

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I mean, if you shine much smaller high-powered lasers at your phone’s camera, it’ll be permanently damaged. It doesnt take too much energy to damage electrical optics.

      I dont know if this was ever really effective considering the doctrines of the time, but I guess it could be useful for coastal defence, disabling optics and sensors that would defend against incoming missiles or send out fire onto a coastline.

    • MeanEYE@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      You can bet your ass it didn’t work. It’s typical of Soviet anything. They come up with some retarded idea, then order it to be made, engineers realize someone is taking heavy drugs, they make a mockup and cover it up. So world never knows it never worked. With Soviets it was always if you didn’t see it on parade, it didn’t exist.