LogFAQs > #952776984

Ah, so let's just go through the basic types of combat lasers: pulse lasers, IR lasers, and continues beam lasers.

At the moment, we don't have pulse lasers in actual combat. In theory, pulse lasers can go into the GW of energy range. That amount of energy is enough to vaporize metal and cause all sorts of issues. The issue is that, at the end of the day, it's still just light, so a sufficiently reflective material can just... bounce the laser off.

IR lasers are what are used for targeting a lot of the time. Basically, you have a laser shooting out light at a frequency too low for humans to see, but plenty bright for machines to see. So you lase a target, hold it steady on them, and then drop a missile targeted on that lase point. It's illegal (or a warcrime, I'm not smart enough to figure that out) to have a machine do that lasing, so it's done all through human hands. In the future maybe that changes, but that's what it is right now, and what people use right now.

Modern continues beam lasers basically just fuck up cameras. There's some sort of AI that hones in on the sensing module, blast it with lasers, so it fucks up the honing part of a honing missile. The term the navy uses is "dazzle", and that's what you see in the navy ships (I was looking it up because I like lasers). These don't need to be super powerful, it just needs to be accurate.
It's also illegal (or a war crime) to use lasers to blind someone. That's way easier to do than you think, I've got a 1.2W handheld laser that I mess around with, and that can easily blind someone. If you had an AI that just blinded all of the enemies, it would do way more damage than you would ever imagine.

EDIT:
Oh right, the units can be either watts, or lumens for a laser. Either's fine, people use watts for the technical side, but there's no reason to not use lumens.