Quote:
Originally Posted by cosmicfish
ALON won't work. Optical extinction is down around 0.075/cm in the 1-2 um range (the best IR or visible case for this material), which means that for a 2" thickness you would be dumping about 30% of the laser energy into the material. That would be catastrophic for any kind of laser weapon even though you could see through it.
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Yeah, I didn't think that through far enough. Even with the higher melting point, the thermal conductance is too low to allow the heat from attenuating the beam to be siphoned away.