comment: >
  
  Oh man… Now I want professional laser tag…
context: They have an office in Finland. >
  
  They just throw prisoners at the front lines and use them to probe Ukrainian defenses for strikes by Wagner's elite. >
  
  Wagner's "elite" have already been KIA >
  
  Wagner’s “new” elite.  Aka prisoners. >
  
  I wonder how similar that is to a radar detector you buy for a car, they also detect lasers. >
  
  Not sure how effective this is in the field.
  It is essentially an infra-red light detector. The IR beam coming from the laser targeting/aiming devices needs to hit the sensor arrays/windows. These are small and typically moving. >
  
  That's why laser detectors are useless on cars, and why cops use laser speed guns nowadays. All it does, at best, is tell you when you've already been dinged.
  Maybe they're a little more useful in a war zone, because being targeted doesn't mean you've been fired on yet. >
  
  You can jam the lasers, IR tools exist. Check out wired magazines new cannon ball run article from this week. >
  
  But not legal in every state >
  
  The notable thing is that while Part 15 of the FCC rules ban radar jamming(sales, manufacture, possession, or use), there's no such federal regulation for lasers. Laser regulation is mostly limited to "pointer" devices and is the regulatory domain of the FDA.
  So there's no legal market for radio jammers but there's a broad one for laser jammers even if there's local regulations.
  This will probably change with automated vehicles relying heavily on LIDAR... I'm not sure they can survive an adversarial environment. They need cooperation. >
  
  LIDAR systems (e.g. autonomous driving) are designed to operate in traffic environment with multiple LiDAR equipped vehicles. 
  LiDAR systems are typically based on the time-of-flight measurement of the emitted (laser) and back-reflected photons from the object. One will get spurious disturbances but these can be filtered out with data processing.
  Jamming a LiDAR is challenging because the jamming laser beam (photon flow) needs to continue hitting a relatively small sensor area with filtering optics optimized to detect the photons emitted from the LiDAR system itself.
  It is possible to jam / blind image sensor based systems. >
  
  Is this reply GPTed or something? It lacks human nuance/point.
  
  Jamming a LiDAR is challenging because the jamming laser beam (photon flow) needs to continue hitting a relatively small sensor area with filtering optics optimized to detect the photons emitted from the LiDAR system itself.
  
  You only need an emitter of the same wavelength, which can be acquired from mouser or hacked out of an actual LIDAR sourced from robotshop/hokuyo. The sensor's lack of dynamic range combined with time-of-flight logic makes it difficult to operate in an adversarial environment. You can white out the sensor itself, or pollute the environment with that wavelength so it can't see it's own pulses. Either works. >
  
  Which is easily countered by rolling frequencies, no? >
  
  LIDARs inherently have narrow optical frequency ranges due to their use of solid state laser diodes, and an optical notch filter in front of the sensor. >
  
  
  Video has emerged on social media depicting captured Wanger’s novel laser detection device, called the Spider. It is a laser early warning detection system to provide advance warning of attacks.
  The Spyder is a lightweight warning system used as a passive military defense. It detects, analyzes, and locates directions of laser emissions from laser guidance systems and laser rangefinders.
  
  Seeing as Wanger group just suffered immense casualties, it doesn’t seem as if this advanced warning system worked very well. >
  
  
  it doesn’t seem as if this advanced warning system worked very well.
  
  The device is probably fine.  It probably doesn't perform as well in the hands of dumbasses like Wagner. >
  
  Fascists never are that bright so you may be right. >
  
  In Wagner's case, they don't even have the motivation to be competent. They just throw prisoners at the front lines and use them to probe Ukrainian defenses for strikes by Wagner's elite. If the prisoners live? Great! They can be used in future attacks. If they die? Oh well, there's more prisoners where they came from.
  Fortunately, Wagner's tactical genius isn't leading to efficient gains on the battlefield, so all their work could be undone if Ukraine gets the tools to fight as a modern combined arms force. >
  
  I am not sure if Wagner “elite” is much better. So far all they “success stories” come from them killing unarmed man in Africa. There were no single “success” in Russian Ukraine war which could be attributed to Wagner.
  Considering the fact that the founder of the Wagner is convicted criminal (he spend time in jail for robbing and killing single women  ) I would imagine that most of Wagner were criminals even before they start “recruiting” in jails officially. >
  
  Some of them do have some experience from previous engagements, and they gain some on the front currently, but they also send in untrained russian conscripts as first wave to sacrifice in order to find ukranian positions, so compared to the 3-step 1 week training of most russian forces they certainly are elite... >
  
  Is it laser tag equipment? >
  
  Its a “pro” version