Let's say that that lasers turn out to be extremely effective,

>>34648936
Reliable point defence is the death of supersonic long range missiles.

Now shit has to evade detection long enough to get close enough to make saturation possible.

Alternately it has to be dumb and hard like the terminal aspect of a rail gun projectile.

Aircraft will need to avoid detection as well.

>>34648936
AUVs would be the obvious response, but don't rule out novel solutions. Autonomous air systems could achieve saturation in concert with AUVs.
Another thing is there is a lot of fixation on its use against air targets when it could literally blind the shit out of the "speedboat suicide swarm" bogeyman.

>>34648936
It would be the return of the battleship essentially only at much much longer ranges. Railgun equipped battleships hurling hypersonic slugs at each other at ranges of over 100 miles. Sounds pretty awful and glorious at the same time.

>>34648936
Pirates will approach ships with big mirrors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKTpWi5itOM

>>34649133
Except the Chinese struggle with material QA (can't even make a decent ball-point pen), which railguns depend very heavily on. Their entire doctrine of excluding the USN with shore and sea-based anti-ship missiles is now BTFO and they have no plan B. Expect a return the days of equal treaties and half of china hooked on crack.

>>34649371
*unequal

R A I L G U N S
A
I
L
G
U
N
S

>>34648936
The end of anti-ship missiles and a return to kinetic weapons. Missiles are surprisingly fragile due to weight and stress constraints, so when a laser burns a hole in it, it generally breaks apart under its own forces. Sort of like when you're standing on top of a soda can and suddenly there's a hole punched in the side and the whole thing collapses.

Kinetic weapons aka "Chunk of dense metal that moves fast" might be from a railgun or a multi-stage hypersonic cruise missile that gets the payload to an extreme altitude and the rod of pain then uses a gravity assist to complete the terminal phase with minimal guidance.

Or we might just see saturation attacks become even more of a thing, or a rise of a missile armor arms race. The former is more likely, as missile armor reduces weapon effectiveness on every shot (every missile has to carry the extra armor), while a saturation attack retains full effectiveness even on undefended targets.

>>34649126
Using directed energy weapons against humans treads murky legal ground with Geneva. IIRC, SK had some crazy-ass spotting laser they had to stop using because they found out it was blinding Nork eyes and ran afoul of the "No weapons designed to maim" and it set a messy precedent for future laser weapons. So it's just easier to design something to be used against unmanned air targets that just happens to be pretty fucking awesome at killing manned surface targets too, but that usage is up to the people operating the system.

Kind of like how Willy Pete shells are officially smoke rounds used for obscuring sight lines and napalm is for area denial and defoleation, they just happen to have some militarily side effects.