[yellowapple]

You don't necessarily need the round to survive. If it's reflecting 99.9% of a destructive laser beam, then that poses a risk of that beam bouncing back at the ship and causing damage. It might be a minuscule risk in isolation, but dozens or hundreds of rounds with retroreflectors designed specifically to bounce lasers back whence they came could wreak havoc on all sorts of fragile sensors (including the squishy ones in sailors' eye sockets).

[coredog64]

That would make this an illegal weapon system according to the Geneva Convention. Weapons that are intended to injure rather than kill are prohibited.

[slededit]

That’s not the right reading of the convention. The rule is against unnecessary suffering and even excessive lethality. For example hollow point rounds are more effective at killing but solid rounds have the same disabling effect and give the recipient a chance of survival. Hollow point bullets are banned by the convention.

Its also illegal to use excessive calibre bullets against human targets. Even though such large projectiles are much more likely to kill.

The exact phrasing is:

“It is prohibited to employ weapons, projectiles and material and methods of warfare of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering.”

https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul...

[yellowapple]

A sizable subset of America's past, present, and future adversaries in war have never ratified any portion the Geneva Convention.

[angry_octet]

Yes, all the sailors on deck managing the sails, climbing the mast and so on. Wait, is this the 19th century still?

[yellowapple]

"Sailor" is still commonly used (even in official contexts) to describe personnel on modern naval vessels.

[angry_octet]

Sailors aren't on deck during a battle any more, so are unlikely to be suffering laser reflections (!) from tiny projectiles thousands of yards away.

[yellowapple]

Most warships (of the non-submersible variety) have windows, last I checked. In fairness, though, that does make it easier to mitigate that issue.