[pfdietz]

> Laser weapons are being developed but they are basically just not there yet.

If lasers were available in WW2 I think they would have been used as blinding weapons against kamikazes. One could make the argument the rules of war against blinding don't apply to someone who is already going to kill themselves to attack you -- he's not planning on having usable eyes anyway.

[pixl97]

Of course if we were advanced enough to have laser weapons in WWII, we'd likely have laser guided bombs, hence laser guided planes which would have made any attacks against ships more deadly.

[YurgenJurgensen]

I'm not sure laser guidance works how you think it works. The laser is probably the least important part of laser guidance. It's basically being used as a highly collimated and monochromatic photon source. Radio-guided weapons were already being deployed by the end of WWII. The presence of lasers which probably could have been invented with 1940s tech had priorities been different, wouldn't really have drastically changed much. Semiconductors and microelectronics are what enabled practical laser-guided weapons, by reducing the size, fragility and cost of guidance packages.

[pixl97]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbTWzC86R4Y

The Device that Won WW2 - The Cavity Magnetron

Yea, the fact the US/Britain had RADAR while Germany/Japan did not, or did not in the same fashion the allied forces did dramatically shifted the favor towards the allies.