I think that pansychism and determinism are interesting theories, but it is not clear to me what I will learn about them by reading ChatGPT potentially hallucinate about them?
The key missing information here seems to be how many of these satellites would be required to have constant coverage of likely trajectories. This depends on the distance at which the laser remains effective. There would be no atmospheric scattering, but beam collimation is never perfect. It also depends on how fast the satellite can fire a new shot, as any warhead will be surrounded by decoys and other penetration aids. If this requires a large number of satellites, I am very sceptical. While Starlink has shown the possibility of creating large constellations, these sats would surely be much larger and more expensive. Really, Starlink makes me think something like BRILLIANT PEBBLES (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles) would be a more reasonable alternative.
Also, could an adversary surround the warhead with absorbent chaff as a countermeasure? Or simply an ablative shield, the warhead needs one anyway to get through the atmosphere.
Still, a very interesting read from a very interesting CEO.
That was my experience, but I am glad that I tried again. Player of Games is much more explicit in the world building (almost too much), and then a good balance is found in Use of Weapons. So I always recommend reading those two first before circling back to really understand the value of Consider Phlebas as an outside view on the Culture (and really, The West).
This is because companies buy long term contracts, which are still priced higher than the spot price on the, IMO reasonable, assumption that gas prices will rise again next year as the war continues (and Russia has more options to escalate e.g. cutting TurkStream).