Finally, another problem was aiming the lasing rods before firing. For maximum performance, the laser rods needed to be long and skinny, but this would make them less robust mechanically. Moving them to point at their targets would cause them to bend, and some time would be required to allow this deformation to disappear. Complicating the issue was that the rods needed to be as skinny as possible to focus the output, a concept known as "geometric broadening", but doing so caused the diffraction limit to decrease, offsetting this improvement. Whether it was possible to meet the performance requirements within these competing limitations was never demonstrated.