Green Security Clearance Laser Pistol Available

nazgul000 writes "You thought those green laser pointers sold by ThinkGeek and others were pretty cool, didn't you? Well, think again." It seems obligatory to point out that even laser pointers, and certainly anything more powerful than those, are capable of causing real damage.

Comments

Are these really stories?

[duckpoopy]

because they seem like advertisements...

Could this be used as a soldering tool?

[ravenspear]

i.e. is it strong enough to melt metal?

Coming Soon: Laser TV

[VernonNemitz]

Just need three lasers, red, blue (not yet widely available), and green, and means to switch their (big not needed!) output power to 256 levels very rapidly. Then a fairly simple arrangement of horizontal and vertical rotating mirrors can scan the flickering beams across, say, an ordinary home-movie projection screen, rather like we do with electron beams and electromagnets in a CRT. Somehow I think somebody somewhere has been working on this...but the lasers have so far been too expensive. But not much longer! Remember Blu-Ray? That diode laser is the last piece needed!

Re:Coming Soon: Laser TV

[takev]

I believe you can not easily change the power level, however you can do pulse width modulation. There are also now laser light modulators, that can change the frequency of a laser to an other color.

And yes, people are working on a projector build with a single laser and that gismo to modulate light. There have been expensive two laser versions helium and argon. The argon laser actually produces 4 colors, blue and green.

The green laser pointer from thinkgeek also uses a frequency divider to change the color of the second laser. The thinkgeek Laser is actual a red laser that pumps a ultraviolet laser of which the frequency is divided by two to get green.

Re:Now here's a real laser -

[bill_mcgonigle]

The trouble with /. is that when you post something funny there are half a million people who get it, but still twelve who don't, and they need to post about it.

Re:Crap like this...

[Ageless]

Nope, and neither can this laser.

I don't know if you've ever played with a laser pointer or not, but I can't even hold one still enough to keep a dot within a centimeter from one side of my living room to the other for a few seconds. That's about 11 feet. Now, I suppose that if you could get within 11 feet of the pilot you might be able to blind him if he didn't see you standing there with a laser but from that distance you could just throw a rock into the turbine and blow the engine up.

More likely, if you are in the pilot blinding business you are going to be a good few thousand feet away. Add in to that that it's going to be difficult to find a place where you can stand and get line of sight into the pilots eyes. I don't know about you, but when I look up at a plane I see the bottom, which is usually made of metal, not glass. I'll give that if you tried real hard you might be able to find a tall hill within a few thousand feet of the airport that would give you line of sight to the pilots eyes.

Now that you've got your hill, and your laser and a plane is taking off (or landing) facing directly at you you just need to aim it right at his eyes. I'm assuming here that you have mounted some huge scope to the laser so you can *find* the pilot's eyes from 1000+ feet. And probably a tripod. All that's left is to hold that beam right on his eye for several seconds while he's moving, the plane's moving and you are moving. Don't forget the beam is going to be spread out some at that distance, which means less power per square centimeter which means you have to hit him longer.

Is it possible? Just barely with great resources and planning. Is it likely? No. Once again, just buy a $150 rifle from Walmart and shoot holes in the fuel tanks.

Re:Warning!

[drinkypoo]

The best part is that this is apparently a requirement for making the device legal for licensing. Reminds me of how the US mandates that any soot in diesel exhaust here now has to be under a certain size, but the bigger particles are filtered out by lung cilia and the smaller ones aren't. Makes you wonder who makes this shit up.