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DIY Laser Pistol Shoot 1MW Blasts
An anonymous reader writes "It doesn't get cooler than this — a German hacker put together a 1MW laser pistol capable of shooting straight through a razor blade with a single pulse. Quoting: 'Fitted with a Q-switched Nd:YAG laser, it fires off a 1 MW blast of infrared light once the capacitors have fully charged. The duration of the laser pulse is somewhere near 100ns, so he was unable to catch it on camera, but its effects are easily visible in whatever medium he has fired upon.'" Update: 03/17 18:22 GMT by T : Too bad; turns out it's "only" 1KW, rather than 1MW. I still want one.
Sweet. How long does it take to charge? IMMA FIRING MY LAZORS PEW PEW PEW
This guy builds what the Arctic Spyder tried to be.
1kW, not 1MW.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
How will I know how close the stormtrooper is to hitting me?
The future is now!
According to the comments on that site it is 1 KW
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
..SHARKS! with freeking laser beams....
... I'll have a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster with a side of Plutonium Nyborg
Now the next time I'm in Mos Eisley I can take care of that Guido problem.
As all right thinking people do, I have to love dangerous toys. The build quality and aesthetics are pretty sweet as well.
.22s or even compressed gas propelled sub-.22 rounds almost certainly pack more punch...
Unfortunately, as is so often the case with exotic energy weapons, I just can't shake the nagging feeling that
Now the next time I'm in Mos Eisley I can take care of that Guido problem.
I think Snookie would be more interested in a UV laser.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The Fire Dept is gonna love that!
I'd buy one....not sure what the hell I'd do with it but I'd buy it. Now if it was ACTUALLY a 1MW laser...I'd buy two.
"That's just a clumsy and random weapon of a less civilized age..."
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ybFw9nyTDwkJ:hackedgadgets.com/2011/03/07/diy-pulse-laser-gun/+http://hackedgadgets.com/2011/03/07/diy-pulse-laser-gun/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=ubuntu&source=www.google.com
The more I learn about Windows the more I am surprised it runs at all
It shoots through a fucking balloon.
the offer is attractive. we'll stay here with you. we really have a choice. we choose you. we were made for this. please choose us/life. the alternatives...., none.
A couple months ago I came a across a "game" at the mall, and I immediately thought "A person with a portable high powered laser could steal every bit of stuff out of this". Anyway the game is similar to those claw games, where you move the claw with a joystick to pick up an item. This game differs in that expensive items like DSi, PSP, iPod, are dangling from strings. The player moves an arm with an (obviously inept) pair of scissors on it, which tries to cut through the string to drop the item. It must take many cuts to gradually cut through the string, because I could see where strings had been slightly damaged by the cutters, but still needed a lot more to cut all the way through.
Anyway, a person with one of these lasers could clean house. The case is clear glass all the way around, so I assume the laser would shine right through it.
Sweet - of course Youtube to the rescue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxeAi0v2DrI
Better known as 318230.
Now we got lasers, but where are the shields ?
Read radical news here
... that is all
This is cool and all, but I would be scared to go anywhere near that. That's way over class 3 on the laser safety scale and minor reflections could do permanent damage to your eyes. I've played with ~0.5W lasers, and those are scary enough. Apparently this is 1kW! The class 3 limit for pulsed lasers in that frequency is 1/3000th as much apparently (30mW). Basic safety goggles only filter out so much light and you can still get blinded through them.
I would guess it's just a matter of time before whoever bought this accidentally hits something shiny and the "ricochet" blinds someone.
One megawatt is one million joules per second. The pulse ... 0.1 joule.
lasts 100 nsec, or 0.1 millionth of a second. If you multiply
the two, you get the total amount of energy for the pulse...
That's about the same amount of energy as lifting a 100 g
chocolate bar 10 cm vertically in the air....
If Star Wars taught us anything, the bad guys can't hit you with a laser.
Typos... that's just how I role.
It's not the site being Slashdotted. It's one its ad servers that block the site from being displayed until the ad comes through. Fuckers...
Please Mythbusters, test this on various meats so we can get some penetration numbers.
It's like Lasing a stick of dynamite!
It's not all that interesting what the power is, without knowing how long it's applied for. TFA says 100ns.
1kW * 100ns = 0.0001 joules
1MW * 100ns = 0.1 joules
Neither of which is very much energy. Next question: how small an area is that energy applied to? Pretty damned small, I'm assuming, if it's going to punch a hole in a razor blade with that little energy.
I mean, how can it look cool without being mounted on a shark's head?
If the laser is 1 MW, as the site claims, and the pulse length is 100 ns, then the pulse energy is about 0.1 J. That's not actually very much, even in a nice focused package. If it's 1 kW, as other commenters claim, then it's 1/1000th that. For comparison, consider the energy in a typical .22 rifle shell: 180-250 J, or about three orders of magnitude.
So while it'll definitely blind you with a shot to the eye, and would probably leave a nasty burn on your skin everywhere else, a blast from this laser pistol probably won't penetrate your body, and certainly won't kill you.
An interesting test, which I'm bummed that the builder didn't try, was to fire it at a hamburger, steak, or even a chicken bone. I don't think it would do much (see above), but it'd still be interesting to see what it does.
Pigeons don't stand a chance.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Perhaps either the original estimate is correct or the pulse duration is much longer, of the order of 100 microseconds.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I would suggest that the same 'punch' as a .22cal kinetic weapon is not necessary. Kinetic weapons rely on the premise of uncontrolled damage for effectiveness (i.e. trauma = stopping 'power'). Energy weapons rely on a potentially different premise: tactical damage -- cleanly disablement of a target's vital system (i.e. disable the brain, heart, nervous system). You see the same effect from other energy weapons, such as a tazer. All it would take for this weapon to disable an enemy human, for example, would be to steam a whole through the chest into the lungs/heart, or through the skull into the brain. Tissue is pretty soft. I can't imagine it would take much more than this example to do it...and think of this: If some backyard engineer created this...what do you think the gargantuan budget of the U.S. military has created?
Kinetic weapons aren't dead, and won't be for quite a while. Energy weapons are in their infancy, and likely already have a niche. It just isn't advertised yet.
They left it out of the article and video, but the greatest feature about this particular item is that each time you fire it, it makes one of four sound effects, until the fifth shot, when it cycles through all four in sequence. Sounds include "laser blast," "machine gun," "scanner ray," and "falling bomb." The inventor was quick to point out that his favorite is when it does all four. "I usually just shoot it in the air four times so that next time I pull the trigger, it'll play all the sounds."
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
Did anyone else watch the video and think that the "Plasma Ball" was actually dust igniting and being pushed along the path of the laser? Or am I the only one annoyed by that part of the video?
What sort of range do you imagine this things gets?
. . . to cool laser guns' power (it probably doesn't but don't spoil the moment), then we can hope for a 1MW laser gun by 2030. Now, about the power supply . . .
So, possibly the Lassiter?
http://firefly.wikia.com/wiki/Lassiter
Part of the reason stopping power is such a big deal is that it takes a lot of energy to punch through rib cages and skulls. Most people who die from handgun wounds do so from exsanguination, not disablement of vital organs, and most of these people are shot with cartridges an order of magnitude more powerful than .22 long rifle.
I suspect that any energy weapon that wants to match a handgun in terms of energy delivered in the same time domain will need to produce at least as much energy to do the damage necessary, or operate on principals similar to a Taser and act on the nervous system.
By any chance, was the guy's name "Lassiter"?
Can I get a phased plasma rifle in a forty watt range?
It seems like if you're not using visible light then you're going to be delivering a lot of your energy into water that lies near the surface of a human being. You're going to want to target eyes and stuff, which is tactically workable but a violation of some convention or other ;)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Something only slightly more powerful, built on cost overruns and huge R&D budgets lining the pockets of the Military Industrial Complex?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Just saying...
1kw, 1MW... meh... get back to me when the power rises to 1.21 gigawatts!!!
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
Even a modest sized hammer would be a quicker implementation of this scheme - to gain access to the prize items, that is.
FINALLY!! A viable excuse for hot babes to start wearing skin-tight silver jumpsuits. :D
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzle_energy
According to wiki the muzzle energy of a 10mm pistol is about the kind of punch this thing packs.
That's, of course, assuming you want to say that kinetic energy is the same as the energy of light. And that 100% of the laser's energy is put directly into whatever you're shooting.
In reality a laser gun would do much less damage to people because we're mostly water. Water is VERY good at absorbing infrared radiation, so you would get a bad burn but it wouldn't punch a hole through you.
If he made a gamma ray pistol....well...then I'd be scared.
But what if I'm wearing a Red Shirt? (I'll pause to count the number of exploding heads...)
Just curious, if this is an infrared laser then why is there a visible white light when it fires? Is that an effect of the laser heating the air?
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
right next to do not shoot at airplanes
Until this thing can put out 1.21 jiggawatts of electricity, it's of no use to me and my purposes.
It doesn't end well.
Well, my days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle. -Firefly
I have a bunch of feral razors that have been going through my garbage.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
A lot of people are pointing out that there isn't much energy in a single "shot" from this machine, which is true, and some of those people are then drawing analogies based on the same total energy applied over a long time, which is bogus. You can't draw a nice rectangular hyperbola of time and power and say every point on that hyperbola is equivalent with respect to outcome because the energy is the same. There are time related phenomena which limit the destructive effect of low power, long duration events.
Take the razor blade. The total energy used spread over the entire mass of stainless steel isn't going to change that razor blade one bit, but the speed of heat conduction in steel is finite. If you concentrate the same amount of energy in the same tiny area, there will be more localized heating if it's 0.1J delivered in 100ns as opposed to the same amount of energy delivered in 100 days. Furthermore, this localized heating could cause secondary reactions, such as the iron burning.
Imagine you take a matchstick and put it on a hot plate set to 100 F (38 C) for a week. The same amount of energy pumped into the matchstick in one second will have a much more impressive effect as the match flares and lights.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
what is the cycle time of this thing... it's basically useless if it takes as long to recharge as the old muzzle loading pistols took to reload...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Nope:
A bullets kinetic energy is going up against the crush and shear resistance of the targets tissue. Human tissue is pretty weak against this.
A lasers thermal energy is going up against the heat capacity of the targets tissue. Water to a slightly lesser degree water saturated tissue that humans have has a ridiculously high heat capacity.
The kinetic energy of an ak-47 bullet converted to pure thermal energy and applied with 100% efficiency would destroy much less than a cubic centimeter of human tissue.
Until energy weapons get several orders of magnitude more energy than bullets, they won't be useful as an anti personnel weapon.
apologies for the treachery of the letter 'd'
You mean for your inability to proofread 3 sentences.
What will happen now?
Idiots will want one.
At least a few idiots will get one.
At least one idiot will shoot someones eye out.
New legislation regulates lasers even more.
Serious 'garage inventors' will have problems to work with stuff like that.
This guy may be in trouble with that concoction, because blinding weapons are banned by international treaty on laws of war.
(Yet the chinese manufacture some, disguised in heavy machine gun format. Allegedly some of those were exported to african regimes and one ended up in the hands of somali pirates. they tried to use against on coalition patrol helicopter, which was immediately retaliated with lethal gunfire.)
See what happens when governments make it more difficult, or outright impossible, for citizens to obtain contemporary firearms? You drive people to start making guns that shoot deadly light! Oh my god, we are all doomed!!!!
I wonder if I could get this guy to make me one and attach it to my pet shark?
Hey, wait a minute...So, does this mean that Stallone and the movie "Demolition Man" had it right? Are we headed to "The Big One"?
Wake me up when someone makes a phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range.
You Engrish not very good.
Instantaneous Blindness is pretty sure to stop any human. The effects cost a lot more than death, too, making it a much better insurgent or non-conventional weapon than anything else...
What if the pulse is the diameter of a needle point, and rotates to describe a circle about the size of a pencil lead?
Probably not much better. With the rise of the 'high tech' consumer market since the 1960's, the gap between what's available at Wal-Mart or on the 'net from specialty suppliers and what the DoD has available to it has narrowed considerably. In many cases, it's *reversed* since the DoD has an interest in conserving robust working systems (like the side arms this would replace) while the consumer market is driven by the almost sexual urge to upgrade-upgrade-upgrade.
Imagine this toy in the hands of a geek at a beach with beautiful women wearing two piece swimsuits. The results will vary depending on the aim accuracy.
The energy necessary to vaporize a gram of tissue is still enormous.
A taser and a destructive laser are similar in that they are not guns, but it ends there.
Laser weapons for use against infantry are violations of the laws of war.
The US military has operational advanced laser weapons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_Laser
Laser weapons are advertised and marketed in international arms markets, you just don't see the ads in your sunday paper.
"Stopping power" has nothing to do with punching through bone. "Stopping power" refers to the ability of a cartridge to drop a target WITHOUT hitting the CNS or circulatory system (ie by causing trauma to muscle and organs).
Even a .22lr will easily punch through the skull or ribs, however it will cause a lot less tissue trauma then a more powerful cartridge (A ,22lr is pretty much like sticking a .22 metal rod through someone).
However actual testing has shown that shot placement not "stoppan' powa!" is the only thing correlated to actually dropping a target quickly. This is why special forces are quite happy to use "wimpy" 9mm weapons for CQB and focus their training on shot placement.
clearly it's 1.21 GW.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I'm just not that mad at razor blades.