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DIY Laser Pistol Shoot 1MW Blasts

Posted by Soulskill on from the i'll-order-a-dozen dept.

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.

2 of 284 comments (clear)

  1. Thievery by Dan+East · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  2. Do not look at laser with remaining eye by Z8 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.