Slashdot Mirror
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
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?
..SHARKS! with freeking laser beams....
... I'll have a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster with a side of Plutonium Nyborg
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
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.
It's Greedo no Guido - he's Rodian not Italian.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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?
Not sure which is more sad ... the fact that you know that, or that you think we care. ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Can I get a phased plasma rifle in a forty watt range?
30797 fatal crashes occurred in the United States in 2009. Do you really want to add the risk of falling out of the sky to that?
Yes. More so if I can shoot them out of the sky with my laser pistol :)
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
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.