WANT.
http://www.amazing1.com/burning-lasers.htm
Laser Gun – A prelude to a weapon of the future – the technology is here! Now Available – hand held, battery operated, 500 joules of pulse energy produce an intense burst of light capable of burning holes in most materials.
Input Voltage: 12VDC @ 1.5AMPS, 20-30sec. Charge Time Rod: 3 x 1/4″ Nd:GLASS With Integral Mirrors Output: 1-3 Joules @ 1.06 Microns Infra Red Storage Capacity: 270 Micro farads @ 2 KV Flash lamp Energy @ 1000 Volts: 135 Joules, @1500 Volts: 300 Joules Single Collimnating Lens 120 to 150 Shots From Internal AA Batteries Certified Class 4 Laser Product
Yay!!!! Handheld laser weapons that can do actual physical damage, and that you can buy! Yay, capitalism!
LAGUNSYS – Lab Assembled with Flashlamp, without Laser Rod (NDGL) ………………………………………$1949.95
NDGL – 3″ x 1/4″ Laser Rod Nd:Glass 6% doped with mirrored ends, full spec and brand new >1J …..$595.00
BOOOO!!!!! Damned capitalists!
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Seriously, the product is pretty neat, but still pretty far from a full-up phaser. It takes 20 to 30 seconds to charge up between shots, and each shot might hurt a person, but would hardly likely be fatal. Plus, the ergonomics suck:
It appears to have both fore and aft “pistol grips” that look like straight tubes. If someone goes to the bother of building one of these, I’d hope they’d go the extra step of ditching the “lab equipment” look and put it in a fiberglass phaser rifle housing or some such. And replace the battery pack in the weapon itself with a backpack full of batteries… or, better yet, something like a methanol fuel cell. Tens of thousands of shots, and if the power source is jacked up, a much faster charge time. Additional cooling systems would also likely to be required.
If an individual shot is powerful enough to take out a bird or small critter… holy crap. Varmint hunting has just gone to a whole new level. No windage, no gravity drop, no muzzle flash, and probably pretty quiet operation. Instead of getting one shot and then watching all the ducks fly off except the one you shot… now you get to plink away for minutes on end, with the ducks simply flopping over dead with a small smoking hole in their noggins.
Expect this to be banned momentarily.
7 Responses to “Sci-Fi Science You Can Buy: Rayguns!!!”
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300 bucks gets one of these, non-lethal but remarkably capable of seriously damaging eyeballs just the same.
I love living in the future.
Jim
I’m interested. I could use it in my neighborhood. There’s a raccoon and a groundhog that are devastating my garden. And, of course, there are the college students who cause so much late-night noise …
Yeah, that one-watt LED one is the cool one, but that’s a no-no under present US law.
What do you know about the old (Delta Press?) publication “Poor Man’s Ray gun?” This used a magnetron (maser) supposedly. I might imagine it as an assasination weapon in that there would be no surface burns to give it away, just arcing of a microphone perhaps on a lapel, so the beam would have to be aimed up just a bit. Combine this with an audio spotlight, and a target might think he was suffering audio hallucinations, hot flashes, but out of wanting a sense of composure on camera, would remain in the beam.
The weapon could be housed inside a camera, so no gun-powder sniffing dogs would be alerted. What would really be nice if this were installed by a phony alter say, so that some terrorist would imagine the supernatural is in effect. Standing waves of infrasound may also cause hallucinations (though no “brown note”) Add corona discharge for st. Elmo’s fire, magrails to have metal objects hurled about, and an externa Persinger style God-Helmet, and you could really freak some folks out.
What’s the beam attenuation like? (I’m thinking of Rule Four here.)
@Jeff Wright:
The ADS the Army is putting into practice is a long-range microwave. They use it for crowd control, because it hurts SO BADLY that no one has been able to stand in its path for more than a few seconds. Their version is a non-lethal (for the expected application time!) weapon that only penetrates a few millimeters. It doesn’t even burn you unless you are physically prevented from getting out of the way. Then I imagine it would start boiling your skin.
In short: Microwaves boil organic matter that contains water. Being boiled hurts too much to stand still – so if this maser (Microwave laser, basically) were to work, it would have to be extremely powerful and complete its work in under a second or two. I don’t know if it could be made that powerful – the Army’s version is like an old-timey squared-off satellite dish mounted on a HMVV.
In addition, the target would explode. That’s what microwaves do to living things placed inside. Same waves, same effect.
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