Science fiction media is filled with representations of laser weapons hitting living targets. But since we don’t actually know what an event like that would look like, the effects folks have to imagine the results. And they are all over the place. Sometimes the laser cuts the the victim like a hot knife through butter. Sometimes it just leaves a scorched entry wound. Sometimes the entry wound explodes. Sometimes the entire victim explodes. Sometimes the victim is vaporized.

Part of the reason why we don’t know what a laser-weapon-strike would look like is because we simply don’t have meaningful laser weapons. Things like the “blasters” from Star Wars or the “phasers” from Star Trek are *probably* in the hundreds of megawatts to gigawatt range in power output; and while such lasers exist, they are the size of buildings and have firing times measurable in nanoseconds, often enough. And besides, even if someone could set up a series of experiments where some government-funded gigawatt laser was used to blast targets just to see what would happen, somebody would get all snotty if living targets were used. Shocking, I know, but even though our prisons are full of rapists and murderers and jihadis and televangelists and Illinois politicians and the like, Hollywood for some reason can’t park ’em in front of a laser cannon and flip the switch to “on.”

Bah.

So, the best we can do, for the moment, is subscale experimentation. It’s not perfect by any stretch; no matter how powerful your laser, if the pulse is really, really short, the actual depth of penetration into a target is going to be extremely limited. The first outer layer gets blasted off and turned to gas; if enough power is dumped into that gas it’ll turn incandescent, and will absorb all further incoming laser radiation. A laser cutting right through a human body almost instantly is almost certainly Not Gonna Happen. Even if the laser could somehow punch straight through, all that flesh and blood would be instantly converted to gas. So if you had a hole five millimeters wide by, say, eight inches long suddenly poked through your torso, the flesh and blood that *used* to be there will *explode.* You’d be blown apart, an effect that Hollywood can certainly reproduce, but that might jack up the MPAA rating.

So here we have some extremely high-speed, good quality video showing numerous laser strikes on droplets of black ink. The droplets are *vastly* smaller than your average human victim of a dastardly alien space pirate attack, but there might be something to learn here for those looking to film just such a scene. Or, it can just be some really cool video of lasers blowing up ink droplets. Don’t need to overthink everything, I suppose.