http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/S3_Krypton_Series-113-63.html
Green laser, one watt. A mere $1000.
[youtube 5Tx02Up-ovw]
This thing would probably be *more* dangerous than a firearm, for the simple fact that people would likely be more willing to mess around with it like idiots. And the slightest reflection – off plastic, glass, metal, probably fricken’ *paper* – would likely be enough to dazzle someone, if not outright blind them.
Still, a one watt hand-held laser seems like it might be of some practical value. The claim is that it’s bright enough to dazzle the sensors of satellites in low Earth orbit; if this is in fact the case, you can expect that these lasers will sell like hotcakes to every government on the planet, and downward-looking satellites will start going “funny” in large numbers quite soon. Huzzah! There’s you market for new cheaper launch vehicles! Gang a dozen of these together on a finely-trainable turret with a really good telescopic sight, and mount to the payload compartment of your friendly neighborhood Xcor Lynx rocketplane, and you have an instant anti-spysat system. I wonder what these would do to solar panels…
A regular green laser is bright enough that as a sight on a gun, it is itself a dandy weapon. Play it over the face of a home invader, say, and the home invader is going to lose all interest in doing anything but getting out of the house. But with *this* thing, play it over the face of the badguy, and he’ll likely be not only permanently blinded, but maybe even *scarred* by the experience. Of course, once criminals figure that out expect to see these lasers used to do just that sort of thing. Terrorists and jackasses will have all kinds of fun with these and airplanes/cars…
Youtube has a number of videos showing people starting fires and popping balloons with green lasers less powerful than this. You might be able to hunt small varmints with this laser.
9 Responses to “WANT.”
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Y’know, you might want to tag this as dumbassery as well. The thought of any boob with a grand waltzing around with a 1 watt laser is scary as hell. A lot more dangerous than most people with a gun.
If cities thought they had problems with kids and laser pointers dicking around with cars, busses & cops, wait for this baby to get out there.
Plain irresponsible. I hope they get the crap sued out of them, “legal” or not.
> I hope they get the crap sued out of them, “legal” or not.
They should only get sued if the product is defective. Otherwise… suing a company because someone misused their product would lead to the extermination of the alcohol, tobacco, firearm, explosive, fertilizer, drain cleaner, automotive, hammer, boxcutter, aircraft and dog-breeding industries.
They’ve been successful in suing the tobacco industry, it’s only a matter of time before the other industries you mention get hit, too.
Suing Big Tobacco was successful because, at least theoretically, tobacco is dangerous *when* *used* *as* *directed,* while Big Tobacco said that it wasn’t. Nobody denies that putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger is dangerous, and gun manufacturers *probably* discourage doing such a thing. Similarly, laser manufacturers tell you not to point it at people and things and stuff, and to wear the shades. To be directly comparable to tobacco, the laser manufacturers would have to be telling people to shine it in their eyes and that there is not real health risk associated with doing that.
http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Spyder_III_Pro_Arctic_Series-96-37.html
Full watt for a much more reasonable price.
“Plain irresponsible. I hope they get the crap sued out of them, “legal” or not.”
Stop being such a pantywaist. Lots of things are dangerous in the wrong hands. Maybe we should all hope for auto makers to “get the crap sued out of them, “legal” or not”?
> Full watt for a much more reasonable price.
Different color, though. Blue instead of green. I’m led to understand that green is more visible to the human eye than either red or blue at the same wattage.
I’m not going to say anything about one of these things, although a friend of mine had someone show up with one a few months back, and I was about ready to kill him for not inviting me over so I could also play with it, like they did.
So much for his chance of seeing my plans of how to take around ten of them and firing all the beams in the same direction at the same time.
Actually, when you think about it, it’s not that difficult to figure out how to combine all ten beams and shoot them out as a single 10 watt beam; there are many ways to do that, and some would actually let you send out one far more tightly collimated beam that would have far less spread at distance.
One can find 1 watt bare modules on ebay for much less than $300. (Yeah, the combination idea occurred to me too. 🙂 )