DIY Laser Pistol Shoot 1MW Blasts 284
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 (Score:3, Funny)
Sweet. How long does it take to charge? IMMA FIRING MY LAZORS PEW PEW PEW
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
now the bigger question...
Did he add a sound modulator that makes the PEW sound every time he squeezes the trigger?
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Insightful)
He likely didn't need to ... I suspect the squeals of glee followed by maniacal laughter suffice for the time being.
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If it vaporizes enough iron to cut through a razor blade in 100ns, the expanding cloud of gas from the target should provide more than adequate sound effects.
Wrong power (Score:4, Informative)
1kW, not 1MW.
Wrong unit (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Enough is enough (Score:2)
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It is very cool - and that's why I'm not sure where the need to exaggerate is. The impressive part is the time he spent on the case. Many geeks have built equivalent lasers.
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The power is pretty meaningless provided the pulse is short enough, it's the energy delivered that matters.
You can get a low end estimate for the energy delivered by knowing the diameter and thickness of the hole.
From that you can work out the mass of steel that is vapourized.
The longer the pulse is the more time the heat has to dissipate until, eventually, the heat is conducted away so fast that you can't actually mark the steel at all.
I can't be bothered to look up the numbers but lets assume 400J/kgK SHC
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So the article says 1MW, the author's video shows 1MW, and the youtube page says "it fires an intense 1 MW blast of invisible infrared 1064nm light". And yet a single anonymous comment saying 1kW is more trustworthy.
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No, on the YouTube page the creator admits that it is probably between 10 and 100kW. He claims that he "could" make it 1MW, but that "no one cares":
We care, though, because while the cool part of this project is the package in the author's eyes, an awful lot of geeks' ears perk up when they hear "megawatt laser". The project is very cool, but not a breakthrough.
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The correction is in the comments, the original website states 1kW.
Also, common sense might help... 1MW wouldn't should through just the razor...
It doesn't seem to add up, though (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps either the original estimate is correct or the pulse duration is much longer, of the order of 100 microseconds.
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yeah, I read 1MW and I immediately thought a breakthrough had been discovered. But kn, 1kW. which I have built as well. Not nearly as nice looking as the one in the article,.
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Re:Wrong power (Score:4, Funny)
panda eats, shoulds, and leaves?
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Google is your friend:
100ns * 1MW
(100 nanosecondes) * 1 mégawatt = 0,1 joules
So, 1kW is barely 0.0001 joules..
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And, to be in the same neighborhood as a conventional pistol (at least in terms of energy delivered) with a 100 ns pulse you'd need around a 40-50 TW laser.
Take 9mm Parabellum. 115 grains at about 1100 ft/s is around 420 J. Delivering that over 100 ns gives about 42 TW so this "pistol" is out by 10 orders of magnitude.
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And, to be in the same neighborhood as a conventional pistol (at least in terms of energy delivered) with a 100 ns pulse you'd need around a 40-50 TW laser.
Take 9mm Parabellum. 115 grains at about 1100 ft/s is around 420 J. Delivering that over 100 ns gives about 42 TW so this "pistol" is out by 10 orders of magnitude.
That corresponds pretty well with making hair-thin holes through a razor-blade. I can believe 1MW
Re:Wrong power (Score:5, Insightful)
What the fuck is the matter with you guys??? He's got a cool, hand-held -laser gun- that shoots holes in stuff. Who gives a damn about "log10(4200), blah, blah, blah"
It's like a friend's just got laid by a Victoria's Secret model (this is for argument's sake, so shut up) and the discussion devolves into an argument about the velocity of the ejaculate.
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That's because he used 0.0001s = 100us in his post. The math was good; the units were bad.
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usually when they test things that are up in power they'll put a cinder block behind it. good videos on youtube showing CW lasers creating a nice orange glowing spot on the block after a few sec.
Re:Wrong power (Score:5, Funny)
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Ahh, that makes sense now. Nice movie reference btw. ;-)
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TFS says it's a 100ns pulse, giving a total energy output of 0.1J
Re:Wrong power (Score:4, Interesting)
Er, normally the power output is given as the power of the laser pulse, is it not? Rather than normalized to an equivalent laser that is on continuously. A 1 MW laser that is pulsed at 10 Hz with a 50% duty cycle would be outputting 1 MW during the pulses,and 0 otherwise, for a total of half the energy of a 1 MW continuous laser.
For example the laser in TFA, which is actually only 1 kW, pulses only once for 100ns. The actual power output of the pulse is 1 kW; it is not a 10 MW pulse that they average out over a second.
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The problem here is that people aren't trained in physics. Watts are a measure of power, not energy. If you multiply the Power x the amount of Time, the result is the amount of Energy.
Think of it like a firehose vs. garden hose: the firehose pumps gallons of water per minute, but the garden hose takes a lot longer to pump the same amount of water. The "power" is like the size of the hose: how much energy does it pump in one second? That's like Watts. How much water ended up in the bucket? That depends on bo
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Not according to posts (below), summarizing:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law [wikipedia.org]
The inverse-square law generally applies when some force, energy, or other conserved quantity is radiated outward radially from a point source.
A laser does not act like a point source... or it does, but it acts like a point source which is very, very far away.
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No. Re-focusing light creates a virtual image. Remember that from optics? It is the distance to that which the inverse square law follows, and that virtual image (in the case of a laser) is very, very far away. In a perfect laser, the distance to the virtual image would be infinite.
The inverse square law requires a point source. Suppose your laser has an aperture which is 1 mm in diameter. At 1000 m, the beam has expanded to a 2 mm diameter. By simple geometry you can infer that if a point-source of the lig
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Do you honestly believe that a handheld laser is shooting 1,000 kW? For reference, a hair drier or microwave is about 1kW. Now picture a thousand^Wbeowulf cluster of those.
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Do you honestly believe that a handheld laser is shooting 1,000 kW?
1E6 watts times 1E-7 second is 100 mJ. A tenth of a watt-second is not exactly Hiroshima.
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A tenth of a watt-second is not exactly Hiroshima. It is if you're in a colony of bacteria living quietly on a certain razor blade.
Somewhere a giant alien is holding a hand held laser near our galaxy saying "its only 100 mega kawabs, but it should punch a hole through this disk...."
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If it fires 1,000 kW in a millisecond blast, once a second, then it would have equivalent power to your 1kW hair drier.
In fact this one fires 100 ns blasts -- that's 100 billionths of a second.
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Besides a general sense of the state of the art? The "article" is a blog post that links to another blog post and YouTube. The owner of the YouTube video says:
So it sounds like I'm off by either 10 or 100 times, depending on whether the builder even knows!
Anyway, it's not terribly high-energy. He's putting out 0.1J maybe over 200ns?
Still very, very cool - I just wish the normal human urge to exaggerate wasn't being expressed.
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infrared? bogus. (Score:3)
How will I know how close the stormtrooper is to hitting me?
Re:infrared? bogus. (Score:5, Insightful)
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It was the Force. The universe wanted balance so it was protecting those that where trying to bring balance.
I expected better from someone on Slashdot.
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Wow, careful there, cowboy--them's some mighty big words and concepts you're wielding there! You do realize you're posting on Slashdot, right? Still, this reaffirms my belief that it's not all just Lemmings and brain stem functionality ruling /.
Re:infrared? bogus. (Score:5, Funny)
Stormtroopers are excellent marksmen - what you see depicted in those Rebel propaganda videos is a tactic called "herding". Funnily enough the makers of the propaganda videos never show what happens after the stormtroopers have herded the scruffy nerf-herder rebels into their trap...
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Re:infrared? bogus. (Score:4, Funny)
That's exactly what I always say!
In a universe ... ruled by narrative causality ... one man ...
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Manufacturers will be forced to add an additional slow visible pulse and an audible pew sound. Just like they have to add some engine noise because the Prius is too quiet.
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Look for the guys in red shirts. /gets instantly pummeled by scifi nerds.
1MW or 1 KW (Score:2)
According to the comments on that site it is 1 KW
Is it waterproof? (Score:2)
Awesome! (Score:3)
Unfortunately, as is so often the case with exotic energy weapons, I just can't shake the nagging feeling that
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It might side-step local gun laws. Aren't lasers almost completely unregulated? If this was mass produced it could replace mace. I'd be a little concerned about blinding people. I'm not sure if IR blindness does anything to humans though.
Shame he didn't get a pork shank to show us the effect it would have on flesh.
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Informative)
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Visible light would not be safer here, since the pulse is just 100 ns long and thus much faster than any reflex of the eye.
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Yeah, but this was made by some guy in his basement or something. Fairly impressive, actually.
And, I gotta say, you're right ... for a DIY ray gun, the aesthetics of this are remarkably cool. And, really, what's to say someone with more resources won't scale this up to something with a bigger power supply? Th
Re:Awesome! and effective (Score:3)
Re:Awesome! and effective (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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It seems like if you're not using visible light then you're going to be delivering a lot of your energy into water that lies near the surface of a human being. You're going to want to target eyes and stuff, which is tactically workable but a violation of some convention or other ;)
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Something only slightly more powerful, built on cost overruns and huge R&D budgets lining the pockets of the Military Industrial Complex?
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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.
Un
He even managed to make it look cool (Score:2)
Thievery (Score:5, 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 [youtube.com]
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One of these [wickedlasers.com] should do the trick.
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I think if someone's pointing a gun sight at you, you have worse problems than a kW laser beam.
SHIELDS !!! (Score:2)
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Here are some [precisionphotonics.com]
Do not look at laser with remaining eye (Score:5, 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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
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Yeah, the German Police will probably get to him soon enough...
I wonder though, what effects would this gun have on human skin? He should try it on some leg of ham or equivalent...
Total energy (Score:2)
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....
Re:Total energy (Score:5, Insightful)
That's about the same amount of energy as lifting a 100 g
chocolate bar 10 cm vertically in the air....
... focussed on a tiny point -- it doesn't say how tiny.
Imagine attaching a needle to that 100g chocolate bar, then dropping it point-first at your hand, from a 10cm height.
No shark? (Score:2)
Energy Comparison (Score:2)
So while it'll definitely blind you with a shot to the eye, and would probably leave a nasty burn on your skin everywhere else, a blast from this laser
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indeed *yawn*, homemade handheld xenon flash tube pulsed lasers with much more power output were made decades ago, and energy is only a meaningful metric for continuous beam lasers.
An continuous beam argon laser of a few watts is something to point at a steak, but this toy wouldn't do much.
You mean wattage is only a meaningful metric for continuous beam lasers.
For pulsed lasers like the one in TFA, it's much more important to know the energy (in this case ~0.1J), and then to know the pulse duration or wattage. But judging by the comments in TFA, few people understand this distinction.
The headline "DIY Laser Pistol Shoots 1MW Blasts" is like saying "Rhode Island is Teh Safest State!!1!" because it has the smallest gross number of car crashes. The per-capita figure is far more informative i
Best Feature: (Score:2)
They left it out of the article and video, but the greatest feature about this particular item is that each time you fire it, it makes one of four sound effects, until the fifth shot, when it cycles through all four in sequence. Sounds include "laser blast," "machine gun," "scanner ray," and "falling bomb." The inventor was quick to point out that his favorite is when it does all four. "I usually just shoot it in the air four times so that next time I pull the trigger, it'll play all the sounds."
Plasma Ball? (Score:3)
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You're the only one.
dnrtfa (Score:2)
If Moore's Law Applies . . . (Score:2)
Yeah, but... (Score:3, Funny)
HAN PUNCHED FIRST! (Score:2, Funny)
Now the next time I'm in Mos Eisley I can take care of that Guido problem.
I think Snookie would be more interested in a UV laser.
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You are correct, we should kill Snookie.
Re:HAN PUNCHED FIRST! (Score:5, Funny)
Not sure which is more sad ... the fact that you know that, or that you think we care. ;-)
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It's Greedo no Guido - he's Rodian not Italian.
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The future is now!
Then where's my flying car damn-it.
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Re:Talk about cool (Score:4, Insightful)
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 :)
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Obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com]
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The future is now!
I mean the future is now, Now!
Missed it again, so it's now Now.
Damn it .. will you all stop moving Now, so I can know that the future is here.
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There's got to be a Kari Byron joke in there somewhere.
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I'll be in my bunk.
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I think Westerns already demonstrated the inverse correlation between "bad guy" and "marksmanship".
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If Star Wars taught you anything, it wasn't the difference between a LASER and a blaster.
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For distance, this laser requires a lens to focus. If you miss, someone might go blind but will most likely not burst into flames.