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Geek Creates DIY Pulse Laser Pistol

Real Korimyr #9

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The gun is called the DIY Pulse Laser Gun and was built by Patrick Priebe. The builder says that the gun has a small pulse laser head with a kW-pulse of infrared coherent light. A single shot can punch through a razor blade, plastic, and 5mm thick Styrofoam when focused.

The range of the gun is 3M for dark surfaces and the shot will make a stinging flame and leave a 5mm stain behind. I bet it would burn your skin pretty well too. I don’t even want to think about what it would do to your eye. The gun is about 320mm long and weighs two pounds.

Geek creates DIY pulse laser pistol that can burn plastic and melt foam

It's not enough to burn a man down where he stands or even to hole him, but it is a start.
 
imagine in 10yrs from now, ammo as we now know it may be obsolete.
 
All you need to beat that is a heat-proof mirror. But it's still pretty cool.
 
wow, a whole ten feet of range! THIS WILL REVOLUTIONIZE WARFARE!

Lasers, unfortunately, are several generational leaps away from being usable as a portable weapon. They'll always be less efficient than a bullet. People are made of mostly water and don't burn very well, and localized burns don't kill very quickly anyway. The amount of power required to kill someone as fast as a bullet would is staggering.
 
wow, a whole ten feet of range! THIS WILL REVOLUTIONIZE WARFARE!

Lasers, unfortunately, are several generational leaps away from being usable as a portable weapon. They'll always be less efficient than a bullet. People are made of mostly water and don't burn very well, and localized burns don't kill very quickly anyway. The amount of power required to kill someone as fast as a bullet would is staggering.

Bet something workable and feasible comes out within the next 50-60 years.
 
Bet something workable and feasible comes out within the next 50-60 years.

The only thing holding us back is power requirements. If we could get away from the battery and go to a hydrogen fuel cell for example, it would be easy to implement.
 
The only thing holding us back is power requirements. If we could get away from the battery and go to a hydrogen fuel cell for example, it would be easy to implement.

Actually that's not true, hydrogen fuel cell even if small enough wouldn't give you more power than a battery.
 
Look how far guns have come since they were invented. I guarantee you we'll be using laser guns at some point.

Just don't fire the laser gun in a dusty or misty environment or everyone in eyesight will go blind!
 
Actually that's not true, hydrogen fuel cell even if small enough wouldn't give you more power than a battery.

what? what do you mean?

a batteries power is restricted by it's size, while a hydrogen fuel sell is not. Especially when it's fuel that can be ultra compressed into plasma. There are so many more possibilities for hydrogen powered cells and weapons.In a plasma state Hydrogen can be manipulated with magnets giving millions of more possibilities.
 
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Saw a segment on a show where someone had a homemade rail gun. That thing was serious. You could tell that its creator was a little scared of it. Would be heavy and cumbersome as man portable, with a limited number of shots available. But big kinetic energy.

We'll probably see something like that as a real weapon first. Because it avoids all the drawbacks of coherent light weapons mentioned above.

Still awesome though!( the laser)
 
what? what do you mean?

a batteries power is restricted by it's size, while a hydrogen fuel sell is not. Especially when it's fuel that can be ultra compressed into plasma. There are so many more possibilities for hydrogen powered cells and weapons.In a plasma state Hydrogen can be manipulated with magnets giving millions of more possibilities.

Carrying around an object containing 10 million PSI of hydrogen.

This is a fantastic plan!
 
Actually that's not true, hydrogen fuel cell even if small enough wouldn't give you more power than a battery.

I guess you can see into the future? :roll:

Hydrogen and hydrogen type fuel cells are in the future, no way to tell yet.
 
Carrying around an object containing 10 million PSI of hydrogen.

This is a fantastic plan!

That is not what he said or implied.
 
what? what do you mean?

a batteries power is restricted by it's size, while a hydrogen fuel sell is not. Especially when it's fuel that can be ultra compressed into plasma. There are so many more possibilities for hydrogen powered cells and weapons.In a plasma state Hydrogen can be manipulated with magnets giving millions of more possibilities.

You're wrong about a few important things here.

While you are somewhat correct in that the amount of energy a fuel cell can produce is not dependent on size, the rate at which it can produce energy (i.e. the amount of power it can produce) is dependent on size. For an energy weapon, the power that an energy source can generate is just as important, if not more so, than the amount of energy it can generate. Let's say it takes 1000 joules of energy to fire one laser shot. If your energy source only produces 1 watt of power, then it will take 1000 seconds for it to charge up for the next shot.

Now, a hydrogen fuel cell (or more specifically a PEM fuel cell) is a fairly thin plate that is maybe an inch or two on each side. Here's a picture of one.

single.jpg


The actual fuel cell part is the dark grey plate in between the red and black end plates. That fuel cell can produce 1 watt of power. That's all it can produce. You can't make it produce more by flowing more hydrogen through, that's all you get. Now one watt of power ain't much. So to make more power, you wire up several fuel cells either in series or parallel (or most likely a combination of the two to up both the voltage and amperage). Here's a picture of that.

10watt.jpg


That's basically just 10 fuel cells stacked up together, and it produces 10 watts. See what I'm getting at?

You're also wrong about storing hydrogen. Compressing it will not make it turn into a plasma. Compressing (and cooling) hydrogen will make it turn into a liquid, and eventually a metallic solid (though we don't have the ability to actually make metallic hydrogen). To make a plasma, you actually need to do the exact opposite, heat the material to an extremely high temperature (tens of thousands of degrees kelvin, minimum). And barring unusual circumstances (such as the cores of stars) plasmas usually have a very low density, so a plasma would be a terrible way to store hydrogen. You'd be much better off with just tanks of compressed or liquid hydrogen.

And while magnetic fields can indeed manipulate plasmas, it takes extremely powerful magnetic fields to do so, which require large electromagnets to produce, which in turn require a lot of power to operate.

So basically, as far as weapons go, at the moment, fuel cells would be quite inferior to batteries. Both batteries and fuel cells though are currently incapable of providing the kind of power that an energy weapon capable of killing a person would require. Too really make energy weapons a reality, we need devices with much higher electrical energy storage density than is currently available. It's being worked on though, since such a technology would have extremely wide ranging benefits. Imagine a cell phone battery that could power your cell phone for years!
 
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