
DIY pulse laser gun - xd
http://hackedgadgets.com/2011/03/07/diy-pulse-laser-gun/
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ck2
Time to visit the mall and play the string prize game with that:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=string+cut+game+prize&tbs...](http://www.google.com/search?q=string+cut+game+prize&tbs=vid:1)

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hsmyers
He should get together with Rayethon to work on a hand held version of their
Ship-Mounted Laser Weapon......

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harshpotatoes
This is unbelievably dangerous and should not be in the hands of people who
think of it as a toy.

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phlux
How well can laser light pulses travel through fiber optics? (I am talking
about intense laser pulses such as this - not regular lasers)

Could you have larger version of this in a backpack with the gun portion being
the end of a fiber optic line? Could you join multiple impulses together into
a single fiber for added power?

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nooneelse
Not my field, but I'll play with some numbers on a Friday afternoon. From some
googling, I'm getting an estimate of about -1dB attenuation for the fiber
optic and end connectors for a meter long fiber in the near IR. Which would
give about 20% losses.

The linked-to gun said it did a 1MW pulse, so to match that with 20% losses
you need to start with 1.25MW, giving you 0.25MW loss. But the video doesn't
state a pulse time. You can use (<http://www.mhi-
inc.com/Converter/watt_calculator.htm>) to play around with times... assuming
it fires for 0.001s (I would guess it is shorter than that) and all that loss
shows up as heat, it would be less than a BTU, so easily cool-able.

Assuming your backpack could carry enough energy to have it fire at that power
level for a full second, that conversion page says the waste heat from the
fiber would melt a 1.6 pound block of ice. Such a backpack would do well to
have a top-loading ice reservoir.

However that loss percentage is probably for reasonably unbent fibers, and the
whole point of the backpack-to-gun fiber is to allow bending quite a bit. For
a higher power system, I'd think it better to skip the fiber optics and
instead have something like the laser turrets they put on the front of planes
(<http://www.mda.mil/system/altb.html>). Have a small version of that come up
over the wearer's shoulder, with the turret sitting in front of the user so
they can aim anywhere in front of them. Even with 8 mirrors in the path to get
the business end somewhere comfortable, 98% efficient mirrors would have 15%
losses.

I also happened upon this much lower powered backpack laser
<http://www.cleanlaser.de/wEnglish/produkte/backpack.php>, and its bigger
cousin, [http://www.cleanlaser.de/wEnglish/produkte/high-power-
cl-100...](http://www.cleanlaser.de/wEnglish/produkte/high-power-cl-1000.php).

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phlux
So in thinking about this more - it seems that using a fiber relay system is
less than ideal - and instead what we may want is a series of tubes with
mirrors. Tubes and mirrors with joints that allow articulation of the tube
system.

Further, based on the description of the plane-mounted anti-missle laser
system, which uses a telescoping system to focus the beam - it would seem that
we could incorporate the telescoping functions into our articulated tube,

It should be a trivial exercise to combine multiple beams via prisms and
mirrors, at east a solveable problem.

So - we will need the exoskeleton I mentioned in my other post as we will need
the rigidity of the system to mount our series of tubes to.

Interestingly, the .mil article refers to KW class lasers - rather than MW
class.

I think some testing needs to be done with shooting this DIY laser through a
telescope as well.

