Nevermind the plasma scalpel, look into my flashlight!!

[v-un-v]

Well, I was quite impressed with the plasma scalpel, until I saw,


this


(quite literally!!)

[Inventor]

I checked the Digi-Key catalog, they sell a 120mW laser diode at 784 nm for $24.76, part number 425-1809-ND. That might be powerful enough to do the trick. It has the leads on it already and no disassembly required. They sell the housings too. I wonder how powerful the video's diode is.

I used to play around with laser pointers, bought a batch of 100 of them once from Ebay. They were <5mW, so the above diode is at least 24 times more powerful than a laser pointer. The trouble with the pointers is that they don't all point in the same direction, so they are difficult to combine into a stronger beam.

Next thing to do is gang a bunch of the powerful lasers up in a radial array with a central lens or two to combine the beams into a concentrated multi-beam. That would make a nice ray gun - until you got arrested that is!

[v-un-v]

Well I was actually thinking of laser light shows

The main problem with the low wattage models is getting the beam to travel enough.

Now where's that oscillographics circuit?

[seraph]

[Inventor]

[v-un-v]

[Inventor]

Ah, a use for my drawer of old glue!

Man, now you got me thinking about multi-laser ray guns again, I can't get it out of my head! Good thing I don't have the bucks to buy a couple dozen of those 120 mW laser diodes or I'd make one for sure!

One way to do it would be to house each one in a lens assembly and then point them all into a "death star lens" as described recently in another thread. That would be cool but impractical as the lens is heavy. One could substitute any telescopic lens arrangement in place of the death star lens though.

But to really do it right, you would not want to focus each diode with its own lens, but rather make some lens assembly that takes the point sources and concentrates them into a narrow beam. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) I still cannot visualize how that lens system would work.

Oh, and for anyone foolish enough to actually attempt such a project, please be aware of the dangers and possible legal issues involved. High power lasers are not toys, as you know.

Dang, now I've got lasers on the brain again...

[parabola]

My friend once set up a load of simple laser pointers on a reflective satellite dish (an old sky one, I recall), all calibrated and held into place around the edge and....

It just made a really thick laser beam. The coolest thing was that, at night, you could see it very far away!

Unfortunately, these laser pointers weren't powerful enough to become a face melting ultra-destructo device. Cool though.

Any thoughts on what some really powerful lasers could be capable of??