Real Homemade Pulse Laser Gun

I can picture the military carrying around lightweight pulse lasers that use cellphone batteries.
 
I will get one for my next painball!
My adversaries will not believe their eyes... :eek:
 
As Han says, it's always good to have a blaster at your side.

How soon before they start issuing marines laser rifles?
 
Lunas said:
Yeah that is why i was saying his little bb laser gun is fine for popping balloons or blinding people but for it to be a real weapon the power will have to be around 100,000x that gun in the same form factor that is why we don't have them yet. If i remember right the current laser tech that we do have weaponized is around the size of a Humvee and mounted in a 747 with a large generator to power the thing... I am curious on the range of that little one how far away does the pulse retain its burning power all the shots in the video seemed to be in about 10-15 feet.
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We want 1 megawatt nominal power not pulsed, that would definately get the job done.
 
Untitledone said:
The problem with pulsed lasers, and other electronics projects like this, is that the stated power is usually the instantaneous power. I built a coil gun for a project that was 30 kilowatts, which sounds inpressive but it only shot BB's. 11 joules of capacitor energy discharged in 2 miliseconds works out to 30KW. When you take into account that about 10% made it to the projectile you ended up with about 1 joule of kinetic energy (A paintball from a paintball gun will have around 11 joules of kinetic energy). A laser is a bit different, but the laws still apply. X amount of energy discharged in Y seconds will get you an instantaneous power, and the amount transfered to the target is the amount of damage it does. This thing seems to have about the same destructive power as my coil gun in many of his tests, but my coil gun probably cost no where near that much, and can be scaled easily. Either way its a step forward, and I am happy that people do these projects. I would have done a rail gun, but I did not want to bother solving the rail degredation problem, or deal with random spot welding of the projectile to the rails. I got plenty of fires out of my coil gun with no mechanical wear. I probably will make one of these fun laser projects eventually. Just have to solve the shinny surface, shoot myself in the eye/body bug.
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quick fix for rail guns is to treat the Rails as an expendable part of the weapon, just like the projectile. even if you only get a few shots per rail "cartridge" having a method to eject the rails and install a new set rapidly would make it usable. I imagine when using very high powered shots in a portable setup, you could nearly change the rails as fast as the power system would cycle.
 
motomonkey said:
quick fix for rail guns is to treat the Rails as an expendable part of the weapon, just like the projectile. even if you only get a few shots per rail "cartridge" having a method to eject the rails and install a new set rapidly would make it usable. I imagine when using very high powered shots in a portable setup, you could nearly change the rails as fast as the power system would cycle.
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how about the rails be a hard ceramic the only issue i could see is to make them exchange like that is which way would the rails eject out the front or rear or would you have the whole barrel eject and magnets and rails both be replaced...

Though i suppose that the initial use of a rail gun would be in a sniper configuration and they would have the leeway of carrying 3 or 4 barrels with them and being able to while in cover swap them off.
 
Pulse lasers are great and everything ... but I was partial to Large clan lasers and ER PPC's.
 
motomonkey said:
quick fix for rail guns is to treat the Rails as an expendable part of the weapon, just like the projectile. even if you only get a few shots per rail "cartridge" having a method to eject the rails and install a new set rapidly would make it usable. I imagine when using very high powered shots in a portable setup, you could nearly change the rails as fast as the power system would cycle.
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That would work, but it would be impractical if the rails did not last long enough. Many machine guns have disposable barrels after maybe 1000 or 2000 rounds. The issue is that many rail guns have a random number of firings before degredation/destruction. It could be toast with the first shot or the 10th. We would need more reliability, and longevity. If it could survive 100 +-10% it may begin to be practical.

Lunas said:
how about the rails be a hard ceramic the only issue i could see is to make them exchange like that is which way would the rails eject out the front or rear or would you have the whole barrel eject and magnets and rails both be replaced...

Though i suppose that the initial use of a rail gun would be in a sniper configuration and they would have the leeway of carrying 3 or 4 barrels with them and being able to while in cover swap them off.
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I thought of coating with ceramic or making it out of some high strength composite or ceramic. Then I remembered "Oh damn, the rails must conduct through the projectile. It may come as disbelief but a rail gun doesnt have magnets. You run a large current through the projectile to accelerate it. It works by the Lorentz Force (google it or something, its quite interesting). Hence the reason the arking/degredation/welding, almost like relay contacts but much more severe. The projectile, and rails are not perfect and therefore have pits and bumps. Whenever there is a large enough gap the current will make a micro arc there which presents itself as a resistance, and therefore creates heat (i squared R losses) which can break off tiny peieces of metal or alter the rail shape. The welding effect comes when the heat is so great that it melts a large portion of the projectile, and rail together. The small damage due to normal firing isnt such a big deal to the projectiles, but the rails get damaged every time the thing is fired, and the rails are the pain in the ass to build, and install. Projectiles just drop in, and are considered consumable. Projectiles are cheap because they are pretty much just chunks of iron.
 
there are conductive ceramics and i was thinking that the barrel has coils to ramp up the speed of the projectile as it leaves the barrel but i might be thinking of a gauss gun
 
Lunas said:
there are conductive ceramics and i was thinking that the barrel has coils to ramp up the speed of the projectile as it leaves the barrel but i might be thinking of a gauss gun
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I didn't spend too much time studying ceramics simply because I had to make a decision relatively quickly for my senior project for my AS-EE. You could use coils for pre or post acceleration of the projectile, but rail guns are more efficient than coil guns(also called gauss guns), and for pre-acceleration compressed gasses are much better than any electric initial acceleration. Rail degredation was the reason I did not do a rail gun simply because I wasnt a materials engineer, and would not have the time or funding to solve the problem.
 
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