Directed energy weapon: Laser tazer

Some of may know this video...
The laser induced plasma channel:
YouTube - Laser Induced Plasma Channel


These pics are some of the coolest I have ever seen...straight lightning:




They use a very strong UV-laser...I asked a dude who really knows his stuff and he told me, that not even an excimer laser could do that trick.
There are UV DPSS lasers...I heard they use IR-lasers to ionize air.

Anyone?

These things are so cool...I REALLY want a tazer that works miles away, just put a nice scope on it and ZAP you got em'. lol. I wonder how much current you can put through the plasma channel, so they could have military functions?

meh, I don't think there is a limit to how much electricity you can run through a plasma channel. any resistance simply causes heating, which = more plasma. An actual lightning bolt is simply making it's own plasma channel. But then, I assume the physics get complicated as you run more and more current through it...

StridAst

The US of A are very open to everything which might make a weapon one day. Actually they use it for military-applications already...as a bomb-zapper. Always funny how americans turn a very complicated thing into a very catchy easy word to make it sound more interesting...

Not sure if the current is unlimited...guess not...cant even tell the range of such a weapon (lets just call us a weapon...because....cmon)

I thought about making a N2 laser with a proper beam and very short high-power pulses, but the dude I mentioned before told me to forget about it.

AnselmoFanZero said:

The US of A are very open to everything which might make a weapon one day. Actually they use it for military-applications already...as a bomb-zapper. Always funny how americans turn a very complicated thing into a very catchy easy word to make it sound more interesting...

Not sure if the current is unlimited...guess not...cant even tell the range of such a weapon (lets just call us a weapon...because....cmon)

I thought about making a N2 laser with a proper beam and very short high-power pulses, but the dude I mentioned before told me to forget about it.

Click to expand...

Yeah, well the first limiting factor is divergence, but I suppose with nice mil-spec optics that should not be a problem. The second limiting factor is scattering, so for more range you need a better laser. And there is no way at this point that a civilian could build a laser for this purpose without 10s of thousands of dollars. And yeah, we spend billions on weapons research, and we can't spend a few million on crime reduction or even getting our army better guns...... You germans get HK rifles, which in my mind are superior to our M4/M16 type rifles.

What do you mean with "get"....we make em! I am German...and I am interested in guns and cars and any tech out there...handcrafts in general. Its very German you know...our machines and products are rom VERY high qualitys. We are kind of accurate...prooved when I made my laser-gun ;-) No matter how long it takes, if you can see the effort in the end.

Back to the lasers:
Sounds like a challenge to me my friend. I would bet my right testicle that I could make a electro-laser @ home. For <1000$....
Maybe the range would be like 3-6 feet, but its possible.

AnselmoFanZero said:

What do you mean with "get"....we make em! I am German...and I am interested in guns and cars and any tech out there...handcrafts in general. Its very German you know...our machines and products are rom VERY high qualitys. We are kind of accurate...prooved when I made my laser-gun ;-) No matter how long it takes, if you can see the effort in the end.

Back to the lasers:
Sounds like a challenge to me my friend. I would bet my right testicle that I could make a electro-laser @ home. For <1000$....
Maybe the range would be like 3-6 feet, but its possible.

Click to expand...

Yep- I meant your army "got" the guns, and I agree german engineering is great. And I'm pretty sure that anyone could make a floating ball of plasma for around that much, but an actual plasma channel would be a lot harder.

as a note to remember. The concept of this is simple, but the actual building of one would be *much* more complicated... I remember reading that the plasma will tend to follow the laser back to the source. I have seen pictures of a lens with a hole carved into it from plasma. (might be on the net, might be on these forums, came across it in the past couple months since I discovered high powered lasers and these forums) You will have to keep this in mind, work out somehow to cause air breakdown in a narrow channel, close enough to a contact to send current through it, but far enough that it won't burn up your contact from the plasma. (might be done easily, as anything vaporized by the plasma would be obviously "too close" anything remaining is "far enough away") also some method for preventing the plasma channel you create from etching into the lens, and keeping your laser nice and electrically insulated from the high voltage. I would be most interested to see a home build electrolaser.

StridAst

StridAst said:

as a note to remember. The concept of this is simple, but the actual building of one would be *much* more complicated... I remember reading that the plasma will tend to follow the laser back to the source. I have seen pictures of a lens with a hole carved into it from plasma. (might be on the net, might be on these forums, came across it in the past couple months since I discovered high powered lasers and these forums) You will have to keep this in mind, work out somehow to cause air breakdown in a narrow channel, close enough to a contact to send current through it, but far enough that it won't burn up your contact from the plasma. (might be done easily, as anything vaporized by the plasma would be obviously "too close" anything remaining is "far enough away") also some method for preventing the plasma channel you create from etching into the lens, and keeping your laser nice and electrically insulated from the high voltage. I would be most interested to see a home build electrolaser.

StridAst

Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure that this problem was fixed a while ago. The first use of these lasers was to stimulate lightning to prevent forest fires, and they simply put the cathode in between the laser and target (in a ring shape around the laser beam). But yeah, it should be some time before we see portable versions of this too. I wonder if we made the beam only like 500mW, but had it be really, really thin?
Hmmm I need to learn physics.

Well...of course its easier for the current to follow the plasma back to the laser...but look at TeslaCoils. The HF goes right into the air. Maybe its just a matter of frequenzy.
Guess the shape of the electrode is important as well. Would not be that easy, but its defenetaly doable. Pretty sure about that.

Even it would get "ONLY" a beam which goes back to the laser...would still look nice. Far away from what I wanna see, but still cool.

Maybe a longitudinal excimer-laser fed by a marx-discharge can do the job...

May I point you in the direction of patent number 7675731. "Tunable and aimable artifical lightning device". Just skim through the patent so you can understand what its talking about. Its quite different from the device the original poster was talking about, but produces a similar effect. Google HSV technologies for more info. They're a start up out of California trying to develop nonlethal weapons.

From my research (and I've done a lot of research into this topic), the invention this patent describes seems to be the most efficent and practical electrolaser system I've come across and appears to have the most potential for a handheld unit. Basically, the laser creates consecutive points of plasma in a straight line by using some sort of high speed aiming system. My guess is that this would drastically reduce the energy requirements, meaning that this could be possible with less exotic lasers that many members on this forum may already have.

I would even argue that it is so practical that if a group of laser experts from this forum teamed up with a group of high voltage/ tesla coil experts from another site, then that group of experts could create something similar to that patent. Sure it would be difficult and require copious amounts of creative problem solving, but anyone that can build a laser should already have plenty of experience in the field of problem solving. And it would be so worth it.

Oh my gosh! Are you THE AnselmoFanZero, YouTube sensation and creator of the Iron Man laser glove? Your like a legend! Although I'm not surprised to see you on laser pointer forums. Only the best!