Oh I'm very aware these posts are accesible by the general public. As it should be. That's the first amendment. As for laser hobbyism being banned bit by bit, we really should file these under the second amendment to keep with the times.
The Constitution only says right to keep and bear ARMS. It's not limited specifically to projectile weapons or melee weapons.
At any rate the Chinese have dropped all pretense of using them as a "barrier clearing device"
Keeping this under wraps is a moot point.
IR lasers are only dangerous for the poors. That's just a matter of fact. If you have money to burn, you already have the best CO2 laser goggles, thermal vision to see where an invisible laser beam actually hits, AND it will be VERY useful to check your focus at a distance. The brighter and tighter the hot spot at a long distance, the better your focus is. Or something like that.
All this is doing is stopping the poors from having anything. A rich person will just buy everything and try everything. You're not actually stopping anyone motivated to do harm. You're just stopping the poors. But I digress.
That being said, IR laser weapons arent exactly practical for the poors to have to begin with, but lets say for the sake of argument that some1 is just rich enough to have a cheap Leupold LTO tracker first generation, a thermal spotter scope for "only" 500 ish dollars. And that they have a power supply, a manual switch and controller, and a 40W CO2 laser tube for about I dunno 300 ish dollars more? Now I agree OP is pretty damn careless not knowing when the laser is on or why it mysteriously burns. But thats because he doesn't have heat vision. Heat vision solves all of those safety problems... assuming he IS wearing safety goggles.
Then let's move on to the biggest pet peeve of all. Beam expanders. Theyre not explained very efficiently in laymans terms (probably also done on purpose to weed out the kiddies. Seriously all these hoops to jump through are ridiculous!) Theyre touted as a way to get a collimated (straight ish) beam out to a long distance by increasing the diameter of the beam. Not the whole story.
From the other videos and this
We can deduce that with current non-classified laser technology, building a laser death ray code name Flameless Dragon would require a galilean beam expander of the adjustable focus variety. You're not aiming to collimate the beam you're aiming to CONVERGE the beam (which first must be expanded to a large aperture) and it is here that the thermal sights are essential. With a CO2 laser (no doubt one would pick 10600 nm due to the fact it wont show up on even night vision cameras, and I'll leave that up to your imagination as to why you would want to do that) that's about the only method of checking your work as you try to first expand and then reconverge the 40+ watt IR beam to a small point capable of making materials burst into flames or melt some hundreds of meters away.
Which brings us to
"Why the fuck would you just spell this shit out to random people?!!!"
To which I would answer do you see any variable focus beam expanders for CO2 lasers available on the market? Do you even see any suitable lens for that application?
It's not THAT easy to abuse <_<
It's not like me telling people they can easily make a polymer frame handgun receiver for an existing upper slide from certain airsoft pistols since technically theyre not different enough to make the endeavor pointless
"Wait... wh-whaa?"
Anyways the hard part would be getting the materials. The lens big enough with a long enough focal distance to converge a point that far away. Oh and assembling it onto a CO2 laser tube and aligning it correctly. Just a smooth bore glass tube with ??? dimensions. No threads. No mounts.
*mumbles* clearly one would only buy something as weak as 40W laser tube because its barely maneuverable in a car and anything longer would just be impractical....
you guys:
Oh yeah and if you're a poor you'd have to use a 400W car power inverter to power your Flameless Dragon as you ride off to hit some targets. If you're rich you'd have those large lithium ion solar generator power banks with 800W AC outlet outputs. Just don't do any uncontrolled burns. Some forest fires are beneficial but you have to yknow what you're doing. (It helps if some Native American elders passed down knowledge on how to maintain a forest) Other forest fires.. just burn down the whole forest. And thats bad. Very bad.
N00b protip: No the test fire button on a CO2 laser power supply does not output at full power. Obv you can't be lazy. Im bummed out too. But that's the way it goes sometimes... gotta wire everything properly. Who knows maybe one of these days when Im rich, I'll throw in antifreeze instead of water as the laser coolant and see how well that works without a pump... Firearms are much less of a pain in the ass to MacGyver (yes even the Fake 57) but lasers.... well lasers are for stealth O_O. IR lasers obviously.
