Yes, that honeycomb idea was what I had in mind. I did some experiments with high powered lasers and my hand, and did some order of magnitude calculations.
I considered a theoretical honeycomb array of about 30cm diameter packed with 3W diodes , I also considered just one powerful pulse of <0.3seconds. It's a bit of a stretch, but I wanted to go a little beyond current technology. All the diodes are focussed by lenses to a small 5mm diameter spot.
From the calculations and experiments below, I concluded this gun will not be enough to burn a fatal hole into flesh, just a painful burn mark.
For those who like physics, if a person were made 100% out of water, you might just be able to inflict a fair sized hole with this gun, not quite fatal though. This is a simple calculation given beam diameter, laser pulse energy, vapourisation of water and a 100% laser absorption assumption. This puts a minimum on the required laser firepower you would need to shoot a fatal hole in a person.
It seems from my experiments that the skin and tissue of humans can take a fair bit of laser. Lasers in the continuous Watts, ~5mm diameter on skin only caused pain over ~0.3 second, no hole. Hand held laser guns that shoot holes in people are simply out of the question. The super laser gun I considered can only just make a hole in water, given that humans have a fair bit of water, but also have layers of skin and tissue we need a better laser.
Aside from the lack of firepower, the electronics, energy storage, size/weight are quite possible, someone on these forums could definately build a honeycomb system with a bunch or IR diodes or Blue 1W diodes. I think someone here was ganna build some kind of laser lightsaber like this? Would at least look cool.
