"Ray Gun" laser effect help

[dancer89]

Hi, I'm Michael and it's my first time here.
I'm from Australia.

My question I have is we are doing a dance concert on the 30th nov and are performing Rocky horror, and at the end i need to shoot everyone dead with a Laser gun effect.
Due to the newish laws here i am not entirely sure what i should use. It will be displayed thru a fair bit of smoke from a smoke machine, so could i get away with a 1mW red laser pointer, or should i look at a diode from jaycar and build something up myself.

I will prob never use it again, and don't want to spend a heap of money on it.
Any ideas will be appreciated.

Thanks, regards Michael

 

[wesdaman14]

Cheapest way: Buy a 0.5mw red cat pointer.
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.12323 OR
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.14234
Plus's- 100% legal in Oz
Con's- not bright at all, must be very dark and close to see dot.

 

[dancer89]

Ok, i basically want the audience to see a Beam of light, not so much a dot.
This will be on a stage with various other lights going, prob a few moving heads (around 250w/500w) and i'd say a few par's. Possibly strobing as well, I'm not sure.
Perhaps there is a narrow focused LED (luxon) or something else i could use?

 

[ElektroFreak]

Using LEDs is a great idea. You can find a whole bunch of really brilliant LED flashlights from your local department/hardware store. If you obtained a lens to mount in front of it somehow you could use it to focus the light into a tighter beam.

You could modify the flashlight to flash on and off or strobe, and if you got a bright enough flashlight, you could put a colored gel in front of it to change the color. Then you could mount the whole assembly in some sort of gun casing. Nothing a little ingenuity can't accomplish, for sure...

 

[MarioMaster]

i doubt the crowd will be able to see the beam of a .5-1mW red laser even with dense fog

Green lasers are much more visible than red, so you could probably get a 1mW green module from the internet

 

[Schrecken_Licht]

A 5mw (or less) green laser has a beam that's visible in almost complete darkness even without fog....so a very low-powered green should be plenty visible with lots of fog. In fact, I have a 3mw yellow (much bless visible to the human eye than 532 green) and in a foggy dark room it looks like a light saber!