@ graham marsden
do you really think Stabby McChav is reading this, and would spend his hard-earned giro on one? they'll stick with the £5 jobbies from the local tat shop.
El Reg acquires wildly dangerous laser cannon (with lightsabre option)
Once a year, El Reg's Special Projects Bureau compiles a hardware/office supplies acquisition list for the coming 12 months, which is ceremoniously laid before management in the hope the Vulture Central coffers are particularly cornucopious. The trick is to slip in the more provocative items amid the usual litany of …
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Thursday 1st November 2012 10:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
@ Thomas Newton
... No they won't stick to their £5 tat. They'll be impressed that these things can pop balloons, or burn stuff, and want the higher powers. What El Reg bought was a precision machined aluminium device that is tested and comes with safety instructions and glasses. What the chavs will buy shall be cheap chinese crap off ebay with no safety and no true measurements or testing.
There is no need for these things - anything above say 5mw should be banned outside of licensed industrial use. This comes from me as an engineer that is interested in using lasers, and the higher power ones too (free space optics), but I don't see a problem with being charged a one off cost for a license. This will dissuade idiots from buying, and give the authorities something hard to crack down against when people sell these items.
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Thursday 1st November 2012 18:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I'm in the killjoy camp
These must be standard in every laser lab. My partner did a chemistry masters at Oxbridge and they had one.
They also had a load of service technicians who had points of vision missing because they got complacent. It's very, very easy to get complacent, it's also very easy to forget that a laser will knacker your vision above only a few milliwatts.
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Thursday 1st November 2012 15:21 GMT A J Stiles
Re: 137km?
No, it's quite believable. Even a cheap "toy" 1mW red laser pointer can, with careful adjustment of the focus, produce a spot which is visible from 100 metres.
A laser is a point source and very tightly collimated, so the beam of light is a cone -- but one with a very, very small angle (the kind of angle where you don't bother distinguishing between θ, sin θ and tan θ anymore). The energy in the beam is distributed over the cross-sectional area of the base of the cone. Which, precisely because the angle is so narrow, doesn't vary much with distance.
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Thursday 1st November 2012 12:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Lovely, but dangerous
Considering that incidents of lasers shone at planes on approach or police helicopters are on the increase in the UK, it's not particularly a good idea to be trumpeting the powers that this gadget has.
Not only is it illegal in the UK (because of its power output), but it is dangerous in the hands of a non-professional (your daughter excluded, since she has a dad who is a professional).
As much as it looks like a lot of fun, I'd prefer my pilots to be able to see things in the last few miles on approach into an airport, thank you very much.
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Thursday 1st November 2012 13:35 GMT Chemist
Re: Lovely, but dangerous
"I'd prefer my pilots to be able to see things in the last few miles"
Me too. We were standing on the beach in the south of France a few weeks ago - very dark, beautiful starry night, far from any serious light pollution and then suddenly a brilliant green beam started up from inland pointing up and out into the med. sky. It flashed all over the place for about a minute, no obvious pattern like a laser light show, and then stopped. What it might have done to a pilot or even a sailor doesn't bear thinking about.
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Thursday 1st November 2012 13:38 GMT Loyal Commenter
This is no toy
"For real penetration, though, check out the stats on the 532nm green Krypton. At full power, its NOHD is the same as the Arctic - 149m. However, its FL1 is a staggering 137,120m."
To give that some perspective, that is 85 miles.
I can see few reasons why anyone working outside of an industrial or research setting using such lasers would need something that can project a visible spot of light onto a building in London, from Swindon.
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Thursday 1st November 2012 16:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Dangerous in an idiots hands
I have one of those cheapo green lasers I got off Ebay a while ago. Can't remember the output (not to hand to check). Think it was well over 1mW though. Might be 3 or 5 not sure. Anyhow the first time I had it I was playing with it indoors and decided to shine it out into the dark outside the back window. Silly me forgetting to open it first and that that glass is reflective. I ended up being zapped in one eye. I had a bright green blob on the back of my retina for a good hour or more. Luckily I don't think I did any lasting damage but it was a good warning of just how dangerous these things can be.
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Thursday 1st November 2012 18:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Sigh...
As i own the Dragon lasers spartan 1w blue laser,( a better quality item than the shit wicked lasers pump, no pun intended, out) , a 500mw green laser, 300mw red and a 2.5w IR laser the one thing that has been overlooked is the quality of the optics.They are shite and the beam divergenge is massive. At 100 meters the "spot" is about 2-3 inches across, at 500 meters its about a foot....
Also, none of these operate in true TEM00 mode.......
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