death ray

Sure.

Oh, you mean one that works? No.

You could probably put somebody's eye out.

--
Uncle Jack: "Will, you're invisible!"
Will: "Invisible? I can't be! I can touch myself!"
--actual dialog from third season LAND OF THE LOST

You don't need a death ray for that. Red Ryder BB guns have been doing that for generations.....

There is certainly a lot of energy in a shotgun shell or even a book of matches or a single match, all of which produce light. What you need is a way to harness that into a laser. Do that and even a single shot from a match's worth of energy would be calibrated to "burn", which you'd get from a match in the ordinary way. Defocusing the beam would bring it down to sting and tickle. Even a magnifying glass can focus the sun's rays to damage the skin. Given that hydrogen fuel cells are now used to power electric cars, conversion of chemical energy to light isn't totally out-of-sight sci-fi. With hydrogen fuel to produce electricity and electricity to power a laser (as we already do with laser diodes), the Flash Gordon hand-held raygun is a definite possibility.

Well, it depends what you're vaposing. They vaporise electronic ciricuits so well that's why people work on optical computers, Pv Cell Energy, Advanced Fiber Optics Systems, Cyber Batteries, Electronic Books, Laser Disk Libraries, Distributed Processing Software, Desktop Publishing, Atomic Clock Wristwatches, Light Sticks, Holograms, Digital Terrain Mapping, GPS ,and a Variety of other technologies.

a laser shoots out focused light, which at most could be used for cutting things and/or blowing holes in things...

however, these other weapons typically killed people while producing very little physical damage (a burn, or a dark spot on someones' clothes...).

and, as for stun: a laser will not "stun" someone (as in ST), and if made weaker, it could burn, but this would be more of an "oh holy crap it burns" experience, rather than knocking them unconscious with little other damage...

so, maybe better for this effect would be a non-laser technology.

one possibility: highly charged ions.

these would glow, and could be directed forwards with a magnetic field; they could also "stun" in the sense of having an electric charge, but would probably burn a lot more than they zap.

or, another technology, actually involving lasers:

Star Trek toys, light sabers... quick set epoxy super soakers. That last one could change the world re urban warfare and flame throwers. Humane, effective, persistent. Nice for prison work.

It is no great extension for a laser rangefinder to pop eyes or a microwave phased array antenna to fry a soldier. Energy is energy. Somewhere nearby there must be an 18-wheeler or jet engine powering the generator.

--
Uncle Al 
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/ 
 (Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals) 
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/lajos.htm#a2

[snip crap]

A hamburger is substantially more energetic /_\H(combustion) than TNT. So? Do you see Homeland Severity confiscating Carl's Six Dollar Burgers? Tubs of Crisco?

idiot

--
Uncle Al 
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/ 
 (Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals) 
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/lajos.htm#a2

I suspect that if you wish to vaporize something completely in less than a second, you'll need at least an X-ray or a Gamma ray laser. An optical laser wouldn't be powerful enough. An UV laser might kill by giving you cancer, but it won't vaporize you completely.

As for getting a laser into something small and light enough to hold in the hand, you'll need a small light power source. I think the best bet for such a power source is the nuclear isomer battery. It's just slightly behind nuclear fusion or fission in terms of power density per kilogram, but much safer to hold in your hands. :-)

The nuclear isomer battery works by finding a stable, non-ground-state for an element (such as hafnium). The hafnium stays extremely stable at this state until it is irradiated with an x-ray. The x-ray then triggers the hafnium to drop down to its ground-state and in the process it releases a gamma ray. So you put an x-ray in, but get a gamma ray out, so you're getting more energy back. You could even possibly use the released gamma rays to make your gamma-ray laser directly, if you can find a material that can act as a gamma ray mirror to bounce the gamma rays around until they become coherent.

Yousuf Khan

Last time I heard this much bullshit, I was in a church. And that was a

*long* time ago.

Martin

Tom Davidson Richmond, VA

How about potato chips? They burn nicely and have been killing people for years. Great for arsonists. I have not tried smuggling them onto airliners, but I think I could.

Bill

--
Private Profit; Public Poop! Avoid collateral windfall!

Hey Rich, why are you acting so dumb? This is a physics group so do some physics! Look at it this way: How much energy would it take to do the things you suggest at a reasonable distance?

It should be obvious that "tickle" is pretty easy. One of those kid's "vortex ring guns" can do that! No energy source at all but hand or spring power! "stun" or "harm" takes more. On the net a guy built a vortex "cannon" that used a liquid/vapor fuel like a potato gun (which also can "stun"). He used it on "houses" made of straw, sticks, and bricks just like the three little pigs. Yeah, it blew the first two down! If you want more harm, them maybe a chemical laser could get enough energy in a portable "gun" [probably rifle sized] to blind people. However we now step into the "fiction" side.

Do this quick calculation and answer your own question.

1. What is the volume of the average human body?
2. assume for the purposes of this study that bodies are made up 100% of water.
3. Calculate how much energy it takes to vaporize (boil) that much water.
4. About now you should be seeing that even with chemical energy (which is pretty concentrated) it's going to take a LOT of fuel to vaporize a person at a distance, even if the energy is transmitted with no losses, with some small hand-held "phazer" and that fuel doesn't have a chance of fitting in the weapon unless cold fusion or "free energy" can actually be made to work.

Now that little bit of thinking wasn't so painful, was it?

The finest case of arson of which I know involve dousing the target with... liquid oxygen. Let the cops detect something amiss afterwar! OTOH, don't get hammered and talk about it.

--
Uncle Al 
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/ 
 (Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals) 
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/lajos.htm#a2

There was a bit of a discussion about nuclear isomer energy storage a few months back.

There's enough links in there to get you started. Here's another one down below, where the comments are just as interesting as the main article.

Russia?s Isomer Bomb, Funded by Your Taxes | Danger Room | Wired.com "Nuclear isomers of the hafnium variety have an excited state of roughly

2 MeV above the ground state of hafnium nuclei. Going from the second isomeric energy level down to the ground state can occur in a manner that releases energy in the form of gamma rays with the same energy. Since all of the energy is released in the form of gamma rays, so-called gamma ray bombs could be developed with wide spread and lethal effects.

One kilogram of hafnium nuclear isomer at its second excited energy level has a potential yield of about 0.3 Kilotons. One metric ton of hafnium nuclear isomer has a potential yield of 300 kilotons, and obviously, a 33 metric ton nuclear isomer bomb could have a yield of a metropolitan area busting 10 megatons and so nuclear isomer weapons could perhaps be essentially as powerful as modern thermonuclear weapons, a somewhat scary though given that the huge release of gamma ray energy could be quite destructive even for a nuclear hand grenade size isomer weapon."

Yousuf Khan

Not currently. I have worked on death rays (both lasers and particle beams, including pulsed laser to make ionized path for particle beams). So far the power supplies are enormous. We need higher density electrical storage, or more efficient conversion of chemical to electrical energy.

Almost feasible are chemical lasers. But the existing ones have too much ancillary equipment, and use very toxic chemicals which require a lot of safety gear to use.

There is an economy of scale here. The bigger you make them, the smaller a percentage of total weight this ancillary equipment is.

Actually, there is probably more work going on on non-lethal weapons. Guns work fine for killing people- military and police would like weapons that incapacitate people with little risk of killing them.

Debunked years ago. It's a story the CIA invented to freak out the russians, and never really existed. CF also, "suitcase nuke". *

--
* PV    Something like badgers, something like lizards, and something
        like corkscrews.

Hydrogen fluoride lasers (that 'burn' hydrogen and fluorine in a resonator that enhances the IR generated) come to mind. But as you say the chemical exhaust is, to put it mildly, hellishly toxic.

Can no-one figure out how to make a "hydrogen oxide" laser? Naively all it should involve is an oxyhydrogen torch in a suitable resonator. The exhaust would be (when cooled) perfectly safe water vapor.

Mark L. Fergerson

Show me the link where it's been debunked? Nuclear isomer research is still ongoing.

Yousuf Khan

"Suitcase nukes" were built in the 1960s. See

for pictures.

John Nagle