'Scuze me! I didn’t read page 8 or 9. I just read all the other threads where “1920’s style death rays” are mentioned. 
Aryk29 ambles over to page 8 or 9 to read the rest of the thread.
Anachronistic? Uh, titanium wasn’t used extensively in anything until after WW II. Also, given that it’s a royal PITA to work with (it’s too “springy” to be stamped out using the same processes as other metals, and it can only be welded in a non-oxygen atmosphere to name but two issues), I can’t imagine any pre-WW II death rays being mass-produced out of titanium. If you (or anyone else) has ever seen one, it has to be a one-off custom job and not something mass-produced. (Currently, the cost for titanium is something like 15X the price of steel, and that’s a historic low price! Russia is also home to the world’s largest titanium reserves, however, until fairly recently, they didn’t have the technology to utilize it very much.)
Anachronistic? Uh, titanium wasn’t used extensively in anything until after WW II. Also, given that it’s a royal PITA to work with (it’s too “springy” to be stamped out using the same processes as other metals, and it can only be welded in a non-oxygen atmosphere to name but two issues), I can’t imagine any pre-WW II death rays being mass-produced out of titanium. If you (or anyone else) has ever seen one, it has to be a one-off custom job and not something mass-produced. (Currently, the cost for titanium is something like 15X the price of steel, and that’s a historic low price! Russia is also home to the world’s largest titanium reserves, however, until fairly recently, they didn’t have the technology to utilize it very much.)
Yes, I know that. What I meant is that a 1920’s style death ray made of titanium would be an anachronism.
A bronze death ray would make a rather stylish gentleman’s sidearm, but as it would be rather heavy I would doubt such a thing was ever made.
But then there is the legend of the gold/jewel encrusted “Maltese Death Ray”…
He challenged you because anachronism or anachronistic is generally used to imply that something belongs to an earlier time; outmoded. A guy who brings a 1920s style death ray to a 2010 style death ray duel is anachronistic.
Since we don’t have the whole time travel thing down, we don’t seem to have a word for something that’s chronologically incorrent in the other direction. Hypercedent? Malapropos, or unseemly work, but aren’t that specific.
YOu know my querry about non-metal death rays has gone unanswered. ANy body have a frickin clue around here?
OOOH! OOOH! I GOTTA CLUE! I GOTTA CLUE!
The word “Rache” written in blood on the wall of a tumbledown Victorian mansion.
Hurry, **MonkeyMule ** ! The game’s afoot!
Bosda Quickly, we need to rush a sample to the lab. ALso take pictures, we must analize the hand writing. If I remember the Countess who owned the Mansion before yourself had a lefward tilt to her writtings…
Well, for ceramics, I wouldn’t trust anything made by anyone but these guys. [url=“http://63.111.59.137/archive/output.cfm?ID=588”]This article from Dec. 1995’s Discover magazine explains why:
I don’t know if I’d want a wood-bodied death ray, as it’s apt to catch fire from all the heat generated, plus, it might not handle shielding you from the radiation so well. Fiber-glass is just to flimsy for the rough and tumble world of death rays, and carbon fiber might work, but I’m not sure if it could handle a lot of stresses before it started cracking.
Not so! Anachronism doesn’t imply which direction. A dinosaur in a caveman movie or a transistor radio in “Titanic” would both be anachronistic.
What about a caveman in a dinosaur movie?
A while back I had read a fascinating article about a team at MIT working on a Death Ray whose components were housed only a high strength magnetic field, similar to those used in plasma research.
They were actually having some success. They’d overcome the problem of interference and were researching a power source that could maintain the field indefinitely.
Haven’t heard anything in a few years though.
So. Look it up.
What is the point of such a thing? I mean mean sure, if I’m Magneto I could use my powers to construct a death ray with no moving parts, but what would be the point you know? If I had that kind of power I’m sure there are far easier ways to dispatch my foes.
Death-rays are nothing if not practical weapons of mass death.
AH HA! The thread has finally borne fruit!
MonkeyMule has the WMD. Get 'im, Ashcroft! Run at him, Rumsfeld! Buck fush, Bush!
Sadly NO. See I said weapons of Weapons of Mass DEATH, not destruction. Get yer cronies back to DC damn it.
Besides, legally, death rays are not WMD.
This could be because the death ray makers take great care to donate cash to their representatives in Washington.
Well I thought it was more of a function of the power requirements. To produce a beam wide enough to take out an entire city would take more Joules then I care to count. Though I’m sure Ming-Mongo Inds. Have a few old floor models on the cheap
All you need for that, silly, is to take a 1920s style death ray and a 1920s style cloning ray, cross the beams, and sandwich them between 2 mirrors. Infinite loop!
Its just crazy enough to work!