Is it possible to build a “lightning gun”? A device that would generate a “bolt” of electricity, and project it through the air—wirelessly—with (nominal) accuracy? And WITHOUT indiscriminately zapping the person manning the machine?
Forget practicality…as a weapon, a muzzle-loading blunderbuss would probably be a more useful choice of arms. This is about style.
Also forget about long range—being able to hit a target a few dozen feet would be sufficient.
So…is it even possible to build a device that could do this? Is it technically or physically impossible, or could you hook a Tesla Coil up to a fire hose and make a poor-man’s death ray?
And no, even if the latter was the case, I wouldn’t try and actually build one myself. (You’d probably need upwards of five, even ten dollars just to buy the equipment…and that’s money I simply can’t spare. Also, I don’t want to immolate myself or anyone else.)
Well, for it to be able to have a directed stream of electricity between it an its target would be to induce a huge voltage difference between those points. 10,000 or more volts would be needed to go through the air.
The real key would be to both raise the voltage at the gun and drop the voltage at the target simultaneously. Otherwise, you couldn’t guarantee the accuracy of the beam (going straight between gun and target.)
I can think of no reason that inducing this voltage between gun and target isn’t theoretically possible, but it is beyond current technology (and foreseeable) technology.
You could do it with an specially tuned ionizing laser making an ion trail through the air to the target to act as a wire. As for needing 5 or 10 dollars, if that was that case, I’d have built myself one by now. The tricky thing is finding a laser able to ionize a long path of air for a reasonable price. Also, since I don’t the optimum frequency for acheiving such a path, I’d probaly have to buy lots of lasers, or an even more expensive tunable laser. A laser that ionized the air too effectively would make the air in front of it opaque and have too short a range, while a too ineffective ionizer would just do nothing. I’ve heard of research being done on using this to act as a lightning rod. Building the circuit to generate the voltage is the easy part by far. ( Or you could just cannibalize it from a tazer)
Because it’s cooler!
Also because it could be made non-lethal. It would be a ranged wireless stungun. And because you wouldn’t need as powerfull a laser. The laser is the biggest power and cost part of any 1920s style death-ray.
<Grandpa Simpson>Everything is stolennowadays. The fax machine is just a waffle iron with a phone attached and the death rays we used back in the '20s were just a fire hose attached to a Tesla coil.</GS>
A fully armored knight would be immune to a lightning gun, the armor would safely conduct the charge to ground. If there was a lot of current, he might get a bit warm under the collar, but that’s about it. There’s some crazy guy who dresses up in chain mail and plays with giant tesla coils that I’ve seen pictures of.
Well of course it is. The hit is determined by getting an odd number greater than 40 on a roll of 3 twenty-sided dice. The damage quotient is determined by a roll of a single thirty-sided die.
