As someone who uses lasers all the time. I can say with certainty that a 100mw 488nm wavelength (blue) laser with a small beam size will sting like hell after about 3-5 seconds of exposure. I would guess that the 1w (1000mw) laser they used would probably hurt in a second or less at focal distance. Enough to cause permanent harm? No, but enough to raise blisters.
The down side is that it would only work on exposed skin. So your most effective strategy would be to aim for the face and risk permanent eye damage. I think the effect would be similar to a bee repeatedly stingy you in the face. Maybe not as good as a taser, but nothing you could laugh off either.
“We’re guessing you’d need at least a 100-watt laser to get results quick enough to be effective, and good luck dragging around the battery pack for that.”
I present to you the Vagabond Mini Lithium, a 3.5 pound, 120 watt portable 120V AC battery that’s been getting rave reviews from professional photographers since its introduction about a year ago.
About a dozen years or so ago, I learned of a company that was developing a “stun gun”. The idea was that an ultraviolet laser would momentarily ionize the air between the gun and target, then an electric charge, similar to that of a taser, would be run down that ionized trail to shock the stuffing out of the miscreant.
The main problem… well, among the main problems, was the size of the “gun”. It was about the size of a large, pullman-sized suitcase and weighed well over 70 pounds. Not good for a quick-draw showdown with a Klingon. Still, an interesting concept.
I believe the company is no longer in business. Go figure.
No good. That is the input power, not the beam power. Lasers are extremely inefficient. A 500mw blue laser needs a power supply capable of providing between 75 and 150 watts. The ones I work with need a heat sink that can dissipate 60w of waste heat and that is only 100mw.
I don’t get why it’s legal in war to blow someone’s head off or shove a bayonet into their guts, but illegal to blind them with a laser.
BTW I learned (from Yahoo Answers, so consider the source) that it’s not really a Geneva Convention issue - because that deals with treatment of prisoners, but rather other “rules of war” under the Red Cross.
“Civilized” countries got together and agreed that warfare should be conducted in a “civilized” manner, and they layed out treaties with the rules of said “civilized” warfare. Those rules stipulate that bullets must be full metal jacketed rather than hollowpoint, for instance, so that they pierce and pass through and are theoretically less deadly. Similarly, torture is outlawed, things like mustard gas are outlawed, etc. At the same time, land mines that disintegrate your opponents into a vapor cloud are legal. So are phosphorus grenades and napalm (burning gel fuel that clings and is not easily washed off, so it burns more).
Why are some things outlawed and other equally horrid things allowed? Because people are weird.
I’ve played with lasers which are used for surgery - the target is only a few centimetres from the end of the laser but that is used to cut and coagulate at the same rate that you could cut with a scalpel (the idea is bloodless surgery which is also less painful (the nerves are severed and sealed)).
I also heard about a system called “Microwave Area Denial” or MAD which used microwaves in a net to heat up the skin of people who got into range, creating a sensation like burning. I have a feeling I might have come across it first in a roleplaying tech sourcebook, but I believe it is now technically possible (mounted on the back of a truck and used for riot control).
I may have posted too soon. The laser in the test looks like this one. While it says 1 watt, it is actually only 750mw. It also has a beam spot size of 5mm (most of the ones I use are 1mm). It is 445nm, which is more energetic than 488nm, but not enough to make up for the larger beam size. How effective it is is going to depend largely on energy density, which is going to be directly proportional to power level and inversely proportional to cross sectional area. Since area is pi*r^2, increasing the beam size by 5 times is going to decrease the density by 25 times. Since the lasers I work with have 3-7.5 times less power, they would actually have 3-8 times the energy density of this laser.
If you’re curious about the outlawing of lasers in war, you can find the actual justifications going into that decision here. The reasoning may not entirely convince you. But it wasn’t an arbitrary decision. The main points seem to be (1) there should at least be a chance of recovering from weapons used in war. (2) The use of blinding lasers in war will likely lead to these weapons falling into the hands of terrorists and criminals outside war. (3) Blinding-lasers would almost certainly be used in addition to lethal weapons, not as a replacement.
Point (1) is maybe a bit dubious, but (2) and (3) seem pretty convincing to me. Point (3) in particular echoes concern about the frequency and ease of the use of Tasers in law enforcement.
Yahoo Answers, if it says that, does not seem to be correct. See “Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects (with Protocols I, II and III)” Geneva, 10 October 1980. Protocol IV, Vienna, 13 October 1995 Protocol II, as amended, Geneva, 3 May, 1996.
My guess would be that Strassia got this information from the user manual, which on page 4 lists the technical specifications and says:
Laser Power: < 1 Watt (750mW nominal)
ETA: Also, this laser has nine operating modes, including strobes and low-power mode. I presume the “bacon cooking” test, and the other tests, were run using the highest-power continuous mode?
I have access to power meters, but not this laser. This table is also where I got the beam diameter. It also said that it can be either continuous wave or pulsed wave and that will also have a big effect on how fast you feel pain.
On preview, what Chorpler said.
Note the table is on page 6 of the PDF, which is labeled page 4.
With a multi-billion dollardefence budget, surely there must be some way to create knockout gas that is more or less immediately effective and causes no lasting side effects. Perhaps something that induced pacifism would be equally effective (but imagine the disastrous effects if it fell into the hands of terrorists!?) Or would that create too few casualties when resisting evil?
The first time I saw a picture of an experimental version of that it covered a table; so, progress.
They are also working on lasers that “weld” flesh together as a replacement/alternative to sutures.
It’s called the ADS now, and is not only possible but has been deployed/installed various places.
I believe much of the problem is dosage. We’ve had “knockout gas” of various kinds for a long time; but it’s one thing to feed a carefully controlled amount into a breath mask in a hospital setting, and another to deliver it at a distance at range under battlefield conditions without either massively overdosing or underdosing everyone in the cloud. What we’d need is something that can’t overdose you.
Also, IIRC there are legal problems since it would technically be a “chemical weapons”, and the laws banning chemical weapons weren’t written with exceptions for non-lethal versions in mind.
Mine is an older model which does not have 9 operating modes - it only has 4 modes (low/high flash/continuous). There may be a 5th “hibernation mode.” My printed manual which came with my model just says 1 W.
I’ll add that their website has changed quite a bit since I was last on it. They were advertising green and blue lasers at 1.5W for $100 more, and I can’t find those any more.
I know, let’s create a gas that causes pacifism. We can test it out on this population over here. Don’t worry, nothing can go wrong, like causing them all the lie down and die in place, or have some tiny fraction go effing batshit crazy. No way at all.
Hi, Miranda!
The thing is, the mines that vaporize people are not technically “anti-personnel mines”, they are mines aimed at hardened targets like tanks and trucks. They are designed to have enough explosive charge to, for instance, break the track on a tank and thus immobilize it. Except those kinds of mines are not personnel-proof - they can be tripped by a person, which with that amount of explosive, the result is definitely “anti personnel” - there be no person left.
I also note that the treaty you mention leaves Claymore mines as legal. Those are explosive anti-personnel devices. It also doesn’t address other kinds of booby traps and explosive devices.