Whether you call them ray guns, death rays, beam guns, blasters, laser guns, phasers, zap gun or heat rays, human beings have been wanting to harness the power of light and of course weaponize it for a very, very long time.
Possibly the first example of a laser-based weapon was the Heat-Ray featured in H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds from 1898. Since then, science fiction nerds have been putting laser guns in their books, movies and TV shows.
There have been many attempts to make an energy-based lasers since Nikola Tesla attempted to make a “Peace Ray” in the early 1900’s. Recently the U.S. Navy has invested much R&D into creating a laser weapon. However this regular guy created a laser gun in his garage!
YouTuber styropyro created what he calls a “laser shotgun.” This gun uses a lens to combine eight 5W lasers mounted with parallel beams onto a giant heatsink, and powered with a huge lithium polymer battery pack.
While this laser isn’t blowing up planets, it is capable of bursting balloons and incinerating ping pong balls. Think of all the amazing benefits of this contraption, it could be a fantastic equalizer when you’re losing in beer pong, you could make little kids cry from 30-feet away by exploding their balloons or you could just strap one of these on the heads of sharks.
This shit is only 40 measly watts, imagine the damage that Lockheed Martin’s 30,000 watt laser can do?
The Terminator should hook up with this dude.
[Gizmodo]