Take a look at www.wickedlasers.com - current "top of the range" is 95
Milliwatt for $499.00 USD - I don't think I'd like to be on the receiving
end of one of those at 2 or 3 miles, even for a test.


"Jim Carriere" wrote in message
.. .
dano wrote:
In article ,
Gord Beaman wrote:


"Cockpit Colin" wrote:


Hysteria aside for just a moment, have a read of ...

http://www.equipped.org/lasers_airliners.htm


Interesting and reasonable...thanks...


Right up until the line where the author states:

"More recently, the media has taken note of somewhat more powerful
lasers, up in the area of 20 Mw, that can be obtained for less than
$1000, which has again ignited fears."

Um, a 20 megawatt laser is going to ignite more than just fear. It's
also going to ignite steel armor and maybe even titanium.

And it's going to need at least an industrial strength nuclear reactor
to run (assume approx. 1% efficiency, so that a 20 Mw laser will need at
least 2,000 Mw electrical power source. That's 2 gigawatts.

So would a 12.1Mw laser require 1.21 gigawatts?

Maybe they misprinted 20mW as 20Mw, since there is an earlier
reference to 5mW. The article is pretty sloppy in it's use of units.
The abbreviation is W not w, I don't think w stands for anything.
Capital M is short for mega (million) and lowercase m is milli (one
thousandth). Quite a few orders of magnitude!