Lucky
Member
telomerase said:Anyway, how do you "phase" a plasma? It's just intended to indicate he's asking for something not invented yet
AtomicRocket said:Whether you use lasers or particle beams, you'll need a bit over a kilojoule of output energy to reliably incapacitate a human target. In the case of a laser weapon, that energy would be subdivided into ~1 joule pulses at ~5 microsecond intervals, to achieve penetration in the face of a laser's natural tendency to deposit energy at the target's surface. Particle beams don't have that problem; boost the electrons up to a few hundred MeV, and you can dump the whole kilojoule's worth at once.
The plasma clears away easily in that time frame; debris is the real issue, and the driving force between the 5 microsecond pulse rate. That allows roughly 90% of the debris to clear the beam path, assuming a 1mm beam and instantaneous 1J pulses. 1 joule every 5 microseconds is optimal against soft tissue, other materials will want different pulse trains.
It was recently revealed that the US military was researching a rather alarming line of less-lethal weapons, the Pulsed Energy Projectile (PEP) program.
(As a side note, understand that there is no such thing as a "non-lethal" weapon. This is because any weapon or gas that can reliably incapacitate or render unconscious a 300 pound world wrestling champion will be strong enough to instantly kill a small child or elderly person.)
PEP weapons fire a laser pulse that is very intense but only a fraction of a second in duration. The pulse vaporizes a tiny portion of the hapless victim's clothing or skin, creating a plasma burst intense enough to knock the victim to the ground. This was intended to be used for crowd control. I don't know about you but it seems to me that a pulse strong enough to knock one down is also strong enough to make one's eyeballs explode if it hit your face. But I digress.
However, during test performed on animals, the researchers noticed something unexpected. The pulses were creating pain and temporary paralysis in the test animals. As it turns out, certain pulses would create a plasma burst emitting an electromagnetic signal of proper frequency to artificially stimulate the nerve endings in the animal's skin.
The 'phase' part could be one of several things, #1 it could be like a phased-array of laser diodes
#2 it could be that there is something changing frequencyPhase-locked diode laser arrays
Lots of microlasers on a chip, all working together. Extremely efficient, if you can actually get them to work together.
I also mentioned earlier that lasers would likely have to have pulse energy and frequency tuned to the specific material being targeted. It might be possible to do this automatically, based on crude spectoanalysis of the material vaporized in each pulse, but if not expect penetration to be roughly halved if a laser weapon is fired at a target it has not been optimized for.
Or perhaps something altogether different.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3l.html