There is a YouTube users known as styropyro who has created some interesting laser creations, including a lightsaber. He has recently created a 40W laser rifle that makes me wonder about the legality of weapons.

I am assuming that you can just make a weapon like a nuclear bomb, right? Well, I suppose that this laser gun, which uses eight parallel 5W laser beams fastened to a huge heatsink and has a giant diode laser array regulated by 24 LM317 drivers.

You can see on the video how this user can blast things like ping pong balls and wood igniting them until they burn. I have to admit that would come in handy, but it would also kill your eyes, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, there is no reason to have this laser, as an over-the-counter laser should have only 0.005W of power. I don’t think that is enough to burn eyes, but the prototype lasers used by the U.S. Navy have 30,000 Watts of power used to shoot down drones.

This leads me to wonder if someone can just build a weapon like this, and will the law look the other way? I mean, what is keeping an army of laser wielding soldiers from invading?

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