[gregpilling]

I have a 4kw IPG laser. It cuts through 1/4 steel plate with ease, unless there is a piece of tape or spray paint on the metal. It can't cut that! it has to do with how the wavelength of the light couples with the material. (I am not a laser engineer, I am the customer)

The 4kw power supply only is $128,000 if you want a cost reference,(just the power supply - motion control, cutting head and chiller are extra). It is an 8 module unit of 500 watts each, that can be powered down to 50w each if wanted, with full frequency and duty cycle control of the beam. It is about 48"x48"x18" and plugs into a 460v 30A 3Ph circuit. There is a chiller the size of a refrigerator to keep it cool.

100kw like in the article would cost roughly $3.2M for the light source only.

There were 20 kw lasers mounted to 7 axis ABB robot arms when I visited the IPG factory in November, being used for welding. The fiber optic cable was the size of a garden hose and terminated at the end of the robot arm in a tool changer mount. It could tool change from cutting laser head to welding head.

[hinkley]

So... we can protect tanks and planes from laser weapons by putting scotch tape on them??

[black_puppydog]

Or spray paint! Guess the glorious days of bare brushed metal tanks are over. :(

[hinkley]

Banksy will save us all!

[sorokod]

First active armour plates, then scotch tape.

[thawkins]

Or mirroring, shiney tanks....

[tpurves]

This reminds me of all I could think about watching the new star wars films. Why don’t all the storm troopers get to have the shiny mirrored suits. Those pesky rebels and their lasers blasters would just bounce off. check mate empire.

[rasz]

This bothered you? and not WWII style bombing run using inexplicably slow and unmaneuverable crafts? or space ships slowing down after fuel runs out?!?!?! :o how about small unmanned shuttle hitting lightspeed into the destroyer? too obvious I guess.

[Retric]

The ship might not be slowing down, every ship in both fleets is accelerating so you are in an accelerating reference frame. Stop accelerating and you will not keep up.

A larger issue is the empire has light speed travel so they can easily get on the other side.

[adrianN]

The larger issue is that you can somehow kill an entire fleet by sacrificing a single ship and yet nobody had the idea to build hyperdrive torpedos.

[Retric]

Depends on relative costs of an engine and how random the destruction.

I think the bigger issue is simply how close the ships where to each other. If that's standard then hyperdrive weapons are a big deal, if it's a mistake then at best you take down a ship some % of the time.

[thawkins]

Yep KKW, kinetic kill weapons, basicaly large cannon balls moving at close to light speed.

What about the devastation a couple of buckets of playpen sand would cause when accelerated to relativistic speeds, hypervelocity buckshot gun..

[gamblor956]

Hypervelocity ballistic weapons have been researched in the real world, and found wanting. It turns out that mass and volume matter more than speed in terms of the damage inflicted. A projectile that is too fast and small may simply pass all the way through the target, retaining most of its energy, while a wider but slower projectile will impact the target and pass more/all of its energy into the target, causing significantly more damage (i.e., like hollow-point bullets).

So really, it's not that nobody had the idea to build hyperdrive torpedoes. It's that they knew they would be fairly useless, and nobody would expect your enemy to kamikaze their sole remaining flagship into yours at hyperdrive speeds when they could accomplish far more damage to the target by simply crashing into it at normal speeds, as has happened nearly a dozen times in the SW movies. Holdo's act wasn't an act of strategy; it was an act of desperation, and worked far better than she expected it to.

[adrianN]

Even if torpedos are ineffective because they pass right through the object (which I doubt, at relativistic speeds), you might want to consider sacrificing a flagship in case someone builds an attack station the size of a moon.

[rasz]

mass is less important than speed, E = mc^2

[jliptzin]

Star Wars is not sci fi. It’s set in space and in a different time period, but has little to do with science, and much to do with fiction.

[gricardo99]

>in the far future

Ehm...

“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...."

Couldn’t resist ;)

[jliptzin]

Ah you're right, updated. But whatever, point still stands, haha.

[stevula]

We still expect the people in the story to act plausibly based on the rules and conventions of their setting. Suspension of disbelief has its limits.

[asimpletune]

Exactly, it’s our age’s retelling of mythology.

[gamblor956]

1) B-wing bombers have been slow and lumbering and functioned that way since the original SW trilogy...

2) Star Wars has always worked that way. Having the ships continue coasting would violate rules established in the original Trilogy. See, e.g., ESB, where disabled Destroyers promptly lost stationkeeping.

3) The Resistance's largest ship barely damaged the Third Order flagship; a portion was split off but the flagship itself was still functional. It was the massive amount of debris from the Resistance ship breaking apart on impact that caused most of the damage to the remainder of the TO fleet. This strategy simply doesn't scale.

[bootlooped]

Don't forget the fact that the bombers, in space, had to fly "over" their target to "drop" their bombs.

[Osmium]

> Those pesky rebels and their lasers blasters would just bounce off.

They're not meant to be lasers in Star Wars (: They're packets of ionized gas (a gas Lando and friends mine at Cloud City).

[mrighele]

In the movies I never heard them being called laser blasters but only blasters (and in fact they don't behave as laser at all), though almost everybody I know consider them laser weapons. I don't know if this is a general issue or simply due to the fact that in my country "lightsabers" were translated as "laser swords".

There are lasers in fact , but are less common and bigger weapons. Death Star's weapon is the prime example of course, but there are also others (right now I remember a laser weapon looking like a rhasadar being used by the rebels during the battle of Hoth).

[taneq]

The thing that gets me is they have holographic displays but they can't figure out that it's a bad idea putting the pilot of a military ship right at the front with their head sticking out.

[codeulike]

Or they can build robots that are clearly sentient but they don't bother giving them a voice.

[220V_USKettle]

In fairness, we have no idea what the IP licensing schemes are like for text-to-speech technology in that galaxy.

[azeotropic]

Do you ever downvote comments or collapse threads? Maybe R2 units are just constantly incoherent, off-topic, or abusive.

[taneq]

Actually the treatment of sentient droids in those movies is one of the sour points for me, rewatching it now. Somehow it's OK to just wipe a droid's memories, or dismantle it, when it's just as much a 'person' as any of the organic characters. Blah.

[codeulike]

In Sci-Fi terms the Star Wars approach to AI is nonsensical. You have sentient droids that are treated as possesions/slaves/butlers but there's no AI except for the droids, no spaceships that fly themselves or superintelligent AI minds or anything. And the aforementioned lack of voice for some droids.

But in cinematic terms the R2D2/C3PO double-act does make for some funny exchanges, so I guess that's what they were going for. So its kindof tropes first, world-building afterwards as an afterthought.

[cicero]

The novelization of the first Star Wars movie alluded to controversies over "droid rights", but that was a theme that never developed as the series progressed.

[lawlessone]

> it's just as much a 'person' as any of the organic characters.

The organic ones aren't treated that well either.

[pnutjam]

Dude, this was "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." Obviously we've gotten smarter.

[flippyhead]

Mostly I hate how they act like children.

[pault]

The Cohen Brothers' adaptation didn't perform well in focus groups.

[krapp]

>Why don’t all the storm troopers get to have the shiny mirrored suits. Those pesky rebels and their lasers blasters would just bounce off. check mate empire.

Firstly, it would look ridiculous, and they would no longer seem menacing.

Second, and most important, so Phasma's toys sell better.

If you want a canon-consistent reason, umm... because most stormtroopers are grunts and the Empire doesn't really care about them.

[ashelmire]

>Firstly, it would look ridiculous, and they would no longer seem menacing.

Cylons beg to disagree.

[krapp]

The original cylons looked pretty daft. The updated non-human versions were a lot less shiny, though.

[overcast]

They are not lasers, they are blaster bolts of plasma. Not a beam of light, but rather individual shots of super heated gas.

[nugi]

So carbon ablation foam armor then. Easy as toast.

[mehrdadn]

Like this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMSyGOoesfM

[gregpilling]

Yes, same power unit, but I have the IPG motion control and machine, not a Prima. The Prima was more than double the total cost of mine. That machine in the video can hit $1,000,000 with options. Also it is super cool.

[jacquesm]

That's one sweet rig. What do you make with it?

[agumonkey]

if you want some fun there's https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=laser+rust+remo...

[mehrdadn]

That rust removal is amazing. Thanks for sharing!!

[agumonkey]

real iron man

[samplatt]

4KW power supply for $128k?

I understand a lot of engineering went into making that & needs to be recouped, but it still sounds on the high side. I wonder how hard it'd be to build one, if required.

[adrianratnapala]

Might depend on what he means by "power supply". For a purely electrical thing it does sound expensive unless there is a stringent low-noise requirement (which would surprise me in an industrial laser).

The lasers I've heard of work by amplifying light along a fibre that has been energised by some other light source -- and that light source is sometimes also a laser. So in this case the "power supply" might actually be thing that produces 10-20kW of light (of which only some is converted into laser light along the fibre).

[gregpilling]

OP here. by power supply, I was talking about the metal box that the bright light comes out of. The thing making the 4kw of laser juice. Not just a transformer.

[jakeogh]

It's the current regulation and all the snazzy PWM.

[krapht]

Even so, 128k is a bit excessive. They're definitely charging the enterprise/business markup for that power.

[argyleaf]

Not really given the highly integrated nature of laser manufacturers where they bundle the table, drives, CNC, material handling, power supply, and (often) SLA together. Additionally there is a lower run-rate of consumables in comparison to other industrial cutting technologies so the life-time cost is more comparable to competing technologies.

So why not always use laser? They have far higher upfront costs as their business model is not consumable-driven. Further they are limited in material thickness and finish they can handle. They are great at cutting sheet and thin (<= 1/4") metals, when the surface is clean and uniform as mentioned above, but if your shop needs the ability to cut thicker materials or the up-front cost is too high then plasma, oxy-fuel, or (possibly) waterjet are better options.

[archon810]

Why... do you have that?

[grzm]

From your parent's comment and their profile, I'd wager $1 that it's an industrial laser, likely used for welding and cutting.

[ggm]

Because of his second amendment rights.

[sorokod]

The right to bear robot arms with lasers?

[ggm]

That's the one. John Hancock used one to burn his big bold signature onto the sheepskin

[gregpilling]

For evil purposes.

Or for cutting steel and making auto parts.

[jlebrech]

couldn't you just switch frequency?

[cheeze]

This comment is a perfect example of why I love hn. Article about thing that I know a small amount about but have mild interest in? Go to comments and find guy with big ass laser!

[samplatt]

Reddit used to be like that; it was the main reason I switched from Digg ~10 years ago.

[riffraff]

It still is, in some subs, just not the overly popular or poorly moderated

[sake]

r/linux was recently having some laissez-faire experiment where there was minimal to no moderation for one week. Everyone was like "hey, nobody discovered major vulnerabilities in one week, moderation has no function!"

No moderation on anonymous forums certainly seem to attract the brightest and shiniest individuals together. Cough.