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This is a gun with three settings: particle beam, plasma
bolt and laser. The laser is the usual zingy-zingy padoom
thing with the shiny and not so shiny ends, although
that's
a bit old-fangled nowadays, right? The plasma bolt is a
cloud of smoke heated via microwave and shot out using
a
linear accelerator. The particle beam uses the same bit
to
zhoop little thingummies. Let's say positrons, eh? This
is
not the bit.
This is the bit. All of this is driven using capacitors
which
are charged using a crank handle, so you go whizz-whizz-
whizz with a thing on the side until an LED lights up to
tell
you it's ready, then you set the toggle to the right
setting
and whoosh. Takes a couple of days to recharge. Maybe
a
treadmill would help.
Inspired by a juicer.
[link]
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" One thing I've found out, over the years, is that, anytime you think that you were the originator of some new idea, ' I was the first to do that, ' you'll find some old fellow who did it around 1895. Every darn time. " Edward Hamilton, 1904 - 1977, in "The Space Opera Renaissance", TOR Books, 2006 |
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For even the simplest of directed-energy
weapons, the disconnect here between the
minimum energy required and the actual
power input available, even integrated over
days and ignoring storage losses, is N orders
of magnitude, where N is any arbitrarily
large positive integer greater than, say, 6. |
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A scifi writer who croaked in 1977 was still handing out
snappy
quotes eight years ago?! That's one helluva futurist... |
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Join the club....or morning star if you prefer. |
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Thank you for the invitation, I think I shall! Is my
immediate death compulsory or do we let Nature take her
course? |
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I envision a bulb-topped tower leaning out over the castle gate, connected by various gears to an ox-powered wheel on the interior. When the party with the battering ram comes running up electrical arcs jump down and zap them. |
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Although maybe I got that from Connecticut Yankee. Yes, yes I did. He did not do the smoke-based particle beam though which is also very intriguing. |
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