Captain Postal posted:

It makes me wonder what would happen if the guy doing it was African. The laser works by being absorbed by dark things and heating them up until they fry, so would there be a difference if someone with more Melanin tried it?

MrYenko posted:

So what you're saying is you wonder if it's also useful as a laser rifle that only kills black people?

SynthOrange posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9z5WdPlToo

Its got a catchy beat

Mithaldu posted:

Can we please not get another backseat physics derail?

Mithaldu posted:

Can we please not get another backseat physics derail?

Effective-Disorder posted:

Focal length. Notice how much rust it clears off as the distance from the 'gun' varies. Now consider the surface of his fingers while it's cleaning the plate underneath. Even 2 centimeters makes a big difference.

Say Nothing posted:

Effective-Disorder posted:

Edit: "Thoughtless hunters" look a lot like domestic terrorists.

C.M. Kruger posted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack

Ben Burtt posted:

"The lightsabers are one of my favorite sounds, and in fact it was the very first sound I made for the whole series. For some reason after I read the script even though my assignment was to find a voice for Chewbacca, and then a voice for Artoo, and then, well maybe come up with some sounds of laser guns and other things. The lightsaber fascinated me at the time when the script had first come out, they had some paintings that Ralph McQuarrie had done. So that there were some concepts visually of what some of these things would look like, and those pictures were very inspiring because they gave an idea of the direction we were trying to go in the look of the film and it was inspiring to me to therefore think of sounds that might fit that kind of visual style.

I could kind of hear the sound in my head of the lightsabers even though it was just a painting of a lightsaber. I could really just sort of hear the sound maybe somewhere in my subconscious I had seen a lightsaber before. I went to, at that time I was still a graduate student at USC, and I was a projectionist and we had a projection booth with some very, very old simplex projectors in them. They had an interlock motor which connected them to the system when they just sat there and idled and made a wonderful humming sound. It would slowly change in pitch, and it would beat against another motor, there were two motors, and they would harmonize with each other. It was kind of that inspiration, the sound was the inspiration for the lightsaber for the lightsaber and I went and recorded that sound, but it wasn't quite enough. It was just a humming sound, what was missing was a buzzy sort of sparkling sound, the scintillating which I was looking for, and I found it one day by accident.

I was carrying a microphone across the room between recording something over here and I walked over here when the microphone passeda television set which was on the floor which was on at the time without the sound turned up, but the microphone passed right behind the picture tube and as it did, this particular produced an unusual hum. It picked up a transmission from the television set and a signal was induced into it's sound reproducing mechanism, and that was a great buzz, actually. So I took that buzz and recorded it and combined it with the projector motor sound and that fifty-fifty kind of combination of those two sounds became the basic lightsaber tone, which was then, once we had established this tone of the lightsaber of course you had to get the sense of the lightsaber moving because characters would carry it around, they would whip it through the air , they would thrust and slash at each other in fights, and to achieve this addtional sense of movement I played the sound over a speaker in a room.

Just the humming sound, the humming and the buzzing combined as an endless sound, and then took another microphone and waved in the air next to that speaker so that it would come close to the speaker and go away and you could whip it by, and what happens when you do that by recording with a moving microphone is you geta Doppler's shift, you get a pitch shift in the sound and therefore you can produce a very authentic facsimilie of a moving sound. And therefore give the lightsaber a sense of movement and it worked well on the screen at that point."

Captain Postal posted:

It's columnated though. That's what lasers do.

It all comes down the the absorption of the sample at the wavelength of the laser, and the energy the laser puts out over the pulse length. As someone pointed out way back in the thread, (white) skin doesn't absorb CO₂ laser primary wavelength all that well (although if you add in a frequency doubling crystal you're pretty hosed), although retinas do. So these things can pass over skin without harming if you set it up correctly, but you always need eye protection from reflections.

Effective-Disorder posted:

My Pop's a Lineman, and he's always dealing with pesky hunters hunting insulators.

Edit: "Thoughtless hunters" look a lot like domestic terrorists.

RoboJiggolo posted:

Really? you're going to take someone vandalizing a power line and label them a "domestic terrorist".
That puts the bar at a pretty shocking - and dangerous low.

No pun intended.

RoboJiggolo posted:

Really? you're going to take someone vandalizing a power line and label them a "domestic terrorist".
That puts the bar at a pretty shocking - and dangerous low.

No pun intended.

Effective-Disorder posted:

My Pop's a Lineman, and he's always dealing with pesky hunters hunting insulators.

Gorilla Salad posted:

Wasn't it Mel Brooks who got a medal in WWII doing that?

I think the story goes that he and his squad were returning from a boring, uneventful patrol and decided to have a little fun betting on who could shoot the most insulators off the power lines. When they eventually go back to base, they were called in front of some officer who asked them if they had encountered any enemy activity because evil German snipers had knocked out their power. Oops.

They also needed some brave men to escort combat engineers out into the field, crawling with snipers as it was, and protect them as they replaced the insulators. Naturally, Brooks' team volunteered because they knew the only people out there shooting power lines was them.

So off they all went and even got a medal for bravery out of it.

Phanatic posted:

Mel Brooks was a combat engineer, though.

eljackass posted:

I'm dumbfounded that plinking insulators has been or is apparently actually a "thing". Why the hell would people ever do that?! Not enough birds to shoot or something?

quote:

Gill said that on one occasion, a snowstorm and avalanche prevented Google from transporting repairers and gear into the area of the cut.

It usually used a helicopter or a Caterpillar D9 tractor for transport. It improvised by sending three technicians on skis to "repair the fibre that got shot down".

"These guys had to cross country ski for three days," Gill said.

"[One guy] is carrying what is known as a fusion splicing kit on his backpack."

He joked: "These guys had to go in and fix the fibre while facing gunshots

"So [the] internet... [it's] more dangerous than you realise."

Effective-Disorder posted:

It's still a thing, apparently. Only now they're taking out your internets.

SynthOrange posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9z5WdPlToo

Its got a catchy beat

Three-Phase posted:

Sabotaging infrastructure (I'm talking beyond spray painting a transformer box) is domestic terrorism.