Now just think of it 100 times more powerful in the hands of the army.
Xeni was there first! 
Or in the hands of the police.
Or 100 times less powerful but used as nonlethal.
Indeed. Each of the 8 lasers is 5 W, which is similar to the power of an incandescent Christmas light. Hold one of those in your hand and it is hot, but it is spread outover the multiple square cm of the glass bulb. This concentrates that to what, a few square mm, which you can see still takes a couple seconds to do its work. It would definitely cause non-trivial pain on the skin, with at least 2nd degree burns, and I hope he is careful about glancing the beam of shiny metal surfaces.
But all that pales in comparison to a real weaponized laser.
B
I think, last I heard, Lockheed had a 15kW model they built for the ONR. The navy said they need 100kW before it will be useable as a weapon. (These are large, ship-mounted installations, of course. Not human portable.)
Why? The article isn’t about those. There are many more powerful lasers out there, but it’s still nice to see this one.
It ignites paper almost as fast as a match! It burns quite small pieces of wood! WILL NO-ONE STOP THIS DANGEROUS MADMAN ?!?
40W, you say? Is it ideal for home defense?
Actually, this laser could be pretty good for home defense. A run-of-the-mill burglar that encounters this thing is quite likely to brown his pants for camouflage and commence a rapid tactical retreat.
Disappointed by the lack of sound effects.
Inquiring minds want to know, how does it do at cooking a steak?
Would the “Ouch! Ow ow ow ow ow switch it off ow ow ow it burns! ow ow OW OW OWW MY EYES MY EYES!!!” from the target count?
By scanning across the surface, I’d reckon?
…okay, copypasting my commentary from the other thread that now seems to be dead…
Such diode array is good for pumping a laser crystal; it is routinely done for DPSS lasers.
However, parallel beams, even if focused with a lens to one dot, won’t really cut it. A better way would be using a proper beam combining technique.
http://www.rp-photonics.com/beam_combining.html11
Another possibility is getting a neodymium crystal and making a 1064nm Nd:YAG laser (optionally frequency doubled to 532 nm). For bonus points, it could be pulsed and Q-switched for way more oomph per pulse (less energy but more power, sometimes the tradeoff is worth it). Go for inorganic-glass q-switch if you can, the organic dye based ones degrade.
Yet another possibility, but requiring more power, is using a 40-watt CO2 laser tube built in a rifle body. Airplane model grade batteries can give hundreds of amps for the DC-DC converter for the tube (the 40 watts of the tube is quoted as the laser power, not as the power consumption).
Final verdict: pretty, cool, will brighten your day, should be redesigned from scratch into something way better.
just the thing for those annoying drones if you are a fire-fighter.
Unlikely to take the drone down. May act as a pretty good dazzler, especially if mounted on a pan-tilt head with target tracking. No hard kill, possible mission kill.
I need a plasma rifle in the 40 watt range.
