Heat and salt work just as well on roots as toxic commercial products. I kept a brick patio free of weeds with pots of nearly-boiling water. In areas prone to random seeds or stubborn ground covers, I’d use a salt water solution.
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First ground hog that farts under that thing is toast.
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Specs hint at lots of hardware, hence its 9500 lb. weight. The diesel for the drivetrain may (as planned for deployment on US ships with high-powered lasers) provide power to the lasers.
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Interesting to see how this works out. I can see it will be difficult killing weeds growing right up against the crop plants without damaging the crop itself - as the farmer in the article said they were using knives to cut out weeds that close.
Much like how NASA was a real thing before Andy Weir and Ridley Scott made The Martian, Skynet already exists, and existed long before James Cameron used it in a story
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The British government has Skynet and COBRA. No wonder we’re always the bad guys in movies.
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A lot of weed control, particularly in organic farming, is about suppression rather than elimination. If you can burn off the foliage of a weeds you give your crop a huge advantage in its competition with them. In other words, by the time the weed foliage grows back your corn is already 2’ tall and shading out the weeds. Flame weeding, which is very common in organic farming, works the same way.
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I keep waiting for this tech. It seems like such an obvious product for capitalism to loose it’s shit over but it keeps not happening for some reason. Mosquito laser - Wikipedia
The Aussie version must be COBBER surely?
Should anyone wish to find one of these devices: try Tosche Station, next to the power converters.
The engine weighs 507 lbs, so maybe those eight lasers add substantial weight. Cooling, perhaps?
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Probably. CO2 lasers convert about 20% of the applied power into laser energy in continuous-wave mode so the other 80% eventually gets dissipated as heat. I expect they are using a CO2 laser because of how the 10-micron wavelength interacts with water molecules in the plants.
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Do tell me more. Does robot also have his own agenda?
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And then at night, the weed drones come…
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What @anon87143080 posted… and this: The lasers have to be able to fire (I assume at full power) “every 50 milliseconds”. So I’m thinking heavy batteries (recharged by diesel)… or perhaps big capacitors???
This is exactly how the cop-on-the-malfunctioning-robot-beat futuristic sci-fi action thriller Runaway, starring Tom Selleck, starts.
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