The Fun Guy's Journal: 190.6 buying a big laser

With all of my DIY-ness, I'm almost ashamed to admit that I'm planning on buying a honking big laser for work. I'll purchase it off the shelf, instead of building one myself. I'm thinking something that will give me around 800 gigawatts/cm^2. I might be able to put something like that together, but it would be a pain in the butt.

I originally wanted to buy a collimated maser in the same power deposition range, but those are harder to find. I may have to build it from scratch.

UPDATE: As an example, this is the kind of thing I'm looking at.

Awesomeness!

[Shadow Wrought]

So what does that actually mean to a laymen How fast would that burn through a dictionary? If you shined it at a mirror would the light reflect ior just burn through? What about against steel or aluminum or ceramics? Or... lettuce?

Re:

[The Fun Guy]

A few seconds at full power would probably burn through a phone book. What I'm hoping is that a few hundreds of a second will deposit enough heat to get the kill that I want exactly where I want it without leading to thermal propagation into the food.

An anti-proton beam would work even better, but those aren't available for what I want to do.

Yet.

Re:

[Shadow Wrought]

An anti-proton beam would work even better, but those aren't available for what I want to do.

Yet.

Can't you just use a straight proton beam but reverse phase the couplers back through the proton array?

ST aside, youtube really needs a video as to the laser versus the phonebook. Just sayin'...

Re:

[The Fun Guy]

reverse phase the couplers back through the proton array?

RTFM, n00b. ;-)