Mark Megahan
For a full 30 years, Greg Leyh has been striving to perfect a plasma cannon. He’s finally achieved “a huge gun that fires a 180,000-volt blast of hell-fire a distance of about 35 feet.” He’s an expert in his field. “In his time he’s built some of the world’s biggest Tesla coils, huge towering transformers that throw off terrifying webs of crackling electricity.” Like the Tesla coils, his cannon is a whole lot more spectacular than destructive. Chris Thompson over at Defector says he wouldn’t mind taking a blast straight in the chest. We’re not that brave. Since Thompson had an entertaining way of describing the contraption, we’ll let him tell the story.
Fun with plasma
“Plasma, as you know,” Defector reports, “is at the extreme bitchin’ end of all science. You can make it in your microwave if you don’t mind blowing up your microwave, and possibly your home.” Making the stuff, Thompson observes, “is cool and dangerous.”
Loading it “into a cannon so that a precisely aimed bolt of it can be fired directly into the serenely smiling face of a blogger is, at least in theory, one of the great feats of genius in human history.”
Thompson then issues a bold challenge. “Simply seat me in a comfortable office chair a short distance from this weapon, steady the laser reticle directly at the end of my nose, and send a ray of God’s shining breath roaring through my skull, so that it flies apart and is atomized and leaves behind only a grisly blackened neck-stump and the scent of charred hair.”
He doesn’t really have a death wish. He knows the plasma cannon can’t actually do that.
The video, he notes, shows “this so-called plasma cannon failing to fully destroy what appears to be a paper target, to say nothing of the sheet of plywood to which that target has been affixed.”
One would think it would vaporize things in an instant but it doesn’t. That doesn’t mean there aren’t effects. We wouldn’t want to be in front of it when it went off.
Not for blasting people
“But this plasma cannon isn’t for blasting people, you say, having watched the entire video instead of simply skipping to the kerpow part. It’s for frying the circuitry of enemy robots! Well to this I say, la-di-da. LA-DI-DA.”
It couldn’t wipe out a pack of those Boston Dynamics robot dogs. Thompson “can think of far more satisfying ways” of sending one of those “yelping into robot hell.”
“I have been bitten by dogs that were meaner than this weapon. I could easily take a blast from the plasma cannon. Do not think of bringing it to face me on the field of battle.”
“I would walk right through it, laughing, and then lift the cannon’s operator by the elastic of his undies and sling-shot him over the horizon.”
The device, he points out, “weighs more than my car.” It’s built from really big and expensive capacitors.
“Am I to understand that we have come no further in the development of plasma weapons than a refrigerator-sized device capable of delivering less destructive force than a single cherry bomb?“
