Sweet gun music, have to get back on gun design myself in a bit, still learning about lasers for now.
Kind of a subthread but... learning about laser design.
What I learned so far has helped a ton trying to save time on getting the most powerful lasers in game using published scientific papers saving time on picking the best options, and also understanding what is happening as the variables are moved about.
This paper is the one I'm studying for now, a graduate paper on Solid-State Laser Design.
www.creol.ucf.edu/research/publications/3601.pdfI'm making this post to put what I've learned so far together in one format for myself and for those who are just starting out on laser design.
The Lasers in game are all of one basic type from the many types of lasers out there.
The lasers of game are all Solid-State Continuous Arc Lamp Pumped Lasers.
"Solid-State" means the Gain Medium is a Solid material (Ruby, Nd:YAG, etc) vs a gas.
"Continuous" means the laser works continuously instead of in pulses.
"Arc Lamp Pumped" means the Pump is using Arc Lamps (using a gas) instead of Flash Lamps or other types of pumps.
Our kind of laser is the one circled in Red.
Even though it's called "Elliptical", in my attempts so far, the cavity should be as round as possible until beam intensity drops off.
The rounder the more efficient the laser seems to be up to a point.
This is important to learn because each part tells us about what each part does and how to get the results we want.
Our lasers have 3 main parts.
1. Arc Lamp aka Pump (Small Black Solid Circle) Lights up when powered and starts the whole action inside the laser.
2. Gain Medium+Lasing Rod (Small White Hollow Circle) Amplifies light from Arc Lamp aka Pump.
3. Cavity Wall aka Optical Resonator (Big Circle, different colors depending on temperature.) Filled with Coolant Liquid, and reflects light between (1) and (2).
To get the most "efficient pump system utilizes... (1) a spectral output that closely matches the absorption bands of the gain medium, (2) transfers the radiation
with minimum losses from the source to the absorbing laser material, and (3) creates an inversion which spatially matches the mode volume of the resonator mode."
Still trying to figure out what (2) and (3) mean, but 1 means that only the gas of the arch lamp and the Gain medium have to match to get the maximum power from both.
In theory Xenon gas should be the theoretically most powerful gas to use, but it doesn't match up well with the absorption of Nd:Yag (the "best" gain medium) so Krypton gas must be used instead.
The most powerful Arc Lamp setup currently 2017 is Krypton Gas with a Nd:Yag Gain Medium.
Edit: Xenon plus Sapphire works and is more powerful ingame. (Must be future technology.) Thanks Vegetal.
It looks like these are the only two Arc Lamp gasses that are worth using.
The Cavity that surrounds the Arc Lamp (black filled in circle) and Lasing Rod (the round white hollow circle), is always round because it is non-focusing, so it should be constructed to keep the Lasing Rod and the Arc Lamp almost as close as possible.
As far as I can tell, the differences in coolant effectiveness or only 0-50 K at best so a better coolant isn't THAT much better.
But the wrong coolant CAN reduce the power of your laser by quite a lot.
Liquid Hydrogen seems to be the best coolant for now.
More to follow...
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