Re:Ask HN: Wikipedia articles that made you say "wow "?
by mikewarot on Friday December 15, 2023 @11:44PM
(#38661802)
There was research a while back to fit optics to the back end of fighter aircraft. Effectively turning the airplane into a gas dynamic laser, and extracting the energy from the population inversion of CO2 in the supersonic exhaust could yield up to 10 Megawatts of output!
"it doesn't have to work for very long" design doesn't get much shorter time scale than that. (Barring fusion / fission but you shouldn't do that in the garage)
In a way it's the inverse of: https://www.capturedlightning.com/frames/shrinker.html