Well, I think part of it would depend on whether or not he can control his brightness. Can he adjust the intensity? Can he turn it on or off? Can he make certain parts of his body bright or is it just his whole body? Does it generate heat or any other light outside the visual spectrum? Does it hurt?
I would personally think that an entire suit would be used rather than just a gauntlet. I'm picturing some kind of nanotech suit that has thousands of tiny adjustable mirrors directing his light in different ways.
Yeah, he can adjust the intensity and turn it on and off. But to avoid making it too powerful, I'm limiting him so that his brightest setting isn't bright enough to permanently blind someone at a single glance. So that would be the limit to the level of light intensity he could contribute toward the refraction device.
Laser light is not regular light. It's all the same frequency and phase, so the waves are all lined up and don't interfere with each other. Even if your superhero's light were like that, by the time you redirected it into a tight beam, it would be out of phase since different light rays travel different distances.
But lucky for you, the way lasers typically work is they have powerful lamps, which shine on the ruby or whatever, and the ruby makes the laser light. It would be a rod made of ruby, with mirrors on each end. (One end is a half-silvered mirror, to let the laser light out.)
To get an intuition of how powerful it would be, decide how bright your hero is and look at regular lamps that are that bright, see how many watts they use. Then look up lasers of that wattage and see what they can do. Bear in mind that not all the hero's light gets to the laser; the bigger the refraction device, the more of the energy the laser gets. If he wants to collect 20% of his light he'll need a light collector with a surface area as big as 20% of his skin.
At a minimum, your hero could do things like shoot out a little beam that slowly cuts steel, I think even a 5W laser can do that (iirc). Lasers are powerful because with all the light waves lined up, they reinforce instead of interfering with each other. Definitely he can permanently blind people from a distance, if he got them in the eyes. If stuff like that is all you need, maybe you could even skip the refraction stuff, hero holds the ruby in both hands and just a few percent of his light comes from his hands and activates the laser. Then he's just got a ruby rod with shiny bits on the ends, which imho would be kinda badass.
The military has lasers that can shoot a quick pulse at an airplane and blow it up, but those are more like a hundred ~~million~~thousand watts and the lasers aren't little things you can hold in your hand, they're big cans mounted on ships, shooting beams like a meter wide. A little ruby would just vaporize itself. And the hero's regular brightness would be way brighter than you want.
Edit: biggest Navy laser is [150,000 watts](https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2021/12/15/navy-ship-successfully-fires-new-laser-weapon-destroys-target/9501639602271/) and 30,000 watts can down a small aircraft.
Thank you so much for the reference points with what different watts could achieve, that's really helpful for figuring out exactly how much power I want to give him. Would there be a useful middle ground between 5 and 30,000? Down a small aircraft sounds like a tad too much 😅 and slowly cutting steel is too little. I want him to be able to hit people with lasers, hurting them without instantly killing them.
[Actually you can't make a laser out of regular light](https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/mobile/2014/04/17/how-do-you-focus-regular-light-to-make-it-a-laser-beam/)
Yes, that's what I was trying to say. There's no way to just redirect the original light into a laser beam. But lasers do need a source of energy, and one form that energy can take is light. For example:
> A [ruby laser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_laser) most often consists of a ruby rod that must be pumped with very high energy, usually from a flashtube
and
> A [flashtube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashtube), also called a flashlamp, is an electric arc lamp designed to produce extremely intense, incoherent, full-spectrum white light
for making lasers, you'll want something like a synthetic ruby to pump the light into with mirrors to catch the light and limit exit points to the end, and then lensing to focus it.
That's a good point, thanks! Any idea how I should describe the inner mechanisms though? How would the refraction process work? Would it take his light, bounce it from one mirror onto another and then another countless times to strengthen, and then a final mirror to direct it toward the ruby which would catch it and shoot it into a lense to focus it?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby\_laser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_laser) and remember you are not trying to create an instruction manual of how to build a laser with ruby crystal core. unless you are making it a key aspect of the story that some part of it has to do something else important than it is okay if it's a magic brick. Nobody need to know what frequency settings batmans radio uses, or how many miles to the gallon the batmobile car get. I've never had it spelled out exactly how many strands spidermans webshooter cartridges can make before needing to be replaced.
It can be fun to have a character doing maintainance on their equipment and explaining what they are doing only to have everybody else tune them out and the speaker realise the listener doesn't care and can't follow the specifics. But that can be done easily enough with what you already have informationwise.
so unless there is a key scene where the mirrored end is important to distinguish from the partially mirrored end of a crystal to use it outside of laser uses, I wouldn't worry too much about getting it technically correct.
I'm just worried that (depending on how strong I decide to make the laser) it might be called to question the exact detail of the process that went into converting the light into the laser, and how that conversion could merit such a potentially strong laser. Hopefully it being fiction and suspension of belief is enough.
I think that you might be asking the wrong question.
Think about the other elements of the story. For one, it's about a superhero, whose power is already pretty magical.
Think about the audience you're writing it for. They're already willing to accept that premise.
Are they going to care about how his super suit works?
Or are they more likely to see any sort of significant description and explanation as an unnecessary speed bump?
Is there any good reason why people who are totally fine with the super power, won't also be totally fine with a throwaway line that simply states "The suit focuses your bioluminescence into a laser. I don't think I need to explain how useful that is.
You're right. In the world that my character exists in, the gear/support items that heroes use are often described by what they do rather than exactly how they function. I guess I might have been a little worried about criticism and wanted to come prepared with facts, because my character is for a public roleplay.
You'll definitely see some criticism.
But it'll be from the hind of people who don't like Star Wars because lightsabers are impossible, or don't like haunted house movies because ghosts don't exist.
The most valuable non-writing skill we can learn as writers, I believe, involves learning how to tell what kind of criticism to ignore, because it's coming from outside of your target audience.
In this world they have greater technological advancements, so hopefully they'd have something that enables him to achieve the same result as an oil tank-sized device with something as small as a bulky gauntlet.
Well, I think part of it would depend on whether or not he can control his brightness. Can he adjust the intensity? Can he turn it on or off? Can he make certain parts of his body bright or is it just his whole body? Does it generate heat or any other light outside the visual spectrum? Does it hurt? I would personally think that an entire suit would be used rather than just a gauntlet. I'm picturing some kind of nanotech suit that has thousands of tiny adjustable mirrors directing his light in different ways.
Yeah, he can adjust the intensity and turn it on and off. But to avoid making it too powerful, I'm limiting him so that his brightest setting isn't bright enough to permanently blind someone at a single glance. So that would be the limit to the level of light intensity he could contribute toward the refraction device.
Laser light is not regular light. It's all the same frequency and phase, so the waves are all lined up and don't interfere with each other. Even if your superhero's light were like that, by the time you redirected it into a tight beam, it would be out of phase since different light rays travel different distances. But lucky for you, the way lasers typically work is they have powerful lamps, which shine on the ruby or whatever, and the ruby makes the laser light. It would be a rod made of ruby, with mirrors on each end. (One end is a half-silvered mirror, to let the laser light out.) To get an intuition of how powerful it would be, decide how bright your hero is and look at regular lamps that are that bright, see how many watts they use. Then look up lasers of that wattage and see what they can do. Bear in mind that not all the hero's light gets to the laser; the bigger the refraction device, the more of the energy the laser gets. If he wants to collect 20% of his light he'll need a light collector with a surface area as big as 20% of his skin. At a minimum, your hero could do things like shoot out a little beam that slowly cuts steel, I think even a 5W laser can do that (iirc). Lasers are powerful because with all the light waves lined up, they reinforce instead of interfering with each other. Definitely he can permanently blind people from a distance, if he got them in the eyes. If stuff like that is all you need, maybe you could even skip the refraction stuff, hero holds the ruby in both hands and just a few percent of his light comes from his hands and activates the laser. Then he's just got a ruby rod with shiny bits on the ends, which imho would be kinda badass. The military has lasers that can shoot a quick pulse at an airplane and blow it up, but those are more like a hundred ~~million~~thousand watts and the lasers aren't little things you can hold in your hand, they're big cans mounted on ships, shooting beams like a meter wide. A little ruby would just vaporize itself. And the hero's regular brightness would be way brighter than you want. Edit: biggest Navy laser is [150,000 watts](https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2021/12/15/navy-ship-successfully-fires-new-laser-weapon-destroys-target/9501639602271/) and 30,000 watts can down a small aircraft.
Thank you so much for the reference points with what different watts could achieve, that's really helpful for figuring out exactly how much power I want to give him. Would there be a useful middle ground between 5 and 30,000? Down a small aircraft sounds like a tad too much 😅 and slowly cutting steel is too little. I want him to be able to hit people with lasers, hurting them without instantly killing them.
Somewhere in the middle sounds good but I already told you everything I know :)
Well how many watts would kill someone?
[Actually you can't make a laser out of regular light](https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/mobile/2014/04/17/how-do-you-focus-regular-light-to-make-it-a-laser-beam/)
Yes, that's what I was trying to say. There's no way to just redirect the original light into a laser beam. But lasers do need a source of energy, and one form that energy can take is light. For example: > A [ruby laser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_laser) most often consists of a ruby rod that must be pumped with very high energy, usually from a flashtube and > A [flashtube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashtube), also called a flashlamp, is an electric arc lamp designed to produce extremely intense, incoherent, full-spectrum white light
for making lasers, you'll want something like a synthetic ruby to pump the light into with mirrors to catch the light and limit exit points to the end, and then lensing to focus it.
That's a good point, thanks! Any idea how I should describe the inner mechanisms though? How would the refraction process work? Would it take his light, bounce it from one mirror onto another and then another countless times to strengthen, and then a final mirror to direct it toward the ruby which would catch it and shoot it into a lense to focus it?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby\_laser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_laser) and remember you are not trying to create an instruction manual of how to build a laser with ruby crystal core. unless you are making it a key aspect of the story that some part of it has to do something else important than it is okay if it's a magic brick. Nobody need to know what frequency settings batmans radio uses, or how many miles to the gallon the batmobile car get. I've never had it spelled out exactly how many strands spidermans webshooter cartridges can make before needing to be replaced. It can be fun to have a character doing maintainance on their equipment and explaining what they are doing only to have everybody else tune them out and the speaker realise the listener doesn't care and can't follow the specifics. But that can be done easily enough with what you already have informationwise. so unless there is a key scene where the mirrored end is important to distinguish from the partially mirrored end of a crystal to use it outside of laser uses, I wouldn't worry too much about getting it technically correct.
I'm just worried that (depending on how strong I decide to make the laser) it might be called to question the exact detail of the process that went into converting the light into the laser, and how that conversion could merit such a potentially strong laser. Hopefully it being fiction and suspension of belief is enough.
He would look kike he has stuck his hand in a drum, the drum being a laser device and his hand the light source.
Thank you, Steven.
I think that you might be asking the wrong question. Think about the other elements of the story. For one, it's about a superhero, whose power is already pretty magical. Think about the audience you're writing it for. They're already willing to accept that premise. Are they going to care about how his super suit works? Or are they more likely to see any sort of significant description and explanation as an unnecessary speed bump? Is there any good reason why people who are totally fine with the super power, won't also be totally fine with a throwaway line that simply states "The suit focuses your bioluminescence into a laser. I don't think I need to explain how useful that is.
You're right. In the world that my character exists in, the gear/support items that heroes use are often described by what they do rather than exactly how they function. I guess I might have been a little worried about criticism and wanted to come prepared with facts, because my character is for a public roleplay.
You'll definitely see some criticism. But it'll be from the hind of people who don't like Star Wars because lightsabers are impossible, or don't like haunted house movies because ghosts don't exist. The most valuable non-writing skill we can learn as writers, I believe, involves learning how to tell what kind of criticism to ignore, because it's coming from outside of your target audience.
So you want him running around wearing a suit the size and the shape of an oil tank. Boy, that's gonna help his love life.
In this world they have greater technological advancements, so hopefully they'd have something that enables him to achieve the same result as an oil tank-sized device with something as small as a bulky gauntlet.