I dunno what the hell beams need to work but it's very likely they don't use solid state crystals to concentrate energy.
Even the current most powerful lasers are gas based, and even though FS2 beams are most certainly not lasers (but instead some kind of superheated, contained particle beams), the use of solid crystals is doubtful.
They are likely ruddy expensive regardless, though. But could you clarify the purpose of this topic a little?
I think the most powerful lasers do not use gas, but are either Neodynium or Ytterbium based, or at least the power multiplying part is. The primary energy to start the population inversion is coming from Xenon flash sources. I'm guessing that the reason for this is related to the wavelengths of the powerful gas lasers, CO2 operates mostly at 10.6 µm and my gut says it takes a lot of effort to frequency double this to visible or ultraviolet wavelengths.
More interesting stuff about the current energy levels can be read from Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_laserhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_FacilityPlease note the size of the facility, if you think it in terms of the FS ships, I think one could make it fit into a 1 km long ship, or even cruiser level ships but that would require some participation from the Finns at least. Unfortunately, due to the component warming, the pulse repetition rate is somewhat lacking at this point, but maybe in the future...
The beams in FS are not lasers for two reasons:
1. Laser is not focused
Of course one could say that it is a Gaussian beam travelling in space with the minimum of waist located in the end of the other ship and that location can be easily adjusted with large pieces of adaptive optics. Speaking of which, lets estimate the minimum spot size on the hull of the enemy ship just for the heck of it: assuming 2 m aperture in the beam turret, and a enemy ship 2 kms away, the resulting F/# would be - according to paraxial optics - 1000.
Now the Airy radius (diffraction limit) is r = 1.22*lambda*1000, where we estimate the wavelength of the equivalent laser beam to be around 550 nm (green light) yielding Airy radius of 670 µm. Below this one cannot go, so we see that quite a lot of irradiance is wasted if it was a laser beam. Here Gaussian optics nature is ignored, but because the spread angle is quite small, the result should give a good initial guess.
Working through the the Gaussian beam model with 670 µm spot at the minimum waist, resulting aperture diameter would be 2.4 m. Someone else could calculate the irradiance level on the ship and then reverse-engineer the required power from the ship's reactor. I suppose the result will be gigantic.
2. The whole beam is visible to the eye.
This one is not easily explained away with any scattering property, one ought to see bright flashes of dust particles exploding along the beam. And no, there are not so many dust particles in space to make the beam visible in the way it is depicted. On the other hand, it would be cool to see those tingling particles along the beam in space (rest of the beam cannot be seen) and a extremely bright focal point in the hull of the enemy ship. Feel like SCPing anyone?
Of course, the industrial level lasers that are used for cutting are most commonly CO2 based.
Yeah, of my hobbies I like martial arts best and Optics comes as a close second.
Mika
