A Chinese company claims to have developed a laser gun that can set people on fire and blow up gas tanks from nearly a kilometer away. Is a laser like this even possible? Watch to find out!

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Original article reporting on the laser rifle: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplo...

Clearly these claims are far fetched, but the company went as far as releasing an incredibly underwhelming video of the gun working:
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplo...

In this video I explain why this laser gun is something of fiction. I first try to decode the laser's wavelength, and then use the Rayleigh Criterion to derive a best case scenario of what the beam will look like at 800m. Then using the Stefan-Boltzmann law, I calculate the minimum power necessary to ignite clothes on fire. It becomes clear that a laser gun capable of that kind of destruction would require a giant pile of Li-ion batteries to operate, let alone the plethora of other issues that would arise with a multi kilowatt laser in a 3kg device.