Greg Leyh likes to screw around with voltage and electric fields and plasma. In his time he's built some of the world's biggest Tesla coils, huge towering transformers that throw off terrifying webs of crackling electricity. Working for a decade out of the since redeveloped American Steel Studios space in West Oakland, and now just plying his plasma skills wherever there's an empty tarmac, Leyh has imagined and tested and fabricated and tinkered with many a device that you or I might reasonably mistake for a doomsday weapon. One of these projects, which Leyh has been working on for 30 years, is a by-God plasma cannon, a huge gun that fires a 180,000-volt blast of hell-fire a distance of about 35 feet.
Plasma, as you know, is at the extreme bitchin' end of all science. You can make it in your microwave if you don't mind blowing up your microwave, and possibly your home, but it is also the stuff they brew up inside of tokamak reactors. Plasma is what kerplodes out of a fuel-stuffed diamond-lined hohlraum after it's been bombarded by 192 freakin' lasers. It's what forks out of a thunderstorm with annihilating fury and chases every living thing for miles around under cover. In China last month researchers at the EAST nuclear fusion reactor fired up a plasma hotter than the interior of the Sun and held it in a steady state for just shy of 18 minutes, making that plasma more than twice as old as the second-oldest human-made plasma of this kind ever to have existed.
Making plasma at all is cool and dangerous; doing it recreationally is true mad scientist shit. Loading plasma into a cannon so that a precisely aimed bolt of it can be fired directly into the serenely smiling face of a blogger is, at least in theory, one of the great feats of genius in human history. Simply seat me in a comfortable office chair a short distance from this weapon, steady the laser reticle directly at the end of my nose, and send a ray of God's shining breath roaring through my skull, so that it flies apart and is atomized and leaves behind only a grisly blackened neck-stump and the scent of charred hair.
Let's see what this baby can do!
Wait a minute. Here I see this so-called plasma cannon failing to fully destroy what appears to be a paper target, to say nothing of the sheet of plywood to which that target has been affixed. This device, which weighs more than my car and which took three decades to perfect, appears capable of doing no more damage to a flat-screen television than what Philadelphia sports fans typically do with their fists in the third quarters of games that the Eagles comfortably win. Am I to understand that we have come no further in the development of plasma weapons than a refrigerator-sized device capable of delivering less destructive force than a single cherry bomb?
But this plasma cannon isn't for blasting people, you say, having watched the entire video instead of simply skipping to the kerpow part. It's for frying the circuitry of enemy robots! Well to this I say, la-di-da. LA-DI-DA. For one thing, they do not yet even have "enemy robots," unless you are talking about the stupid Boston dynamics dog, in which case I can think of far more satisfying ways of sending it yelping into robot hell. For another, while Professor Frink over here is crouched down in front of his stupid console charging up his plasma outhouse and hoping the kill-bots are approaching in a single-file line at 30-minute intervals, I am storming and conquering his defenses with a balsa wood sword and shield I bought at the damn Renaissance Faire. Do not dare to threaten me with a "plasma cannon" defense system that can be overwhelmed by Hacksaw Jim Duggan. Good luck targeting the robot circuitry with your lightning gun, chief; my army will be over here wiping out their circuitry and also converting their metal exoskeletons into shrapnel with a cannon that was last used at Gettysburg.
I have been bitten by dogs that were meaner than this weapon. I could easily take a blast from the plasma cannon. Do not think of bringing it to face me on the field of battle. I would walk right through it, laughing, and then lift the cannon's operator by the elastic of his undies and sling-shot him over the horizon. I cook my steaks with hotter stuff than this quote-unquote "plasma."
Leyh has better instruments of destruction than this one just sitting around in his closets. Check this out:
I can't see convincing an enemy to grip the two electrodes of this device while in the heat of battle, but it's enough to know that if he did he would be totally blown apart for his foolishness.
