I am tired of lasers. Can you think of an original sci-fi weapon with physically possible effects? There are many good answers here, but I will add: What about the green laser pointer that really work? If no medium can pass through, they are invisible, and they actually travel at the speed of light. You just stand there, you have a burning sensation, and then there is a hole through you. Or you are blind.
Or something like this, which is a truly modern laser weapon. Does the laser microphone need to be reflected back to the source platform to detect audio, or can it detect audio by sensing the vibration of the beam itself? In theory, the intelligence modulated into the beam by the vibration of the glass can be detected and restored by any suitable receiver in the beam path.
However, in fact, every “laser bug” application I’ve heard of requires a retroreflector to be installed on the window in question. In most cases, the CIA used a small, almost invisible prism, secretly glued to the glass with a transparent adhesive. Hobbyists have been building laser receivers, and they work well under optimal conditions…in the wild, it is not very practical.
When a wave is emitted from a “point” in a homogeneous medium, it will propagate as a spherical wave, centered on that point. When the wave is emitted from a line, the wave is cylindrical. If it is not an infinite line, then the same is true for small distances. At a great distance, a line is like a point. When a wave is emitted from an infinite plane, it is a plane wave.
Again, this is only within a short distance. At a long distance, the plane is also a point… Now the only difference is that the propagation is on one side… the other side wave is there, but it is absorbed by the plane wave generator. So how can the laser pointer look like a line that hardly spreads. This is artificially made. If you make any light in a narrow and long tube, the light comes out of it, and it looks like a laser beam… This is because there are too many reflections and combinations in the tube, eliminating all other directions Only a narrow beam along the tube is left.