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original drawn by poropun

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    1K17

    5000 hits commemoration picture, no-text version.
    An experimental laser tank of the USSR, it would expose the enemy to powerful lasers. The enemy's eyes and optical sensors would be disrupted.

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    Rathurue
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    NWSiaCB said:

    Wow... 13 different 30 kg rubies that are then dipped in silver? Reading some fantasy novels, I'm just thinking how you could buy a small kingdom with that kind of weapon.

    Lab-grown rubies are kinda cheap, you know? Google searching gives 29$ per carat of premium quality, gem-grade (which was not used here), and optics-grade gems costs about the same as colorless sapphire we used nowadays as screen protectors.

    To be fair, you can't use boule method to create the lenses, since boule method will create synthetic rubies with distorted crystal patterns (as in, the rubies are formed as microstructures of singular crystals adhering to each other) but then you can always refine the boule rubies into flux rubies, essentially melting them and recrystallizes it into one singular lone crystal.

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    • NWSiaCB
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    Rathurue said:

    Lab-grown rubies are kinda cheap, you know? Google searching gives 29$ per carat of premium quality, gem-grade (which was not used here), and optics-grade gems costs about the same as colorless sapphire we used nowadays as screen protectors.

    To be fair, you can't use boule method to create the lenses, since boule method will create synthetic rubies with distorted crystal patterns (as in, the rubies are formed as microstructures of singular crystals adhering to each other) but then you can always refine the boule rubies into flux rubies, essentially melting them and recrystallizes it into one singular lone crystal.

    Yeah, but as I said, I was just reading fantasy novels, and got to thinking of what their value was before the ability to manufacture them. It's sort of like how just enough pepper to fill a grinder was worth the same as the ship that sailed it into port, or how aluminum was once more rare and valuable than gold, to the point that Napoleon had aluminum dining ware to show that he was more wealthy than people who ate with mere silver. Sometimes the differences in values over time just stagger the mind.

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