The boys over at North Street Labs built a handheld burning laser and made it look super simple ... Now the real build starts. They hit the metal lathe and machined a housing for the diode ...

A laser of such an intensity is “sufficient to cut through metal”, wrote a research team led by Li Xiao, an associate researcher with the school of optoelectronic science and engineering of ...

Even sheet metal is no match for a 1 kW laser, and can be melted through in about a tenth of a second. Mind you, kilowatt-class lasers are still far too heavy and bulky for a compact drone to carry.