[boris]

"Considering you can get maybe 2 kW of power per square meter from solar collectors, you'd need about 500,000 square meters of solar panels to power this puppy"

The "Solar Constant" is only 1.37 kW/m2, not 2 kW/m2. Solar cells probably cannot be made more than, say, 30% efficient. So you would need much more power even if the weapon part worked as claimed--highly dubious.

--Boris

[Junior]

I went out and checked the numbers. You're right about the amount of solar power per square meter -- it runs between 1.3 kW and 1.4 kW. The highest efficiency came in at about 34 percent. Therefore, to power this critter, per shot, would require ~2500 square kilometers of solar panels (or a square 50 klicks on a side -- that's about 30 miles for you luddites out there). Of course, one could scale this back a bit at the cost of rate-of-fire...