My issue with the project (apart from the whole balloon-popping part) is that he used 6 laser pointers from Wicked Lasers. (Well, 7 if you count the green one used for aiming.) With the skills the guy had to have to build the rest of the rig, he could have built his own modules for the laser portion. That would have been way cooler.
It wouldn't be too hard to build one of these if you started with a working gatling gun toy. I had one of
these things for my kids a long time ago - I think that would be a good place to start.
I would have put 10 or 12 of the 9 mm can 445 blues on that bitch. Sure, it would have been dangerous as hell, but that was a given the moment someone first thought of a laser gatling gun. (Didn't they have one of those in Fallout 3?) 6 watts is impressive, but it could have been 25-30 watts and been truly deadly.
Then again, if I did build one, I'd have to punch myself too...
*WAS* a spire... Now it's slag!
I'm surprised you didn't lose more electronics inside your house. I had a strike about 150 ft from the house years ago, and it took out all kinds of appliances. (Induced one hell of a surge in both the electrical and phone wiring in the walls.)
Adam