plan ahead

 

 If I had made a drawing and taken a little more time fabricating this piece the first time, it would not be in two pieces now.

 The first time I made it, I just did it "by the seat of my pants" and it shows.

 So now I get to do it again.

 This piece is for a fancy, one-of-a-kind "prototype plasma pistol" which will look like a real working device and not a fancy, smooth, well-rounded "ray gun" at all.

 The story that will go with it is that it is a found object, discovered among the personal effects of obscure (and possibly assassinated by a shadowy government agency!) inventor "Uncle Otto".

 The device will include an expensive but replaceable tritium gas light source, which will get dim in fifteen years, but will glow continuously until then.  Unfortunately, one cannot simply include spares, since every tritium capsule that exists today will be exhausted in twenty years.  You have to buy a fresh-made one when the time comes, assuming they don't get banned in the mean time.  Again.

  This is an old project which got set aside ten years ago because I was so broke I couldn't afford to buy even basic raw materials from which to make some parts I needed for it, never mind the fancy shit like a tritium gas capsule!  Nozzle in photos is after it broke, that's why it's crooked.

 Yes, it will have some sort of pistol grip / hand grip, but it will NOT have a housing - it is meant to look like it was built from real parts, and actually functions, but was never completed or turned into a production item - it's meant to look like an experimental prototype.

 I'm making it so it can be completely disassembled if someone wants to do that.  It has real electrical components now, and will have many more before completion.  It will not contain electronics which can wear out, nor will it use batteries, so no blinking lights and no goofy phaser sounds.  It is constructed in sections much like real high voltage, pulse-compression and plasma devices are made.  I am using my own knowledge of real-world plasma "guns" (lab devices, not weapons) to inform the design elements so it will look realistic, not "futuristic".

 It is also meant to NOT be fragile (unlike the Weta Workshop blasters, all of which have tiny, fiddly, fragile little parts which are known to break if you look at them cross-eyed), which is why now I must re-make the nozzle; it held up to casual handling for years, but when I knocked it over on the bench by accident, it broke because I had made the flared part too thin.  Oops.  In my defense, I had never made a flash hider for a plasma pistol before, let alone without any design drawings... it was my first time.