Trying to focus my laser but running into issues

[brent113]

Maybe this will help explain why albedo is the reason why

Laser dropouts failure

These two seems like different manifestations of the underlying problem. Instead of thinking that when the laser turns on, it’s a sharp transition from “off” to “on”, there’s some function that represents the laser power output. Properly scaled, it starts at zero, goes to one, and takes some finite (and overly long) time to do it. The difference between black and white paper is a difference in laser power delivered as heat to the paper. Black has lower albedo than white, which is almost a tau…