Video Games Tutorials and News - Hydrogen Powered Halo Energy Sword
Intro
in this episode of Make It Real, Bogdan creates the world's first plasma energy sword from halo. With four nozzles, you can only imagine how much power we're going to be dumping out of this thing. Halo Infinite has arrived, and we're excited about it. We're going to be doing three special episodes tackling three different iconic pieces of technology from the game.
Charles will build Master Chief's weapon of choice, the ma5, and Chelsea is working on the halo hud to give us a real-life halo perspective, and today, Bogdan gets us started with the energy sword. Wait a sec, this is a lightsaber. This can't be right. The halo energy sword is a blade of confined plasma, so yeah, James is right, it is just like our lightsaber. But unlike our lightsaber, it has this weird triangular shape with a gap in the middle, not a single beam, so what if I take four of these and shape them into ?.
Lets talk nozzles
This is where the magic happens. This is the glass storage technology, the mirage nozzle used for glass blowing. We used one of these nozzles in our lightsaber build and it worked phenomenally.
So we reached out to GTT and we're partnering with them for this project. They sent us four more. Here's the thing: Hooking up one of these nozzles is not so simple. This might look like one continuous flame, but it's actually 40 smaller individual flames that are mixed together perfectly to give us our plasma blade.
Each of these flames is comprised of two gases, hydrogen and oxygen, mixed together in three precise amounts: once for the inner ring of nozzles and once for the outer ring of nozzles. I'm going to need six hoses for each one of these nozzles, so if my math is right, we're going to need 24 hoses. How am I going to hook up 24 hoses?.
So many hoses
A manifold is a piper's chamber branching into several openings, and that's exactly what we need to do. We need to take two hoses in and hook them up. With 24 hoses out, that's a lot of hoses. First, the fuel line enters the solenoid, which allows us to turn the whole sword on and off. Then this gets split into two pathways, one for the inner angle flames and one for the outer ring of flame.
Finally, they get split into four pathways, one for each nozzle. So all we have to do now is put them together. This is our final fuel manifold. We've got one fuel line in and eight fuel lines out. I've also gone ahead and made an oxygen manifold which does the same thing. We have one oxygen line in and 16 oxygen lines outwards.
This means we have two input lines and 24 output lines to power all of our nozzles. Over the years, we've built a ton of stuff, ranging from pretty simple to extremely elaborate. It takes a lot of tools to bring your favorite things from comics, article games, and movies to life. From the laser cutter to grinders, saws, soldering irons, welding stations, you name it, we've used it, but every single project starts with a design and, far more often than not, for us, that means using solid work.
Seriously, it's actually kind of hard to think of a project off the top of my head that didn't use Solidworks. If you want to get into creating things like we do, Solidworks should be your first step, and there's never been a better time than right now to get started. 3D experience Solidworks for Makers is a new, groundbreaking bundle that brings the industry's best 3D design tools to makers and do-it-yourselfers all over the world for the insanely low price of only 99 a year.
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Hydrogen or propane?
For the lightsaber , we used propane and oxygen. We chose propane because it's stored liquid, so we can get away with a smaller tank and fit it onto a backpack. These two tanks lasted us about eight minutes. But for the halo energy sword, we're using four nozzles, so we're going to need a little bit more gas.
We're going to need a different solution because we're going to be using 140 liters per minute of oxygen. That's equivalent to 72-liter pot bottles. Not to mention, we also need an additional 40 liters per minute of fuel. That's an additional 22-liter bottle, and even though we buy our gases and compressed tanks, it's still too much for a backpack.
There's no way that this is going to fit on my back. For the halo energy sword, we're going to need a tether, and if we're going to have a tether, we might as well use a fuel that'll give us the most energy, and for us, that's hydrogen. Let me show you why. Three, two, one. So the oxyhydrogen flame melts the steel at about fifty percent faster.
Handle design
With four nozzles, you can only imagine how much power we're going to be dumping out of this thing. Well, since the only solid part of the entire sword is the handle, we have to design a handle that's going to hold the nozzles and give us the flame shape of the sword. To do that, we're going to Okay, now that we have our handle in here, we just need to trace it, so I'm going to grab some marks.
Solidworks is a great option for design software because it is super powerful. You can basically design anything you can dream up, whether it's lightsabers, halo swords, power loaders, you name it, and it's actually pretty easy to learn. There's a lot of great content on both Solidworks as a website and across the internet to be able to do just about anything, and then we can just extrude, and bam, there we have the basic outline of our handle.
Now we just need to make it look nicer to round those off, so let's start with the bulbs on the ends. We can use our revolve feature and the sketch we made before to round those off, so let's just select that there, select the axis of revolution. And there we go. You know, on the other hand, as well, it's looking a little bit better already.
Let's give it some fillets. Now we have our basic handle, but unfortunately I'm not an elite and I don't have three fingers, so we have to figure out how to make this comfortable to hold for a human while also figuring out where to put our nozzles. I'm thinking one on either side for the straight two flames and then two angled ones to make that triangular shape.
