Ed Teller appearing in the Oppenheimer trailer just to turn to the camera and state "boy imagine if someone made a BIGGER bomb haha" is a bit on the nose, but I trust Nolan.

mixing things up by just not posting at all

I was thinking that to actually keep the beam on the poor gull long enough to cook it would be impossible at this distance due to stall speeds, but luckily for us (not the birds) we're flying an F-35B today and can just ominously hover and cook poultry at leisure.

So our total beam area is 20/4 = 5m^2. Assuming a beam dispersion of ~2.5 degrees (I think this is maybe an unrealistically tight though), our beam is 5m^2 at ~114 m.

AFAIK there's no solid public numbers on AN/APG-81 power output, but ~20kW seems like a reasonable low-ish estimate (total electrical generation on the F-35 is ~160 kVA, supposedly set to expand up to as much as ~400 kVA to support big boy DE weapons).

Pacific gull is 55-65 cm long, being lazy and treating the target area as a circle with ~56 cm diameter gives a target area of ~0.25 m^2. We want to deliver microwave oven amounts of power, so lets assume ~1kW on target, or ~4kW/m^2.

With 25 follows from 0 posts my k/d ratio is infinitely better than on twitter