system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Warehouse 13] How do the Tesla's and their later upgrades work?

So, I've been working at the Warehouse for a while now, and I get it. Duck and cover, don't ingest the neutraliser, if it's old it's probably trying to kill you, especially if it's Artie... I get the gist.

Thing is, I've been using this ray gun thing from day one, and I still don't know *what* it is. It's like, a long range taser, made by a Nikola Tesla?

There are no wires, it just shoots a ball of lightning. I dunno what's holding that together long enough to make it across a room.

When it hits someone, it just knocks them out, and "zaps" their short term memory away? Why's it only zapping that? Shouldn't they feel like they stuck their finger in a socket, and remember plenty about how painful that just was?

It used to use a battery, I think. In the dinosaur age. Artie's always talking about how in the original design, you had to recharge them back at the Warehouse, but now, ever since Agent Donovan got her hands on them, they just... charge themselves. I'm not even sure if they take any time to do it, I've used them in the Warehouse shooting range for hours. How did she change the design so much, and where's all the power coming from all of a sudden?

That's not even mentioning the Tesla grenades and Tesla Rifle...

I'm telling you, Tesla made these things with his own two hands, just like Claudia made the grenades. They're real, honest ingenuity, not artifact mojo. So, unlike most of this place, they *can* be explained. Help me out?
gpt
Self charging them is easy. There is abandoned energy all over the world, the trick is capturing it with a high enough efficiency to make it worth the effort. Anytime you walk around, you are walking through electromagnetic fields. Especially now with WiFi networks and the Earth's magnetic field. If you accelerate a magnet through an electric field, you can generate current. Just walking around with the modified Tesla in your pocket is sufficient to charge it. The trick is you need room temperature super conductors so that all the minuscule currents you generate aren't just dissipated due to resistance in the wires. And the energy storage has to be efficient enough that you can capture it. Having access to the warehouse means you have access to all sorts of exotic matter that with patience can be used very effectively. 


As far as how it shoots directed lightning, same way that lightning shoots lightning. The Tesla doesn't actually shoot lightning, it shoots a specialized electrostatic beam at the target, generating sufficient electrostatic difference until lightning just happens as a side effect of charging the target. The Tesla maintains a pool of negative charge, generates the localized area of positive charge and boom.


The memory mechanism is a little less well understood. In theory, memories are made by connecting neurons in specific pathways. Your short term memory is the most vulnerable to manipulation, as these pathways are not well established. It's similar to trailblazing. The first time you make a memory, you make a trail through dense brush. The more times you access the memory, the trail becomes easier to travel and better defined. The localized electrostatic beam disrupts these recently connected pathways, and prevents them from being stabilized, hence you lose your memory. More well establish memories are much better maintained, so it's more difficult to disrupt them without much higher energies. However, Teslas have that nasty side effect of vaporizing things when you put too much energy in the electrostatic beam at the target.