I think you 2 are saying the same things different ways.
If I understand @karaelena’s statement it’s a take on yours that if all the speed limit signs displayed an analogue gauge basically showing x% of your individual car’s full speed, we’d have one horrible mess given all the different max speeds of vehicles.
and to further confuse things, aren’t some of the pro’s improved cutting speed due to better optics to 20W output on Pro vs 20W output on basic will have a greater effective laserness?
That’s the real argument against %. 10% of 40W is 4W. 10% of 45W is 4.5W but it might be equivalent in terms of delivered energy of perhaps 13.5% of the Basic’s 40W (based on the 20% improvement metric I saw somewhere here last year).
In truth, since you’re balancing speed, power, passes, distance; and for engraves, LPI - there are simply too many variables (especially considering the materials are not uniform) to worry about such precision. It’s a case of “since we can measure to X precision, we must need X precision”. We really don’t. Any settings, whether shared by someone else or based on personal history are approximations as to the “ideal” and we just need good enough vs ideal. Ideal will consume you in chasing 4 or 5 variables in test iterations until you get it perfectly dialed in and then you’re going to swap in a new piece of wood 
I think that this is also key – materials aren’t uniform, and uniform increments in delivered energy don’t necessary deliver uniform increments in visible/measurable effect. So sometimes knowing the delivered energy might be useful, but a lot of times it could mislead you into thinking you know something.
The user experience will drive the interface. I like to get down in the nuts and bolts, others want something stupid proof. If the best way always won GF wouldn’t be called a 3D laser printer. I was able to get over that without a Psychiatrist.
Love it! We’re awash in data but often don’t realize we have no information
Well I find the last few replies incomprehensible. People seem to be arguing that a completely opaque measure of power is preferable to a well known physical unit. WTF! This is why I find a complete culture mismatch on these forums. More information is less useful?
The current power expressed in a percentage that is not actually a percentage is better than the actual wattage of the laser? The latter I can reason about, the former means very little at all. Why not have 1 to 11 and turn it up to 11 when lasering some home depot ply?
Because if power via PSU->laserness is not linear, but they magically map onto artificial units (in this case percent) then that would be more useful as I can understand the relationship between any two power settings without having to do polynomial math…
I think energy density is the closest you get to “laserness” but that is power over (speed times spot area).
Since spot area is constant when in focus I don’t see a better representation of power than wattage.
Except when pulsed…
Yes if it was pulsed it would need to be average power but I don’ think the GF laser is pulsed, just modulated by greyscale.
yay
a big reason to “obfuscate” the power settings as i understand it is that minimum power settings may not successfully fire the laser and maximum power settings may shorten tube life. if you’re that interested in knowing power draw you could easily measure at the socket and derive a model.
it’s a lot easier to do it this way because then you won’t have people constantly emailing you and demanding to know why they’re only allowed to input what seems to them to be a completely arbitrary number range.
additionally, i haven’t done any looking to check this, but is the power draw vs setting vs burn effect linear, anyway? i don’t think it is, and this might be something they could take into account in creating their user-facing power scale.
Yes a true power scale would not start at zero but that would say something to people, whereas 1% being a significant wattage does not.
I think burning effect is pretty linear with power and the GF percentage is certainly not. It can never be while it starts at 1.
Gotta say in this instance I agree with @palmercr completely.
I also see the benefits of making a 1-100 percentile(which is what this is…it’s not a power percentage-and maybe that’s a change that could help clarify where things lie). It just happens to be mis-labled as a percentage and becomes misleading that way to people who understand what a percentage is and the difference between it and a percentile.
And showing the wattage along with the other settings wouldn’t be a bad thing IMO. Just put it at the bottom where most people will ignore it.
it’s not misleading at all, it’s like complaining that your speaker dial doesn’t have wattages listed instead of an arbitrary number. i agree that it probably shouldn’t be called a true percentage of laser power, but is it? glowforge could simply say it’s a percentage of how lasery the output is.
Oh, yes! it should go from 0-11 because 10 just is not enough!
It is misleading because people think it is laserness but it isnt. So 1% should be 100 times less power but it currently is much more than that. When the low power settings where available it was a lot less but I don’t think you can run a CO2 laser at 1/100th of its power unless you pulse it.
If it was wattage then dividing it by speed would be a good indication of laserness.
Volume controls don’t show wattages because it isn’t a useful measure of loudness. They are actually logarithmic to match our perception of loudness but you can’t put wattage on because it depends on the what you are listening to and continuously varies. It is actually a gain control, not a power control.
It shows both actually:
Recv: ok T:57.2 /100.0 B:19.9 /0.0 T0:57.2 /100.0 @:25.71 B@:0.00
Target 100C, actual 57.2C, power 25.71 watts. 12 volts into 5.6 Ohm.
This is what just about everyone has been trying to tell you about wattage and the 
, not everyone thinks like you, if 20w is the min. sustainable power and 40 is max allowed regular folk expect that 30w is half way between and it is not as the curve is not linear. I have no idea how that curve runs but who needs a curve taped above their monitor when you can simply have a normalized number? You are correct that it is not a true percent but it is a linear number system that works quite well as 50 is right at half way between minumum and maximum.