/cgl/ - Cosplay & EGL

So I'm currently in the preliminary design stage of working on a Laser Musket prop from Fallout 4.

I have a general idea of how to make it happen, but there are two questions which I need to answer before I can start making serious progress.

1) The gears linked to the crank handle before the glass ionizing chamber. The rearmost and frontmost wheels rotate in an opposite direction to the central wheel. Would it be wise to use a system of planetary gears (with the frame holding the "planet" gears fixed to the stock while the "sun" and "ring" gears would be left free to rotate) to invert the central wheel's rotation, or would be a simpler way to do this involving belts/rubber bands?
2) The lighting system. In Fallout 4, the energy in the ionizing chamber and the laser beam focused along the barrel of the gun gain brightness and intensity as the handle is cranked and charged more. Would it be better to just set up a circuit that has a dimmer switch built into the crank handle as well as a set of LEDs in the chamber (so that each crank raises the brightness slightly) and a reset switch in the trigger? Or would it be better to build a simple AC generator into the rotating wheels behind the chamber, link it to a lighting system in the chamber and actually have the brightness dependent on how hard I crank?