19-Year-Old Makes Homemade Solar Death Ray 317
An anonymous reader writes "Concentrated solar power has the potential to generate immense amounts of energy — but it can also be amazingly destructive. American student Eric Jacqmain has assembled over 5,800 mirrors into his own parabolic 'solar Death Ray'."
Stay in School (Score:4, Insightful)
Title is little misleading, to say the least. (Score:2, Insightful)
5800 mirrors, the size of fingernails. Glued on an already parabolic disc.
Couldn't he just have spray canned it with some reflective paint??
I imagined at least 10x10cm mirrors. Now that would have been "solar power".
wake me up when he heating his house with this. This little satellite disc is kids stuff.
This is retarded. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Mythbuster 3.0 (Score:4, Insightful)
That is why the legend says soldiers with polished sheets of metal. From there on the quality of aiming at the focal point depends on how good is sarge with the baton and the "give me 80 pushups in full gear" aim correction method.
Realistically a trained squad can aim and keep aimed around 40-80. Probably a 100 tops. That is more than enough to blind _ANYONE_ on the attacking ship in the days before sunglasses. I doubt that this would have been enough to set it on fire though. In any case, with the captain, skipper and most of the crew blind while facing catapults throwing burning tar buckets and 1m diameter stone balls the ship was as good as burning anyway.
No adjustable focus point (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole point of the death ray is to be able to adjust the focus point.
The Mythbusters tried to set a boat on fire... which was assumed to be an enemy boat passing along the coast.
You can't reasonably expect the enemy boats to sail exactly at the focus point of your death ray... or to either come closer or go further away in case they are not at the focus point of your death ray.
This 19-year-old hasn't made the focus point adjustable... so you can't set a moving target at a variable distance on fire with it.
Any dish shaped thing with mirrors has a focus point - especially satellite dishes - so this isn't exactly rocket science.
Re:The miracle is that a 19 year old persisted (Score:5, Insightful)
I have the simple solution to that question: a girl said she thought it would be cool.
Re:Mythbuster 3.0 (Score:3, Insightful)
wtf guys?
The "WTF" is that it's not a bunch of scientists, it's just entertainment television and nothing more. There's some math and science involved, but the actual purpose of the show is just to have something fun and interesting to watch.