Teenage Mad Scientist Creates Solar Death Ray
- Thread starter vansau
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You didn't actually pay attention during that episode obviously. This is proven and widely used technology in many solar power plants around the world. Myth Busters merely proved that Archimedes couldn't have used it to set ships on fire with the materials and technology he had at his disposal.Jabberwock xeno said:
The show is not crap, and they prove a lot more than you'd probably ever do in your entire life, bud. So chill out.ReverendJ said:
For the thread, the Mythbuster's episode, they used individual mirrors and had extreme difficulty getting everyone to align up properly, even when they did a re-take of it using hundreds of volunteers at the same time. For Archimedes to sink the approaching ships: Yes, it was impossible. But to have enough intensified beams striking a single object from the sun? No, if you calibrate the mirrors appropriately. As you can see from the video, he has hundreds of miniature mirrors in close proximity and alignment, rather than hundreds of fat large mirrors just randomly placed, this is almost similar to how lasers work with their small beams and mirrors (not exactly, but close in how we're just trying to explain this).
Good work for the guy, and hope he wins a science fair for this. If not, let's hope the Judges don't go outside in the sun... eh?
No, they found out that giving 500 studends a heavy, bulky mirror and telling them to aim while standing behind it wasn't a viable way to get 500 times the sunlight in one location and subsequently use them to set a ship(which is in the middle of the ocean, which each wrongly aimed beam spraying up more vapors to absorb more heat). And they admitted that while ships burn at at 200 degrees+, human crews are liable to boil at half that and die of heat exhaustion at a quarter, especially when they're wearing heavy equipment(as marines preparing for landfall in the middle of a battlefield tend to do).Jabberwock xeno said:
Also, this video is from early 2010. Apparently, the "journalistic standards" this section adheres to so strictly that people questioning them get banned don't prevent it from basically being the editor's "hey I saw something cool on youtube" blog.
Bah! He is but a rank amateur compared to Doctor Colossus!
Luckily the UK is safe as it would require sunshine to operate.
Luckily the UK is safe as it would require sunshine to operate.
GothmogII said:
Oh, I'm just awash with possible memes to use here.. He's charging his lazor, is it the Alan Parson's Project? (Good to see one Dr. Evil has been done but where's the "Laser"?)
Good to see that mad science is still being taught to the kids of today.
I think...I think I feel...Humanity isn't all bad?
Pah, preposterous!
Edit: Mythbusters:
It's referred to as the Archimedes Death Ray.
)No they prooved it was impossible to produce a similarly working ray with an effective combat range.Agayek said:
They are no point disproved such an effect was possible at about 4 foot, which is this geeks trick, the mythbusters set themselves a distance of something like 100ft, and prooved no array of even modern mirrors could be effective at that range.
Any large perfectly arrayed parabolic mirror array will do this, the addition of the sun angle line up scope was impressive though.
I think it is over 5,000 (from the 5,800 mirrors) times the heath of the sun in a penny size area on earth's surface and not 5,000 times the heath of the solar surface.
I tought that if i biult one of those it would cause a fire and then I read that that one was burned.
I tought that if i biult one of those it would cause a fire and then I read that that one was burned.
The claim that was made was not that the deathray was impossible, just not terribly probable.Agayek said:
For such a thing to work, the mirrors need to be aligned on the same location (made easy by the parabolic dish backing the guy used). This leads to a problem that the target must be located at the focal point of the parabola. This in turn means the device is only useful as a weapon at very specific ranges. If the platform cannot easily command this range (by vastly superior mobility) or this distance cannot be adjusted, it isn't terribly useful simply because the effective range is measured in the span of a few inches (for anything small enough to be mobile)
"5000 suns" is bullshit, with that out of the way, it is quite impressive. During my long summer break after finishing GCSEs I built a coil gun (NOT a rail gun, wikipedia is your friend). It worked quite well, though it was quite terrifying at times. They are very inefficient, in order to launch something with modest speed you are looking at a few hundred amps peak discharge at 250v+ depending on set-up (for the uninitiated: enough to make wiring yourself up to a plug socket an attractive proposition).
Twas a summer well spent.
Twas a summer well spent.
