Posted on 02/03/2011 5:15:15 AM PST by numberonepal
I still have an old Prime-Star satellite dish lying around in one of my sheds. I just took a look at ebay, and 1/2” square adhesive-backed mosaic tile mirrors are selling for around $15.00 per thousand.
I’m thinking my 9 year old son will be VERY stoked about helping me build one of these things once I show him the video (he is very in to ‘fire’ right now).
Thus, it is possible some time in the next couple of weeks that we will be trying to replicate this experiment. If we decide to go for it I’ll let everyone know how it turns out.
—reminds me of the claim some years ago in one of the “Popular -—” magazines that you could shoot down airliners with a microwave oven-—
That’s pretty cool! It’s kinda like an inside-out disco ball! I happen to have an old PrimeStar satellite dish from about 15 years ago out behind my shed. Now I just need thousands of tiny mirrors, a bucket of glue, and a lot of time to waste.
LOL, of course you did, but nice guy that you are, you left a little for me.
Those were some of my favorite books as a youngster.
Much better than Harry Potter. Potter was lazy kids magic. The mad scientist club used real tools and imagination to create their own “magic”.
Before sealed beam headlights cars used parabolic reflectors. We used to play with them, they will concentrate a lot of heat.
Archimedes goes further back than that! He used the technology to sink enemy ships.
Oops! You beat me to it ... I should have known freepers would catch this quickly!
Not fake, just mathematical. The power of the reflected light is inversely proportional to the relationship between the size of the mirror and the distance of the focus. Notice how large the kid’s dish is, and how close the objects are? You could easily build a solar concentrator to take down a ship provided the diameter of your concentrator is greater than the distance of focus. Of course, then the mirror might be an even deadlier weapon if you just pushed it over onto your target.
42 inches is a little over a meter, so we’ll call it a meter for this exercise. Area of a circle is pi * radius^2, or pi * (0.5)^2, or 0.25 pi. Pi is roughly 3, so area is 3/4 square meters. The solar constant is 1200 W/m^2, so his “death ray” has a maximum power of 900 Watts.
The trick is the focus — 900 Watts over a square centimeter gets mighty hot.
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