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Comment on We could build a solar lazer with a ton of mirrors

They did everything wrong in that video. On of their assertions was that soldiers wouldn’t be able to keep their mirrors properly polished. I don’t know about now, but even 40 years ago, polishing brass was a common punishment detail. I imagine it was moreso in Archimedes’ day, when brass and bronze were the thing to use. Also, there are techniques for using a signaling mirror to hit a specific location which aren’t that complicated, would certainly be something that Archimedes could figure out, and would work better for aligning the mirrors than “try really hard to aim at that spot.” The ridiculous assumptions they make besides those also detract from the goal of a best effort to test the heat ray, and seem to stem from the idea that people back then were stupider than we are rather than just not having accumulated as much knowledge as we had.

It was entertaining, but not as informative as I would have liked.

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papalonian@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
My bad, I forgot there were two episodes on this, I think maybe you only saw the first one or parts of it. There was a huge wooden structure with hundreds of mirrors arranged in a concave shape that almost perfectly aligned all mirrors’ reflections into one spot and absolutely nothing happened. Even with perfect mirrors and modern construction tools and techniques we couldn’t recreate it.

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- Battle_Masker@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  
  Our death ray doesn’t seem to be working right. I’m standing right in it, and I’m not dead yet.
  
  Jamie Hyneman
  
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  - papalonian@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    It is one of my favorite quotes from the entire series. Never before has a man painted a picture of himself as vivid as Jamie did when he delivered this line.
    
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- GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Ah, that could be. Probably due to responses to their first one where they had a bunch of college students holding little mirrors and trying to aim them, and I’ve never watched Mythbusters regularly.
  
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fuzzzerd@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
To be fair, they did build a customised rig to aim, using real mirrors to simulate a perfect case scenario, and still failed. While they did mention those issues, they did try to replicate the results pretty faithfully IMO.

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