Slashdot Mirror
The Solar Death Ray
Ant writes the "Solar Death Ray is made of 112 mirrors mounted on a platform 4 feet wide and 6 feet tall. Each mirror is a square roughly 3.5 inches on edge. All these mirrors focus the sun to a single spot 5 feet, 6 inches from the mirror platform. A wooden fork extends from the mirror base to the area near the focus and serves as a mounting point for Solar Death Ray targets. The mirror platform is mounted to the support frame on a pivot that allows the platform to be angled. The whole system is mounted on a set of wheels. The goal of the Web site was to show the results of the targeted items when the solar death ray was used."
And Batman & Robin wasn't very good.
How I squandered my youth and why I didn't get laid.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Use the Coralized link here!
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Solar Death Ray Guy's next News entry should be fun.
Trolling is a art,
Kent! Where'd you put the giant bag of popcorn at?
I want to build one of these now... Except I'm in Northern England. I'd be lucky if it could melt marshmallows :p
It's really only a "death ray" if you're really really tiny. Mythbusters did a great job of blowing the myth apart, with a much larger mirror array arranged in a proper fresnel configuration. It douldn't set fire to much of anything, even when they put gasoline on the target.
...someone puts that damn Rock and Roll music to good use!
Get your Unix fortune now!
Dantooine. I mean Alderan. I don't understand the question.
Wonder how much juice you could generate if you were to mount a stirling engine at the end of this sucker. Seems like it'd be a lot cheaper/easier to implement than normal high efficiancy solar cells if you could work out a reasonable and reliable sun tracking system.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Yeah, but can you mount it on the head of a friggin shark?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
when you can just point Slashdot at a server?
Mirrors do the same as magnification, it concentrates the sun in one place.
s .html
Anyway, it's been done before:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bclee/len
Claude Angers
Don't look at mirrors with remaining... er... head...
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
THIS is a solar death ray: 10 metres of high-precision parabolic polished aluminium. (And there are bigger ones out there in the world too.)
I've observed there. Because it is radio astronomy, we could observe before sunset and after sunrise, but for some reason we had strict instructions to never let the sun fall on the dish. (That includes the back, but that was to do with thermal distortion of the dish, rather than frying the focus.)
I also used my HP48SX calculator (running a terminal emulator) to command the telescope to slew. Because of this, I claim the CSO as world's the largest and most expensive peripheral for a pocket calculator.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Well... the whole point is energy per unit area on the object.
This is focused light via reflection, not refraction as would come from a magnifying glass or lense.
This contraption probably wouldn't gain much by using a lense. Extra square footage of mirrors would increase it's delicious fry-it power though....
Larry Niven invented the "flashmob" years ago. Now, it looks like someone has come up with something similar to his Ringworld "Sunflowers", which consisted of petal-ringed mirrors which could focus on prey and turn it into ash fertilizer.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Yes.
The claim was that Archimedes thought up having 1000+ soldiers use their reflective bronze shields to shine sunlight on enemy ships. Thus igniting and incinerating them.
They tried this on MythBusters and it didn't work. But they don't always do a perfect job on that show, and since armies were huge back in the day....I wouldn't be surprized if it worked.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
No, because they would get very HOT, and the efficiency goes down dramatically with increasing temperature.
Actually the Mythbusters were trying to take out a wooden boat that was a couple hundred meters (that part I'm not sure of). They wanted it to catch fire. This guy is concentrating the energy and melting stuff, not actually setting anything on fire (except the clue board). Setting fire to a wooden boat far away is a lot tougher than melting a rubber ducky.
Better patent that idea before someone else makes use of it.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
This one is a bit bigger!
The parabolic reflector gaves at the focal point a maximum flux of 1000 W/cm2. The experimentations takes place at the focal zone (18 m in front of the paraboloid. The range of available temperature is from 800 to 2500 C (the maximum reachable temperature is 3800 C) for a maximum thermal power of 1000 kW.
(Did someone just say holy fucking shit?)
Picture of the Odeillo Solar Furnace
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Why, you're absolutely right. It's a myth. This guy must have FAKED all those photos!
Although I found the justification for the Hootie and the Blowfish tape hilarious, he should be flogged with a bamboo cane for burning that tetris disk. That thing was a fucking museum piece!
You are such a nerd. We will have to make you king of the winter carnival.
10 metres of high-precision parabolic polished aluminium
Why aluminum? Is it the most reflective substance on earth?
we had strict instructions to never let the sun fall on the dish
No matter where you point it, you are pointing it somewhere.
And make sure to not leave it pointing in the direction of the only all-black fraternity house on campus. That could start up those nasty black versus nerd wars again. Instead, point it at the Sigma Chi house, those bastards are always burning down their own house... nobody will suspect anything.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
I'd like to see a beowulf cluster of those...
No, it was a laser... very intense highly colimated (parallel) light. This site is about a parabolic reflector, which makes the light converge on a small area. Lasers can target any point in line with the beam. With a parabolic reflector, the light gets weaker (less concentrated) as you move past the focus. Beyond the distance between the reflector and the focal point the light is weaker than the origional light. Of course this is a faceted reflector, so the light isn't really weaker, it's just less and less likely that any point on a plane parallel to the relector will be illuminated the further away from the focal point you are.
Given that he was able to set a rag on fire, I'm guessing that the Mythbusters team did something incorrectly regarding the focusing of their mirrors. And your link says they used a circular configuration which is only good in limited cases since the light is focused in a line (which isn't really focus) rather than a point. This was parabolic setup which is why he was able to melt plastic and set a rose on fire.
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Wired article as proof
Maybe not igniting them directly, but...
How about blinding the sailors on board, who then run around in a panic and knock over the pot of charcoals used for igniting the flaming arrows? Carcoals ignite the ship's deck instead, or someone's clothes, the fire spreads, voila. No more battleship.
The magnifying glass would have to be the same area as the sum of the areas of the facets.
Proof: Take a microscope and set it to 500X. Point the objective at the sun. Do you death rays spewing from the eyepiece? (Answer: no). To find out why, read the first paragraph or ask someone that *really* knows. (Hopefully someone that took some optics (physics) or astronomy)
I hate to be the one to point this out, but um. They haven't actually killed anything. This more accurately should be called a Solar Plastic-Melting Ray.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
You forgot libstdcpp.
I surrender.
Under perfect conditions, you should be able to reach the surface temperature of the sun - about 5600 C. This will be reduced by atmospheric absorption, imperfect reflectivity of your mirrors, etc.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
No offense here to Larry Niven (big SF fan here) but Archimedes has prior art for them since 2200 years or so.
"Slashdot Death Ray is made of 1 website and no mirrors of the target site mounted on a platform of linux, perl, and horribly mangled html. Each user is a square (ed. note: update to modern parlance, ie "geek"). All these mirrors focus the slashdot to a single web server. A wooden fork is stuck into the web server after it melts to signify that it is "done". The mirror platform is often asked for and often denied by CmdrTaco, who mounted his stock answer on an FAQ somewhere. The whole system is mounted on a stack of open protocols dating back to the early days of DARPA. The goal of the Web site was to show the results of the targeted items when the slashdot death ray was used."
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I always wanted to round up a kindergarten class worth of children to act as my solar death squad. Here's how it would work:
1. Give each kid their own shiny little mirror with a post-it note stuck on it to block the shiny part
2. One at a time, have them remove the post-it, aim their mirror to reflect the sun upon some point, then re-post-it.
3. Once everyone is aimed (30 kids or so), have them all remove their post-its at once, instantly creating a plasma-hot ball of fire at the point of focus, incinerating your enemies with the might of a kindergarten class.
Has anyone else had this idea too, or am I the only weirdo around here?
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What sort of lame museum exhibits things you can buy for $5 on ebay?
Tetris the Classic PC Puzzle Video Game 5.25" 3.5"
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
No, Mister Duck. I expect you to die!
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
Yeah, I'm checking this out right now.
p hp
http://www.wentworth.nsw.gov.au/solartower/faq.
It doesn't use mirrors, but a covered substrate which captures the hot air (greenhouse effect), and funnels it into a large central tower.
The hot air (no water/steam required in this design) then moves the turbines.
Looks pretty sweet.
http://augustwestproducts.i8.com
This is a solar furnace, of which there are many in use today. The biggest one in the world is the Odeillo Solar Furnace located in Odeillo, France. The top 3 in use in the United States are at Sandia National Labs, Georgia Tech and the White Sands Missile Test Range. Awesome stuff!
One amusing side note is that Frank Gehry's popular postmodern buildings have been noted to act as solar collectors, effectively frying people passing by on the sidewalk.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I hate to be the one to point this out, but um. They haven't actually killed anything. This more accurately should be called a Solar Plastic-Melting Ray.
No, he did kill some something: Army men. Okay, maybe they are made of plastic, but they're still men.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
You'd be right if there were no atmosphere.
polished aluminum is used because its sub-mm but not extremely sub-mm (ie, optical).
its been awhile, so i forget the exact formula, but basically your surface can be as rough as some fraction of the wavelength you're trying to focus. Hence, wide waves can use dirty and/or rough surfaces (such as arecibo, which is just a hole in the ground and some perforated aluminum panels) and still work just fine, even when soiled as a huge bowl in the ground is bound to become.
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There is no way that would fit on the head of a dolphin.
So what use is it to me?
the death ray is 4 feet mirror is 4 feet by 6 feet. It looks to have a bout 50% of its area covered with cheap mirrors, which I'll assume are about 80% refelective. that makes it about a square meter of effective reflectivity. the solar flux near the equator is about 1 kilowatt per sq meter. This is focused down to an area of about 6 inches square or about the size of a stove burner. A typical stove burner probably runs at about 1.5 KW. so basically this thing has the heat delivery of a burner. Actually a bit less since the object itself may be reflective over a large part of the spectrum. So call it maybe half a stove burner. Still plenty to fry plastic, your hand, or even start a fire.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
> I surrender.
Wait a minute; isn't this backwards?
hawk
I have this mental image of him trying to sneak up on the "enemy" to get that thing within 4 feet of them and then trying to get on the side of them away from the sun...
"Behold the terrible power of the SUN! Hold still, please!"
I don't know how this got to (Score 3, Insightful), but the genius mod responsible is my new fucking hero.
do not read this line twice.
No, the original poster was only mentioning it for the fourth time. And they posted it no more than 2 minutes after the original mention of Mythbusters.
I agree with the grandparent - the post really didn't need to be moderated redundant. Some moderators seem to be under the delusion that just because a post is 3/4 of the way down the page that it was posted *after* all the comments above it, and somehow the poster must have submitted despite all the references that already existed.
Read the posting times, and cut the guy some slack.
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Sorta, anyway. This is a link to the UNLV Solar Project, a project playing with new ideas in solar energy such as focus the light to a specific point (roughly, of course) to increase the uptake of energy by the receptors. I drive by these bad boys everyday. UNLV Solar
What is your penile percentile?
At least half their experiments have been organized so poorly that they failed when its well documented something works, and that was a prime example.
Its entertainment, not science. Don't watch it to learn anything about the reality of the "myths", watch it because its freakin' hot to see Kari bound up in the water torture episode.
(Oops, did I just say too much?)
Oh Dear... I hope this does not add up ...
Myth Busters tried this one too to duplicate something Pythagoras (I think) was supposed to have done.
Archimedes. You're talking about using mirrors to set fire to the sails of attacking ships, right?
David Gould
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