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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
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.
Dantooine. I mean Alderan. I don't understand the question.
Yeah, but can you mount it on the head of a friggin shark?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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....
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.
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.
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?
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 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!"