Archimedes Death Ray in San Francisco

Monkey-Man2000 writes "Following the recent demonstration by MIT students that Archimedes' death ray could have been used to burn Roman ships, the producers of the Discovery Channel's Myth Busters invited the MIT team to San Francisco to try their death ray on an 80-year old fishing boat. This time, even with perfect weather, they were unable to set the boat afire. From the article, "Peter Rees, executive producer of "Myth Busters," said the experiment at the Hunters Point Shipyard showed that Archimedes' death ray was most likely a myth.""

Comments

So tell me

[elmegil]

Why are they trying to burn the wood, when it seems like the rigging should be easier to torch and just as debilitating?

flammability differences

[G4from128k]

I wonder if Roman ships may have been innately more flammable than that 80 year old boat. The use of tar or pitch to seal rough-hewn planks on the sides of the Roman ships would have made them more susceptible to fire. Any oiled cloth would also have made these ancient boats more flammable.

Roman navies.

[Savage-Rabbit]

Early Roman navys were often temporary entities although there were also permanent squadrons even during the later empire. By then it seems their main function was to combat pirates and smugglers since the Romans had by then eliminated all serious naval challengers. A large standing navy only reappeared during the very late imperial and Byzantine period when various barbarian and large moslem naval forces reappered as the Western and then the Eastern Roman Empire collapsed. The temporary fleets, built on campaign or to deal with some sudden maratime threat, were often built of unseasoned or low quality wood and intended to last no more than a few of campaigning seasons before they were either scrapped as unseaworthty or had been lost to bad weather. While it is probably possible to torch a Roman war galley at ancor on a calm cloudless day using some sort of mirror array I don't think such a weapon would have scored more than a couple of sucesses at best and it would have been practically useless against a fast moving and maneuvering target. It would have been most useful against relatively immobile targets such as floating siege towers or catapults that would have been mounted on platforms made by lashing several galleys together. If anything the psychological effect of this 'death ray' would have been far greater than the practical destructive effect, sort of like the effect that rockets had the first time Chinese armies deployed them in combat. At first they probably scared the hell out of the barbarians but after a short while barbarians got wise to the fact that unless they were really big and carried exploding warheads Chinese rockets were not terribly destructive and made sure their forces knew it and that the horses were acclimatized to the alien noises the rockets made. I would not expect a force that achieved the very high degree of professionalism the Roman army did to have been impressed by this sort of a weapon for very long even if the weapon worked under ideal conditions.

Re:The sail

[Deadstick]

I imagine it certainly could be possible to actually, permanently BLIND the people on the boats,

Yul Brynner did that trick in Solomon and Sheba (1959), having his troops polish their shields before an expected sunrise attack. The enemy weren't blinded, just dazzled, but he had positioned his men behind a convenient chasm...

rj