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You don't need to go "very high", 80C is more than enough to wreak havoc. I'm sure that's attainable with a few hundred sats. Can someone do the math?
Is it ever, ever going to be cheaper or easier or more effective than just launching a missile? Seems...unlikely just on the face of it.
Are bullets better than knives?
Each thing has its own place.
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> relatively easy to redesign as weapons There is a fiction I've read years ago that mentioned satellites becoming makeshift weapons by overheating exposed objects (think reactors, gas trucks, oil refineries) by acting as a solar furnace [1] via mirrors. Not sure/don't recall how it deals with practical issues such as clouds and distance/intensity, but good enough for a story I guess. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Probably easier to use a MASER
Masers are not useful as powerful transmitters, but only as amplifiers with a very low noise or as generators with a very stable frequency.
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Is it ever, ever going to be cheaper or easier or more effective than just launching a missile? Seems...unlikely just on the face of it.
Are missiles better than bullets? Are bullets better than knives? Each thing has its own place.
Like this, for example.
I do wonder if capital is so cheap or wealth inequality is actually much bigger problem then we thought so that excess capital ends up in ideas like this.
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> The temperature at the focal point may reach 3,500 °C I thought this was interesting because it doesn’t really seem like an applicable top level claim, surely this is referring to a specific furnace, not all solar furnaces? Then this got me thinking if there is some universal upper bound constraint to these temperatures. E.g. if I recall a telescope can’t make a source object brighter than it actually is, and this…
> I wonder if that principle applies here or not It applies, but also in practice the maximum temperature is lower than the theoretical upper bound. https://what-if.xkcd.com/145/
> "In general, there's no way to "overlay" light beams on each other, because the whole system has to be reversible".
Behold, my two torches.
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Think of the military benefits.
Daylight helps you just as much as your enemy. We've got plenty of cutting edge night vision and thermal imaging devices for humans and radar on vehicles. The Army's 160th helicopter regiment can fly nap of the earth on a moonless night. Satellite-based Synthetic Aperture Radar can pickup human sized objects during a pass and can switch to sub-centimeter resolution in finer modes. If anything, the military prefers fi…
Not if you're persistently using it for multi-week sleep deprivation operation to "soften up" an area before attacking.
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I don't think 50000 60-ft mirrors at the height they intend to fly would cause that to happen. Not enough light gathering power. 50000 60-ft mirrors is about the same area as a single mirror 2.5 miles across. So the area of the mirrors is about the area of a city. You gather as much light as the city itself in regular daytime. If you focused all of that perfectly efficiently onto a city, that city would just look lik…
I think what you're missing is that they could all be focused in one spot, not spread over the city. If curved reflective buildings can melt siding, and mirror solar plants can melt salt, I'm pretty sure a city's worth of sun focused on, say, a college campus, could start a massive fire