powerplant building idea
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A friend of mine (also MIT connected) once used a giant frenel lense to burn stuff into lawns. It was hot enough to cook the grass to a nice brown, but it took ages to actually set it on fire. It would be nearly impossible to set something thin like a sail that had fluid cooling on both sides from the wind on fire.
TANGENT:
I had this idea for a real would invention, basically we set up a grid of fiber-optic repeaters that would take sunlight from one side of the world and send it to the other side of the world, after the enormouse inicial costs to set it up, you could have sunligh-lighting available everywhere on the planet at once.
I had this idea for a real would invention, basically we set up a grid of fiber-optic repeaters that would take sunlight from one side of the world and send it to the other side of the world, after the enormouse inicial costs to set it up, you could have sunligh-lighting available everywhere on the planet at once.
The MIT Test.esteroth12 wrote:in the retest, people were challenged to get it to work... and some people from MIT almost got it, it just burned it too slowly to be a feasable weapon
It was, in fact, viable, but was heavily dependent on weather conditions. I think Boston is slightly farther north than Greece, so Archimedes would have had stronger sunlight. Also note that Archimedes did not actually have to set the ships on fire. "Serious smoke" from no obvious source would probably have been enough to panic the sailors. Still, within ten minutes of good sunlight, five people working with about a hundred mirrors managed to create an open flame. Assuming Archimedes had a few dozen Greek troops at his disposal to move mirrors around and an entire harbour to work with, he'd easily have been able to obtain similar results.
They also ran a test with the Mythbusters in which they obtained similar results.
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