Posted on 04/02/2013 7:10:34 AM PDT by the scotsman
'It may sound like a something a Bond villain would propose, but these amazing pictures reveal the secret plans drawn up by the German army to create a mile-wide 'space gun' powered by the sun.
The giant mirror could be used to focus the sun on a target - rather like the magnifying glasses often used by children to create fire.
The pictures, from Life magazine in 1945, reveal to its readers how 'U.S. Army technical experts came up with the astonishing fact that German scientists had seriously planned to build a ‘sun gun’.'
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I had always been intrigued as a child about little magnifying glasses that would make grass, leaves or twigs catch fire.
If the Germans were thinking of some kind of focused beam or parabolic dish I’m afraid that the concentrated rays of the sun would burn up the parabola.
the sun’s rays are quite diffuse.
all spacecraft receive direct sunlight and do not burn up.
the parabola would receive diffuse rays and the rays would only be concentrated at the focal point of the lens.
only at the focal point will there be burning rays.
Relatively easy to do now with mylar
Good thing we got the solarian bomb first.
One reason Germany lost the war.
I made one of these a few years ago. I stretched aluminumized Mylar over a round 2 foot pizza pan. I put an air fitting in the bottom of the pan and attached a squeeze bulb to it so I could pump a partial vacuum beneath the Mylar.
The resulting focus-able concave mirror worked well for catching paper on fire at 50 feet with sun light.
I guess that flying saucer thing did not work out.
The solar constant is approximately 126 watts per square foot uncorrected (upper atmosphere). Corrected for atmospheric dispersion at the earth’s surface it’s down to about 104 Watts per square foot.
When you compute the area of Hitler’s mirror or lens, it could be a considerable quantity of heat.
As a child, I was amazed to find out that ants would spontaneously combust as I was studying them under my magnifying glass.
Who said it didn’t......
Yep. We're building a few, darned few F-22s and F-35s, while China...
Yes, but it was the “Demonstration” of its power (vaporizing the UN) that tickled me PINK! hahaha
Hmmmmphhh. Nothing new, the emperor Ming had them on the Planet Mongo in the mid 30’s.
(from ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’)
Eros: “Take a can of your gasoline. Say this can of gasoline is the sun. Now, you spread a thin line of it to a ball, representing the earth. Now, the gasoline represents the sunlight, the sun particles.
“Here we saturate the ball with the gasoline, the sunlight. Then we put a flame to the ball. The flame will speedily travel around the earth, back along the line of gasoline to the can, or the sun itself.
“It will explode this source and spread to every place that gasoline, our sunlight, touches. Explode the sunlight here, gentlemen, you explode the universe. Explode the sunlight here and a chain reaction will occur direct to the sun itself and to all the planets that sunlight touches, to every planet in the universe.
“This is why you must be stopped. This is why any means must be used to stop you. In a friendly manner or as, it seems, you want it.”
Colonel Tom Edwards: “Why, a particle of sunlight can’t even be seen or measured.”
Eros: “Can you see or measure an atom? Yet you can *explode* one. A ray of sunlight is made up of *many* atoms!”
Jeff Trent: “So what if we *do* develop this Solanite bomb? We’d be even a stronger nation than now.”
Eros: [with disgust] “Stronger. You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!”
Jeff Trent: “That’s all I’m taking from you!”
[pistol-whips Eros upside the head]
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