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 ...
Just like with the magnifying glass, the concentration of the light doesn't happen at the parabola, it happens at the focal point away from the parabola.
A /s would have spoiled the thought I thought.
Query: I seem to remember that Archimedes did something similar for the Greeks. Help me out here please.
Gives a rather deadly meaning to the old phrase “Rey of sunshine”
Well, I use my smaller mirror... the same way--
Focusing on... my target!
And unlike them gall durn Nazis, I hit my target... time after time after time--
He does... ya know!
Quite correct. Hitler had an unusual fascination, one might say obsession for exotic and strange weaponry.
Hitler’s greatest asset in WWII were the military minds who made up his general staff and his leading panzer commanders-—men whose advice and counsel he routinely ignored-—another major reason Germany lost the war.
That's what They want you to think...
Not to worry. James Bond took care of this problem in “Goldeneye.”
Great point.
There was a book by an electrical engineer called, “How to Turn A Microwave Oven Into a Ray Gun”.
He used a busted 5KW commercial oven’s innards to set plywood on fire at 500 feet. Boiled a cup of water in 4 seconds.
Just think of what would happen to the operator if the beam reflected back!
I’ll bet this stuff is on YouTube now.
A fascination shared, curiously enough, by Churchill: who spent a remarkable amount of time and energy pursuing sometimes quite bizarre projects - some of which worked, others didn't.
Several questions(actually one with several subsets). What is the temp of Mercury's surface? What is the temp of the moon's surface on the sunny side? A parabolic mirror would provide ample temp for burning things. Don't believe it? Buy a reflector telescope and then use the mirror to focus the sun on something flammable, see what happens.
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