How this guy makes Amazing Mechanical Mirrors

TimeFlipper

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Of course if you cannot view this video in your own country, just go onto You Tube and type in,"How This Guy Makes Amazing Mechanical Mirrors Obsessed Wired".

 

Kairos

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One step closer to Larry Niven's dream of weaponized mirror arrays.
 

TimeFlipper

Senior Member
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13,705
One step closer to Larry Niven's dream of weaponized mirror arrays.

FYI, weaponised mirrors have been in use since May 16th 1960 when Theodore H Maiman at Hughes Research Labs in Malibu California, invented the very first working Ruby Laser Beam? ;) :D...

8270
 

Kairos

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In the novel Ringworld, Niven described a kind of "sunflower" growing in the inhabited portion of the megastructure that had mirror-reflective petals. If it detected any animals in it's field of vision, it would move the petals to reflect the sunlight towards the creature. When you have a huge patch of them, it would become a deadly blast of sunlight.

So some of the hominids living there would build structures with angled rooftops that created a field of devastation in a particular direction that attackers of other hominid groups could not penetrate.

It was a cool idea. To make mechanical version of such a plant, you'd just need little servos to control the mirrors, some kind of laser ranging and motion detection, and a micro-controller to compute the angle of each mirror to put the sunrays on the target.

It obviously wouldn't need power, since you could embed a solar cell in every nth panel, and have the microcontroller direct that to maximize power. It's not like you need a battery or anything, since it would not work at night.
 

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