The transition

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Are you saying a floating mirror designed to point at specific areas wouldnt have thrusters to turn it about an axis.
Waits for full reddit mode reply.
 
Chargeride said:
Are you saying a floating mirror designed to point at specific areas wouldnt have thrusters to turn it about an axis.
Waits for full reddit mode reply.
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What I am saying is that those thrusters would be irrelevant. Anything in most any orbit (except a geosynchronous one, which wouldn't be at all practical for such an application) is eventually going to be below the horizon of any given location. The lower the orbit the more quickly that will happen.

So it isn't going to get stuck on lighting up a "whole country". Most likely you'd end up with near-random bright flashes along the orbital path with large gaps on the ground between the flashes. And by "large" I mean more than 100km (depending on how fast the thing is rotating, which probably couldn't be very fast).

Because such a mirror would need to be relatively large to have any practical effects, the "thrusters" would also have to be large and have large amounts of rocket fuel available to them. That also means they would only be able to move the mirror quite slowly at best. And from a practical engineering standpoint you'd probably design it to move slowly so you'd have more precision in where you could point it.
 
In another thread fire tornadoes were mentioned. The USA deliberately made them in Hamburg and Tokyo on civilians with 160 mph winds. Remember Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse 5? Vonnegut was there. These space mirrors could do that. To any city. It is not about the visible light spectrum. It is all about the invisible infrared. San Francisco had a firestorm in 1906. The earthquake was bad, but the fires from the gas lines brought down the city with the resulting firestorm. I like that Billy became unstuck from time.
 
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Just for a straight-up skinny on that satellite and what it can do...

The satellite is about 18m in size (so about 60 feet in freedom units). It will be able to light up an area about 5km across on the surface for between 30 and 60 seconds.

The area illuminated will be up to five times as bright as a full moon. So much less bright than a typical streetlight.

Not exactly a spaceborne death ray...
 
Mr. Coffee said:
It will be able to light up an area about 5km across on the surface for between 30 and 60 seconds.

The area illuminated will be up to five times as bright as a full moon. So much less bright than a typical streetlight.
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Until they replace it with a concave mirror.
 
What about when 50 are focused on one spot? I had an idea a while ago. What if hundreds brought an empty Doritos bag and a piece of cardboard that fit inside it to an outdoor rally. And all at once turned the Mylar bags inside out and shined them all on the speaker?
 
PedalUma said:
What about when 50 are focused on one spot? I had an idea a while ago. What if hundreds brought an empty Doritos bag and a piece of cardboard that fit inside it to an outdoor rally. And all at once turned the Mylar bags inside out and shined them all on the speaker?
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The energy one of these mirrors would put on the ground would be about 10mW per square meter. Full on sunlight at the equator is about 1 kW per square meter. So to make it as bright as the sun you'd need 100,000 satellites all working together.

The reflective material on the inside of a chip bag isn't a very efficient mirror. And you'd need an awful lot of them to vaporize someone.
 
Mr. Coffee said:
The energy one of these mirrors would put on the ground would be about 10mW per square meter. Full on sunlight at the equator is about 1 kW per square meter. So to make it as bright as the sun you'd need 100,000 satellites all working together.

The reflective material on the inside of a chip bag isn't a very efficient mirror. And you'd need an awful lot of them to vaporize someone.
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How many little distrubeteted mirrors to force someone off stage?
 
Yes, but it would be a flashing light in the night sky, the ludicrous talk of it powering solar panels at night is just so renewable bullsh1 marketing
they cant stop themselves.
The Russians actually deployed this a long time ago and made a 5km bright spot the same as a full Moon over Europe, the MK2 version made a 7km 10 Moon brightness spot.
The unbuilt 70m version would have been very impressive for dark regions

Znamya project, an ambitious experiment to place giant orbiting solar mirrors in space. Lead engineer Vladimir Syromyatnikov designed the mirrors to reflect sunlight back to Earth. The goal was to illuminate dark northern regions during long winter nights and extend work and farming hours.
 
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Chargeride said:
Yes, but it would be a flashing light in the night sky...
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No, it would be a single bright flash in any one location which would move over the surface of the earth about 16000 mph (or 27000 kph in woke units).

Kind of like an Iridium Flare, an effect that already exists (well, existed since there are no more of those satellites) and is about as bright:

skyandtelescope.org

How to Catch an Iridium Flare

Learn everything you need to know about iridium flare observation with these amazing tips for beginning astronomers and experts alike!
skyandtelescope.org skyandtelescope.org
 
Obviously this is a small test flight, but a 70m mirror was feasible in the 90s.

That thing had real lighting potential over a large diameter
10X full Moon brightness is reading a book zone and is practically small scale park pitch floodlights.

You cant turn it off either without moving it across land, an unlikely shield or adjusting it on satellite to max diffusion.

I should imagine it would be full of holes with a few years.
 
We pay France 500m to stop boat crossings
This is what is coming over now.

Screenshot_20260810-153030-005.png


They'll have a cabin and sun loungers soon. :)
Clearly we just need to fly them straight from Morroco and stop with the pantomime
It would be a lot safer for the women and childre...oh hang on.
 
Octopus UK energy supplier ask us to not use high consumption appliances during the partial solar eclipse.
Clearly a publicity stunt, but interesting.
Again greying the area between electricity production and total energy usage.

www.independent.co.uk

Don’t use electricity during solar eclipse, urges Britain’s biggest energy supplier

A shutdown in solar energy generation will coincide with a usual surge in electricity demand in the UK
www.independent.co.uk www.independent.co.uk
 
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