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.
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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.
 
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