The Math would add up

and then start moving them at a relatively insane speed while still keeping their absolute positioning dead accurate when their motors and overall construction clearly weren't designed for either of those tasks at the required level of precision.

That's what they want you to think.

Props on your Internet math and research. It was a fun read.

You still have a crap-ton of atmosphere you have to get through, and the beams being reflected aren't coherent. So the light reflected is subject to the inverse square law, which means that the energy diminishes as the inverse square of the distance. So the actually energy reaching the satellite would be minuscule. If you want to effectively use light to punch all the way through the atmosphere, you'll need beam coherence.

I realize we've had disagreements in other regards but this is excellent

I think solar-powered lasers would be a better bet. That would eliminate any surface irregularities of the mirrors and reduce the effective focus area . This would also reduce the number of moving parts required for focusing.

On the other hand, the amount of particulate diffusion within the atmosphere would complicate both the accuracy of the beam and the effective beam area, so who knows.

Let's try it.

The mirrors are flat, and the sun has an apparent diameter of about half a degree, so at 100 km, the spot diameter would be 900 meters.

You could use concave mirrors, but since you're moving them independently, you'd also have to consider the diffraction limit for each one.

The fucking watermelon killed me

Also, great write up honestly I loved it lol

Welcome aboard!

I trust this person with all of your lives

You have a degree in theoretical physics?

They can aim each mirror individually though.

Yes; it is well known that if you look at yourself in a flat mirror, and then back up, your reflection will spread out bigger and bigger and get dimmer and dimmer, the further away you get.

Wait

this thing is big enough to alter the average reflective index of a whole state if it swings around its mirrors

the focus spot in theorie could be set to any range, just as u go more far the precision of each mirror angle will be the limiting factor amongst atmospheric losses distortions.

in my defense:

Some laws were made to be broken 😎

where they reflected an image made of sunlight at the ISS and an astronaut took a picture

got a link to said picture? it may make for a good meme template. I saw that the chinese did that kind of 'pixel art' with there own near identical solar thermal plant

I'm no optical physicist, but based on empirical evidence of not melting due to light arriving from a huge ball of thermonuclear fire 8 light minutes away (and sure it's not exactly focused), I propose a hypotesis that light-based energy transfer in atmosphere is very lossy and not feasible as a weapon.

Which is perfect for this community, of course.

If its a optical image satellite, it probably doesnt take much to burn on the camera if it's shutter is open.

I imagine the precision needed for that is lacking in a solar mirror motor.

Small satellite that's at least 100km away

Keep in mind that atmospheric interference would likely scatter the light enough to be ineffective

It holds if the light spreads wider than the target. So also for directed light sources at large enough distances. Even a perfect mirror must spread the light in the same angle as it is incomming. Hence the beam would at least 3 km wide at the satellite. Therefore the satellite can only recieve a Illumination of ~65W/m^{2 which is a few percent of the normal sun brightness of 1300 W/m}2.

Another way to look at it, the mirrors cant make the sun seem brighter only larger. From the tower you see a large solid angle around you the mirror, therefore, it can seem like you are at the surface of the sun. However, fro. the position of a satellite, the power plant only takes a small solid angle, so it seems like a "smaller" sun. Assuming 400 MW and 1 kW/m^{2 (at surface) solar power, it has an area of 400000 m}2, so a solid angle of 4.5e-6 sr from 300km while the sun has 70e-6 sr. So ten times smaller, therefore weaker. Note however here i did not account for attenuation in the atmosphere

There is still a power density square law, but with focused energy you are only integrating power flux across a portion of the sphere's surface instead of the whole thing.

I'm not sure about the easy-to-show part, but take a look at the Brightness Theorem / Conservation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etendue if you want to learn more.

You need to move the point from one horizon to the other. Like the sun, satellites "rise" on one side and set on the other. All of that in less than 15min(in LEO).

You can watch the dishes turn.

Yeah, you just need a bunch of geared stepper motors and a big computer. The atmosphere is the reason it almost certainly won't work

Unsure if there were any residencies near it. There's a pretty good distance from the road to the closest of the towers. I do believe there is a golf course not far from it.

... In the middle of THE driest region in the country.

What mariusafa said is correct, but I wanted to point out that objects in space do not freeze immediately. Dissipation via blackbody radiation is much slower than convection and it can take a long time for something to cool down without the latter. In other words, a vaccuum does function as a very effective insulator, which can sometimes make it more challenging to get rid of heat in space than it is to keep something warm. The ISS, for example, needs to use radiators to keep cool. The same goes for many (most? all?) satellites that are at least as close to the sun as the earth.

It's just not true. Disipation by convection effect is one of the ways of disipating energy. Dissipation by blackbody radiation is where most of the energy goes.

For example infrared heaters transmits most of it's heat by radiation. Efficient heaters do not use convection mechanisms, well or not only.

They'll do a Fantastic job, I'm sure.

I feel like you have the same misconceptions that people do about the garbage island.

The pieces of space debris are very far apart, so detonating a nuke would only catch a very small amount

That they do

Nukes solve a lot of problems.

Hell yeah brother

Some orbits are quicker than others. Cloudsat was recently retired, and was lowered to a graveyard orbit which decays a lot more quickly. As I understand it, our collective space programs have made a bit of a mess of operational orbits and we need to think about cleaning up debris while also mitigating any future additions to the debris field.