This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Working Title: Death Ray!: From YKTTW
Meta4: Oops. Dracula's Moon Laser belongs in Kill Sat, not here.
Susan Davis: Moved a better quote from Wave-Motion Gun to here; the old one was:
- "They're the only aliens to ever invent a death ray. And I don't mean a disintegrator, or a heat beam, or some kind of laser, I mean a gun that actually shoots death."— Friend of a friend of This Troper on Doctor Who Daleks.
BritBllt: Removing this natter...
- Didn't the Mythbusters show that even with much more efficient modern day mirrors it'd be a tall order to kill even one ship sitting still from only a few feet away? In other words, not something viable against a moving target? Not to mention that any mention of mirrors and fire attributed to Archimedes were written centuries after he supposedly did it. Hardly seems like a Truth in Television Real Life example.
Changing the original entry to "legend" fixes the whole thing without dragging that rhetorical "didn't Mythbusters do this episode" Take That! into it. Besides, I saw that episode, and they really seemed to go out of their way to disprove the letter of the legend, while ignoring the fact that their rather hastily constructed experiment did at least partly work, enough to justify the bare bones of the legend. The show has a bad habit of trying to end everything with a smug "busted" verdict, when the truth behind legendary history is never so black or white as that (in this case, the events in question are thousands of years old - of course it's been distorted over time).
By the way, here's what The Other Wiki says...
- A test of the Archimedes heat ray was carried out in 1973 by the Greek scientist Ioannis Sakkas. The experiment took place at the Skaramagas naval base outside Athens. On this occasion 70 mirrors were used, each with a copper coating and a size of around five by three feet (1.5 by 1 m). The mirrors were pointed at a plywood mock-up of a Roman warship at a distance of around 160 feet (50 m). When the mirrors were focused accurately, the ship burst into flames within a few seconds. The plywood ship had a coating of tar paint, which may have aided combustion.In October 2005 a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology carried out an experiment with 127 one-foot (30 cm) square mirror tiles, focused on a mock-up wooden ship at a range of around 100 feet (30 m). Flames broke out on a patch of the ship, but only after the sky had been cloudless and the ship had remained stationary for around ten minutes. It was concluded that the device was a feasible weapon under these conditions. The MIT group repeated the experiment for the television show Myth Busters, using a wooden fishing boat in San Francisco as the target. Again some charring occurred, along with a small amount of flame. In order to catch fire, wood needs to reach its flash point, which is around 300 degrees Celsius (570 °F).When Myth Busters broadcast the result of the San Francisco experiment in January 2006, the claim was placed in the category of "busted" (or failed) because of the length of time and the ideal weather conditions required for combustion to occur. It was also pointed out that since Syracuse faces the sea towards the east, the Roman fleet would have had to attack during the morning for optimal gathering of light by the mirrors. Myth Busters also pointed out that conventional weaponry, such as flaming arrows or bolts from a catapult, would have been a far easier way of setting a ship on fire at short distances.
It might be worth noting that MythBusters tested the idea, but I'd say the verdict's still out, especially when different scenarios than the ones they cited are taken into account. For instance, couldn't the mirrors or lenses have been secretly used in the morning while the fleet was docked, as a means of sabotage? Why the insistance on the show's part that it had to be an instant laser beam sweeping through them like a knife through butter? The legend's certainly not as specific as that, and the Siege of Syracuse lasted for months.
