Effects of a Moon-sized Sun-Cannon on Earth

Inspired by this answer, If that Lunar-plant is used as a weapon (pointed toward specific cities/forest/seas/lakes), how much damage it could really do? Is that able to burn cities, or anything?

I assume for fun Full Moon.

To recap here's how the weapon works:

• Fill the moon with mirrors, and direct them to reflect light on a specific point of the Earth

• Due to mechanical orientation errors, and small imperfections the light is not concentrated into a dot, but into a small circle of about 3 kilometers diameter and with a gaussian distribution of sunlight.

• Like in solar plants, mirrors are slightly curved (parabolic shape, with focus point on Earth) in order to try to focus sun of a single mirror to a single spot.

The working principle is the same of Solar plants, just on much bigger scale: (picture from wikipedia)

posted about 8 years ago

CoffeDeveloper‭

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