Myth Busters did several episodes about the Archimedes mirror. They weren’t able to recreate the effect. Makes me wonder if it was just a myth, or if actually setting fire to the ships wasn’t really the point - maybe they just wanted to blind the sailors and navigators, or the ships got hot enough that the enemy feared they might catch fire. Or, Archimedes was just smarter than the people who worked for Myth Busters.
Myth Busters did several episodes about the Archimedes mirror. They weren’t able to recreate the effect. Makes me wonder if it was just a myth, or if actually setting fire to the ships wasn’t really the point - maybe they just wanted to blind the sailors and navigators, or the ships got hot enough that the enemy feared they might catch fire. Or, Archimedes was just smarter than the people who worked for Myth Busters.
Other experiments have shown that the effect can work, the continuing debate is just whether it was practical enough to use as a weapon.