Sonnengewehr (Sun Gun)

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In 1929 physicist Hermann Oberth coined the idea for a behemoth space mirror that would reflect sunlight onto Earth during night time, thus creating an everlasting day, and significantly boosting crop yields.

Sometime in late World War II, the concept was discovered by the Nazis, who sought to create a superweapon on its basis. It was studied by a group of scientists in the Hillersleben village, who estimated that a sodium reflector with an area of 9 square kilometers situated 8,200km above Earth would have the potential to scorch enemy cities. Approximately a million tones of sodium would have been needed for the reflector alone, whereas the weight of the remaining structure is unknown. The name "Sonnengewehr" essentially meant "Sun Gun" or "Sun Cannon".

The crew compartment would have had artificial gravity achieved through rotation, and was to be completely or nearly self sustainable in terms of oxygen and food. The Germans estimated it would take roughly 50 - 100 years to build.
 

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Adler said:
Sometime in late World War II, the concept was discovered by the Nazis, who sought to create a superweapon on its basis.
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No it wasn't and no they didn't.

All of the post-war blather about the "sun gun" was a misunderstanding of Oberth's original idea from decades earlier, a fog-of-post-war game of telephone. Only an idiot who has not the slightest understanding of optics thinks that a mile-wide mirror hundreds or thousands of miles away can focus sunlight to a point bright enough to start fires. Any high school science teacher would point this out and even the Nazis wouldn't waste an hour on it.
 
Orionblamblam said:
No it wasn't and no they didn't.

All of the post-war blather about the "sun gun" was a misunderstanding of Oberth's original idea from decades earlier, a fog-of-post-war game of telephone. Only an idiot who has not the slightest understanding of optics thinks that a mile-wide mirror hundreds or thousands of miles away can focus sunlight to a point bright enough to start fires. Any high school science teacher would point this out and even the Nazis wouldn't waste an hour on it.
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It is very likely that the project was created in order to inflate the "scientific value" of those working on it in hopes of them being taken to the United States like many German scientists were. Its feasibility is pretty much nonexistent.
 
Adler said:
It is very likely that the project was created in order to inflate the "scientific value" of those working on it in hopes of them being taken to the United States like many German scientists were. Its feasibility is pretty much nonexistent.
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There is zero evidence of there being any sort of "project" whatsoever. What seems most likely is a US Army investigator stumbled across Oberths ideas, perhaps out of context, without having been aware of it before. As we see today, people will believe any damn fool thing, and a lot of people actually think the idea of a 'sun gun" is within the realm of the physically possible. And that's after decades of other people incessantly explaining how it's *not.*

80 years later, *zero* evidence has come forth except for postwar news reports (always remember: the "news" gave us Walter Duranty, "very fine people," lab-leak denial, etc.) that were always lean on checkable data.
 
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Adler said:
It is very likely that the project was created in order to inflate the "scientific value" of those working on it in hopes of them being taken to the United States like many German scientists were. Its feasibility is pretty much nonexistent.
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Pure nonsense. All German scientists were interrogated by Allied professionals before being accepted. If you didn't know what you were talking about, you weren't going anywhere.

This is a common internet fiction.
 
Orionblamblam said:
Any high school science teacher would point this out and even the Nazis wouldn't waste an hour on it.
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Actually Nazi were basically the only ones who could got interested in this project (and reject the school teacher explanation as lacking the belief into Aryan genius brilliant insight), but you are completely right that "Sun gun" is a purely post-war fiction.
 
Arjen said:
Lysenko.
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Not quite. Lysenko's ideas were wrong, but they weren't "school-level". You see, there was a MAJOR crisis in 1930s biology. The newly-discovered genetics seemingly contradicted the well-established theory of evolution; according to geneticist, the classic Darwinian evolution was impossible, because mutations were rare and mostly insignificant. For cotemporary biologists it was basically if someone claimed that according to some dubious calculations, the Earth was flat. The debates were fierce, and (unfortunately) in USSR, they involved politics, since rejecting Darwin was, from Party point of view, almost the same as promoting creationism.

Eventually, it was realized, that the elementary unit of evolution is not the speciemen, but the population. And the population genetic efficiently explained the contradiction, and helped to create the modern synthetic theory of evolution. But in 1930s, it was sill in the future.

The one thing that must be understood, is that Lysenko wasn't some random charlatan. He was a respected specialist in his professional area (development of new cultivars), with significant sucsesses there. So his words - no matter, how politically motivated - were taken rather seriously.
 
Dilandu said:
there was a MAJOR crisis in 1930s biology
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That crisis was during the very early 1900s.
By the 1920s, mutationism as proposed by Hugo de Vries and Wilhelm Johannsen was firmly in the mainstream of international biology. By the 1930s, when synthesis with Darwinism was well underway, Lysenko, who rejected natural selection AND genetics, was a definite outlier, unlike Nikolai Vavilov. He was the target of many attacks by Lysenko, resulting in Vavilov being sentenced to death in 1941. Vavilov died in prison in 1943, he was hailed as a hero of Soviet science in the 1950s.
 
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Arjen said:
By the 1920s, mutationism as proposed by Hugo de Vries and Wilhelm Johannsen was firmly in the mainstream of international biology. By the 1930s, when synthesis with Darwinism was well underway, Lysenko, who rejected natural selection AND genetics, was a definite outlier, unlike Nikolai Vavilov. He was the target of many attacks by Lysenko, resulting in Vavilov being sentenced to death in 1941. Vavilov died in prison in 1943, he was hailed as a hero of Soviet science in the 1950s.
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True, unfortunately. The great irony is, if Lysenko just done his job, he would likely be hailed today as great plant breeder. But he ventured into politices - and became the grim example of politics interfering with science.
 
More fiction. In the newspaper strip titled Our Space Age, there is an illustration of a space-based reflector that is identical to the Sun Gun. Writer Otto Binder tells the reader that this device could be useful for illuminating a disaster area at night, in any area, to help rescuers.

For those who revel in the post-war fiction idea, remember that the U.S. had retrieved 100 V-2 rockets and parts at the end of the war. This was necessary because Peenemünde was scheduled to be in the Soviet Zone of Occupation. So, for all the mockers out there: Why bring 500 rocket scientists and their families to the United States at the end of the war? Anyone? We had the rockets, so why did we need them? Answer: They had other technology to transfer to the United States. This was partly revealed in the two volume German Aviation Medicine: World War II which was edited by the Surgeon General of the USAF. Published in 1950.

But back to the Sun Gun. Why did the U.S. publish anything about it?
 
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