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Comment by mondayp | Hacker News Reader

11. Starlink satellites can focus the beam doubling as potential directed energy weapons.

This nicely illustrates one of the fundamental problems of internet comments… it took 30 seconds to write this but it would take me an hour to prove it’s bull.

This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as Brandolini's law or the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle

It's true, that's the basic principle Starlink dishes and satellites operate on - they use phased antenna arrays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array

It's not practical to use it as a Directed Energy Weapon, but it is - conceptually - similar to one.

What is the EIRP of a starlink spot beam? Even if you had multiple satellites blasting a single region with all of their antennas does this do anything worse than raising the noise floor? It just seems like the orders of magnitude are all off for a weapon.

Maybe it gets powerful enough to burn out the radios in smartphones? I can't find a good reference to the total TX power from a Starlink satellite, but I do know that the spot beams have a 15 mile diameter and the inverse square law is a harsh mistress.

If you have some way of measuring the received power from each satellite inside the cell phone, you might be able to use that as feedback to the array to better focus the signal/s?

You wouldn't need to disable the radio altogether, just swamping / destroying the antenna would be enough to 'disable' the system, for all intents and purposes. Since an antenna is optimized for a known frequency, resonance would probably also help.

It sounds just "James Bond villain-y" enough to not work.

In all honesty, the fact that this laser based communication exists makes me a lot more likely to believe that SDI was actually a success in the classified world.

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