Although the same experiment was repeated by a Greek solar engineer, loannis Sakkas, along with the Greek Navy who were able to achieve what the Myth Busters team and MIT engineering students failed to acheive.
Thanks for that link. So 70 sailors, each with a 5x3ft flat copper mirror. The target was not moving, which was an advantage Archimedes would have lacked.
As I recall, Mythbusters had fewer than 20 staff, and their mirrors were smaller.
Apperently they had trouble focusing the solar radiation using their copper mirrors to begin with.
That was the problem Mythbusters had. Specifically, to aim you need feedback, which gets hard when there are lots of spots of light and you don't know which is yours. Which is interesting, but it never seemed like an insurmountable problem to me.
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