Wonder what would happen if a hacker focused all ten thousand of them on a single area for an hour or two. Sounds like a really energy-efficient way to demolish a city.

X Wing: Wedge’s Gamble (1996) by Michael Stackpole shows the rebel alliance using similar tricks during the battle of Coruscant.

> "Wonder what would happen if a hacker focused all ten thousand of them on a single area for an hour or two. Sounds like a really energy-efficient way to demolish a city."

I'm far more concerned about the people who own/build stuff like this using it as you suggest (or any of the government pets that they own) than I am about "hackers" doin' such things (although, you're entirely right to have that concern as well, because there's obviously those type of folks out there doin' bad things even with the technology we have already).

First, they don't exist and 10k of them will never exist. Second, nothing would happen, the power will be minuscule and last for a very short time focused on such a small patch.

see: https://youtu.be/lkjyeI0ykGM

At some point, nations are going to claim the orbital space above them as national territory and develop technology to shoot down violators.

Die Another Day (2003) has a more ridiculous take on the same idea.

I don't think 50000 60-ft mirrors at the height they intend to fly would cause that to happen. Not enough light gathering power.

50000 60-ft mirrors is about the same area as a single mirror 2.5 miles across. So the area of the mirrors is about the area of a city. You gather as much light as the city itself in regular daytime. If you focused all of that perfectly efficiently onto a city, that city would just look like daytime.