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Archimedes Burn-Off. The original ancient death ray episode generated so much rebuttal from fans that the team dedicated an entire episode to revisiting this one myth. So after reviewing a whole stack of DVDs submitted by fans, two teams are selected to come to San Francisco for the small-scale burn off to see if they can set something afire at five feet.

The guys have a small parabolic mirror that works well (nine seconds!), but it doesn't work at five feet. The girls do okay but it takes a couple minutes, and they don't work at five feet either. So both teams have 24 hours to come up with new rigs. Neither team does all that well, but the guys do manage to set the hemp material on fire and are declared the victors.

One guy is invited for the large scale burn-off, to set something afire at 100 feet, but his massive mirror is busted up during shipping so we never get to see it in action. Adam also builds a disco death ray from an old satellite dish and it seems to do pretty well but it doesn't go five feet either, so he is disqualified too.

Luckily it seems that some students at MIT were inspired by the last episode and they managed to set a small boat replica afire with some mirrors, so some people from MIT are invited to help setup a larger test with 300 bronze mirrors to see if it works. They get lots of smoke but they can't do it at the full distance and only get fire at 75 feet, which is half what they wanted.

In the end, there are seven reasons why this myth is Busted:

• The Compass
  In San Francisco the noonday sun generated 450 degrees of heat from 300 bronze mirrors at 140 feet (the distance of an arrow shot). If Archimedes had tried this, the sun would have been weaker, producing even less of a result.
• The Weather
  Clouds can render the weapon useless. Are you going to carry more than 300 mirrors into battle on the off chance that it will rain that day?
• Roman Boats Were Moving
  It's a great choice if your opponent will come close enough to you that you can focus the beam and then not come any closer. But like the weather, those aren't very good odds.
• "Inflammable" Sails
  The sails being mostly light-colored reflects the heat, plus their movement in the wind means they don't even smoke, much less catch fire, so they aren't a good choice.
• History
  The history books don't mention fire for 800 years, and no mirrors or "death rays" are mentioned for nearly 1200 years.
• Scale
  You need some 300 mirrors to produce smoke. How many are required to create fire again?
• Alternative Weapons
  Even a novice archer can fire an arrow 300 feet or so. Set one of those on fire and alleviate the need for all those mirrors (and the people to aim them, the time to set them and the need to tell the other boat to stand still while you do so).

Hopefully this will satisfy everyone. But I'm sure there are some who will still complain about something that was missed along the way.

It's also notable that serving on the girls team is future Myth-tern Jess Nelson.