Algodoo

not bad, but not really anything more than a concept. the shading isn't bad either, but still not very in depth.

I gave you a high score on this for two reasons; first it looks real cool without using any textures and secondly I can't figure out how you got the laser alignment so accurate.

Regarding laser alignment:
I can't think of an easy way to check the laser alignment, since I don't know any easy way of panning 24 km. I made a car and drove there, but even that took a while. If you read e.pos(1) on the mirror and a target 24 km away, the laser position and rotation adjustment would need to be super precise. Am I missing something? Is there an easy way to set the laser alignment?

P.S. One way of setting the laser alignment could be to have a level laser shine back at the mirror and hit a target where the present laser is then use the e.normal and e.pos info for the laser angle and position.

P.P.S. OK, I'm an idiot. After playing with it, I can see that there is an extremely simple way of setting the laser alignment. The rating still stands (couldn't change it even if I wanted too )

Well thank you for the high score, and for saying it looks real cool . I worked really hard to make it look accurate.

This is how I aligned the laser. Maybe it's more difficult than the way you thought of, but this was the only way I could think to do it:

I used the laser tool, set the laser where I wanted it, but didn't let go of the left click, and zoomed in as far as possible and set it to hit exactly where I wanted.

Then I made the reflector, added a center axle, and rotated it some with the rotate tool so it looked about right. I then set the motor so I could control it with the arrow keys, gave it infinite power, and gave almost no speed to speak of. Like 0.00001 rpm

Then I zoomed out as far as possible, and kinetic panned to the right really far.

I then made a box, checked the plot, and saw that the x position was about 24,000 meters from the center. I used the almost-no-speed-at-all axle to line up the laser with the grid so it'd be perfectly straight.

No scripting was used at all. (although if I had used scripting, it may have made it easier and more precise.)

Simple method: Set mirror exactly at 15 degrees from vertical, set laser exactly at 30 degrees from horizontal. Fine position laser with arrow keys if beam height is important.

Another method: Put laser and mirror in approximate positions. Copy laser and mirror to clipboard. Paste into text editor. Change mirror rotation to be 1/2 the laser rotation. You may have to subtract the laser rotation from pi first. Copy everything from the text editor and paste back into scene.

A third method is to have a horizontal laser shine back at the mirror and hit a target where the present laser is then use the e.normal and e.pos info for the laser angle and position. Laser angle would be the arc tangent of (e.normal(1)/e.normal(0)).