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by puls 4432 days ago
I can't believe nobody has mentioned this yet: exactly this was one of the standard disasters in SimCity 2000, where "microwave" was one of the power plant types.
1 comments

Thanks for saving me the trouble.

Microwave tech was awesome and cost effective until the first time the satellite got out of alignment and burned half the city down. I've been terrified of the idea ever since: you just can't make a weapon like that fail safe, and if you do manage, then your throughput is too low to make it worth it.

What you possibly could do is to not have a single emitter but loads of them for each collector. So that a single satellite getting out of alignment would be harmless. Many emitters would need to get out of alignment pushing the beam in the same direction for it to be harmful.