RE: Another new? idea

[Brian Mansur <bmansur@oc.edu>]

 ----------
From: T.L.G.vanderLinden
To: KellySt; stevev; jim; zkulpa; hous0042; rddesign; David; lparker; 
bmansur
Subject: Another new? idea
Date: Tuesday, March 05, 1996 8:54PM

Brian 3:40 PM CT 3/5/96

>Tim
>Since Brain brought up the idea of a mirror again, I was thinking about it
>again. Instead of using a flat mirror that seems to have a bad reflection, 
I
>present the refocusing retro-mirror :)

>Brian mentioned this, and I'm not sure if he means the same as I do

>Since I see some possibilities here, I want to repeat and explain it:

>In fact it isn't a mirror anymore, we use a maser collector (analogy of a
>solar-collector) and convert the whole bunch into electricity. That
>electricity is that used to power an array of masers, just like the ones at
>the Solar home base. So then we have a neat non diffusive or divergent
>retro-beam.

Brian
Kevin and I briefing wrote about that idea.  I see below in your message 
that you recognize the problems.  We seem to agree that putting 1E7 masers 
masers on a sail that converts maser beams to electricity would be a bad 
idea.  My first reason was because of the power losses in the conversion. 
 My second second was that weight of the 1E7 masers would be too much for us 
to push, even many a degree of Wattage.  As you comments imply, at least the 
idea is on the board as a last resort.

>Tim
>I could imagine that there are more efficient ways of redirecting and
>refocussing the beam, but at the moment I only wanted to present the idea 
to
>get some comment about the possible difficulties.

>I know, I know the whole array would be heavy. At least it doesn't need to
>carry fuel and power generators.

Brian
We will probably need course corrections to make 100% certain that the 
retro-reflector stays in the beam.  So we'll probably end up having to put a 
load of thrusters on anyway.  Bumber!