Another new? idea

[T.L.G.vanderLinden@student.utwente.nl (Timothy van der Linden)]

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
>Okay, new twist.  Leave the blasted maser beam on full and use power from
>the masers to convert to electricity and let the tug boat ion accelerator
>eat cake (the kind made up of one ion variety of course).   You can tell I'm
>getting frustrated here.

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.

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.

Timothy