Mirrors (Round 3)

[Brian Mansur <bmansur@oc.edu>]

Brian 11:10 PM CT 3/5/96

Two Mirror papers in one day!?

Here is the idea.  Perhaps we could have these 10 km wide mirrors focus into 
a mirror aparatus connected to them.  This aparatus could refocus the beam 
and spit it out to the Asimov like a full blown maser.  The mirror complex 
should weigh less than the alternative maser generator hardware (I hope).  I 
wonder if  power losses due to reflection would beat out converting maser 
beams to electricity and then back to maser beams.  The beams would again be 
aimed with gyros.

An advantage of this idea over using the entire mirror for reflection is 
that we aren't using a really huge and really flimsy mirror to aim across 
several lightyears.  Now we are effectively aiming a maser gun that is made 
up of mirrors and gets its maser beam from Sol .  Somebody please tell me 
that this is a good idea that actually might work.  I just heard something 
about solar panel safety from Kelly that really made me upset about where 
we're going to get our maser power.  And I'm starting to run out of ideas 
the starship design (at least the propulsion part of it  :).

To make these mirrors to where they would focus on the maser mirror aparatus 
(give me a name here) they would be angled so that they wouldn't be as 
useful for accelerating the mirror (to get it into position to slow the 
Asimov).  We may need to put a relfelective mirror on the Sol side that can 
be discarded when its decel phase time.