Re: starship-design: Telescopes the size of worlds?

[KellySt@aol.com]

In a message dated 7/8/97 12:06:44 AM, stk@sunherald.infi.net (kyle) wrote:

>Wait a minute! We're talking about telescopes the size of planets here.
>Where are you gonna get that much money to build these? It WILL be more
>expensive than a starship, because of the immense size, stabilization
>systems, power systems, etc. This may not seem like a problem, but then
>you have repairs when a cloud of debris comes careening through the
>thing, which pretty much makes useless that telescope. 
>
>Another problem: these things will get so big, they'll warp under their
>own weight. If anything hits this thing, it will become destabilized,
>and when you try to thrust it back to stability the thing will probably
>buckle from stress. If you really want to build these (I don't recommend
>it), at least build them in an array, with many smaller scopes. 
>
>These ideas are great to wonder about, but are impractical: for the same
>price you can go there. Why then do you spend $100B+ on limited scanning
>scopes, when you can go? I ask you: how do you get an electron
>micrograph of bacteria with a telescope? theoretically you could, but it
>would be so massive...
>
>And you say my ideas are far-out?? Maybe my ideas defy current
>understanding, but they are practical. 
>
>Kyle Mcallister

Its not going to be a solid scope!  Its just a lose formation of 1-2 meter
telescopes and a big computer to integrate the image data into a virtual
scope.  On the sheilf technology.  But never used on this scale before.


Kelly