RE: starship-design: Massively Distributed Computing for SETI

["L. Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>]

>
>   E.g., a 100-kilometer diameter microvawe dish
>   tilted by only 1 mm (1/25th of an inch) at the edge, sweeps
> the beam
>   at 1 ly distance by 100 000 (one HUNDRED thousand) kilometers!
>   (i.e., almost one-third of the Earth-Moon distance)
>
>    I am afraid that such deflections are easily obtainable
>   by heat distortions of the structure or gravitational perturbation
>   from an asteroid flying some million kilometers away...

Well it is obvious from what you just presented that a dish is out of the
question. A phased array however is quite a different matter.

Assuming that we are looking at a microwave beam as opposed to a laser, then
we would only have to electronically steer the beam to correct for
movement - as well as heat distortions, gravitational perturbations, etc.,
which also implies some sort of feedback loop to measure such things.

By the way, this also just added another whopping chunk of computer
processing....

Lee