Spaceship based telescopes

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

One of the biggest problems I faced working vehicle design rules has been trying to scale the optical and infrared sensors to GURPS values. Let me know if this makes sense:

* HIGH TECH will let you have a 10x stabilized binoculars are about 4 lbs. at TL8.

* As far as I can ascertain, the various parts of optics tend to scale fairly well with the square of what GURPS simplifies as "magnification."

* This would suggest that a 100x system, 10x larger, would be 400 lbs. and a 1000x system, 100x larger, would be 40,000 lbs. or more.

* However, various sources and HIGH TECH's suggestion for Telescopic Vision implies that a Hubble or KH-11 style system is closer to 4,000 to 8000x. That would be 160, 000 to 640,000 lbs.

Allowing for telescope having a smaller field than binoculars (half weight, say) that's still 80,000 to 320,000 lbs. That's much larger than the maybe 4,000 to 16,000 lbs. the actual system (depending on versions) should weigh.

So, which is wrong:

(a) "scale by the square of magnification"
(b) the estimate that Hubble / KH-11 is about 4,000 to 8,000x magnification
by GURPS standards
(c) the base weight of the 10x system.
(d) it's right, but when you blow a billion dollars on a telescope, you should be able to get multiple levels of "super very expensive"

Also, it looks like if you scale DOWN you get a super-light 1x magnification system. At TL8 what would be a realistic weight for a 1x "human eyeball" camera?





What's the solution?

How much of the weight of a 4 pound set of binoculars is actually optics, and how much is a rugged, ergonomic casing?

The Hubble can't cut corners on optics (though it might be able to be more weight-efficient on them by using some alternate design that's either too costly or otherwise unsuitable for binoculars, I don't know the details of space telescope design), but its casing is neither rugged nor ergonomic.