Spaceship based telescopes

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

I'm more concerned with _overall_ weight scaling for all the optical systems rather than just the mirror itself...

Yeah, still goes up that way. Volume will pretty much go up with the cube, but the sensor will be increasingly hollow.

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

Incidentally, overall weights for active sensors like radar seem to also scale with about the square of the range.

Radar is funky. It's about order 1/4 in both power output and collector area, so overall about the 1/2 power.