Spaceship based telescopes

[David L Pulver]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

The mirror dominates all other components in large telescopes and telescopes have always been mostly hollow.

I don't think you can get a realistic rule that scales for binoculars
and small LLTVs and thermographs and astronomical telescopes. The things that change when you scale up don't change in a homogenous manner.

Nonetheless, I must indeed cover robot eyes to giant telescopes...

As muttered already, I'm inclined to scale optical systems in a roughly linear manner at low magnifications/bonuses but use square of mag for weight at later levels as the simplest compromise even if it's not perfect.

The main problem is I can't figure out a way to make HIGH TECH's suggestion of Telescopic Vision as high as 10-15 (up to 32,000x magnification) for TL7 spy sats work unless I made the scaling *linear* with magnification (Given that Anthony makes a good argument that t his isn't really logical, and about 9-10 levels is better, perhaps I shouldn't...) Square of 32,000 gets rather impossibly high...

I'll probably reluctantly have to say that in Vehicle Design at least the values are about half to 2/3 what HIGH TECH says. I don't really like to do that, but it has the advantage of actually better matching the numbers in SPACESHIPS and UT, so it's not really a retcon.