alt Hacker NewsWouldn't the angle of the offset matter? It seems like it would make scattering worse to be off-axis by too far.
Which then also means you have to build ground stations in this range yet far enough apart that they experience different weather yet close enough that you can redundantly link all the sites.
Aside from government and massive telecommunications companies who would this serve?
???
It's just really cool sci-fi tech that I want to see used in something other than DLP chips!
JWST and other observatories with segmented primary mirrors kind of use the segment alignment one time to get the correct alignment once. Then there is Adaptive Optics. It's kind of the opposite direction though as they are using a laser to detect the distortion so it can be compensated in the image. From learning about SDI when I was a kid/teen, it's just always been about controlling the laser itself in my mind.