> Cooling would be achieved through a thermal sys- tem of heat pipes and radiators while operating at nominal temperatures.
Isn't that drastically underselling potentially one of the harder parts of this whole endeavor?
Everything in space is hard; but these are Alphabet researchers not NASA researchers, and honestly even the NASA papers I've been skimming through have a lot of simplifying assumptions in them, so that's not something to hold against them here.
They are just saying when they think it's worth considering, after all, not giving a detailed all-aspect proposal for how to make one.
Scaling that to the hundreds of GW range is quite laughable.
While I'd suspect the design is still in flux, the current design is for a 120kw satellite with 110 square meters of radiators. Scaling to hundreds of gigawatts is intended to be by repeatedly launching smaller designs.
It's ridiculous anyway you cut it, it's a pipe dream.
Like I said higher up, at this scale, if you want to make your own fantasy plan you can draw a contiguous ring filling a single orbit.
Now if we are talking about thousands or millions you have some real questions. Well cost was question to start with. But at millions satellites yeah there is clear issues.
Simple rule for numbers 1 gigawatt is 1 000 megawatts or 1 000 000 kilowatts... So math is pretty simple there in estimations.