Nuke vs. SPS ( Population reduction isn't necessary for wilderness)

--- In spacesettlers, "hitssquad" wrote:

> Adding transmission capability to the ISS might make it
> officially an "SPS" in your eyes,
No, that would make the ISS an international space station which was now testing one particular piece of SPS technology.

> but it wouldn't make it any cheaper.
No, it wouldn't.

> It would likely make it even more expensive.
Yes, by the cost of the transmitter itself plus the cost of launching it plus the cost of installing it.

> So, you're saying you don't believe a "real" SPS would be as
> cheap as a quadrillion dollars per gigawatt? You think,
> because of the expense of adding transmission capability, it
> would be MORE expensive per gigawatt?
No, I don't believe any such thing. I don't believe any such thing because (and I want you to pay attention here, because while some have tried to point this fact out to you, you haven't gotten it so far) an SPS is not, Not, NOT a scaled up ISS. Yes, an SPS would be about a hundred times the length and a hundred times the width of the ISS's solar panels, so 10,000 times the area of solar collection, but

It doesn't have to have ten thousand docking ports.
It doesn't have to have accommodations for sixty thousand astronauts at a time.
It doesn't have to have 8,370,000 m3 of pressurized volume.
It doesn't have to have ten thousand times the computer processing power.
It doesn't have to have ten thousand toilets.
It doesn't have to have ten thousand hot water dispensers.
And so on.

An SPS simply IS NOT the ISS writ large, and any calculations based on the assumption that an SPS is the ISS writ large will be flawed, even if there are no arithmetic errors.

And that's before one gets into questions of possible advances in launch technology, mass producing parts which now are custom built each time, the fact that the materials and workmanship don't have to be up to the life-preserving standards of a space station, and so on.