Descriptions of SPS growth (was The single-shell city can be done no

> [SPS] has hardly any limits to growth

Could you please describe those limits? As the Terran electricity
market continuously ramped up, SPS gathering-area would continuously
need to be added. For a single equatorial orbit at, say, 200,000
kilometers, there might be three gathering-arrays, 120 degrees apart.
For a gathering-array of 1 kilometer square, the area would be 1
million meters, and the solar power would be 1.3 gigawatts (it is
variable, and we want reliability, so we purposely err on the round
low side). Lets say that can reliably put 200 megawatts of electrical
power into Terran grids. We have three gathering-arrays, so the total
is 600 megawatts.

Increasing the size of each gathering-array to 1,000 x 1,000 km,
increases the area by 1 million-fold. That would bring us to 600
terawatts. Fraterclipse (eclipse by one's own solar-power-gathering
brothers) is eventually going to be a problem if we keep expanding
longitudinally, so sometime -- perhaps now -- we want to start
expanding only laterally. Expanding each gathering-array laterally by
100 brings each to 1,000 x 100,000 km, multiplies total power by 100,
and brings us to 60,000 terawatts. For comparison, total solar power
hitting Earth is 174,000 terawatts, and the United States currently
draws about .5 terawatts of electricity continuously. Maybe 60,000
terawatts would not be the limit before fraterclipsing, but I would
guess that it could share a not-too-large ballpark. Are my
assumptions wrong?

How would the power be transmitted? Each gathering-array might have
two or more transmitters, to route around the gathering-array's
blocking the view to Earth as the former orbits the latter, but
continuously faces the sun. Are the power-transmitters attached to
the gathering-array? Do they orbit the gathering-array? Is electrical
power transmitted (for, perhaps, thousands of kilometers) along the
gathering-array in metal cables?

Thanks in advance.