My question is similar but slightly different: is it possible to throw a "lot" of much "worse" hardware at the problem and solve it through a different kind of brute force than just building ever-bigger mirrors (which will only ever get to low double digit metre diameters at least in the foreseeable future without orbital assembly capabilities).
Say for JWST, there are 18 segments. Could you have 1800 mini Webbs and offset the inaccuracies that come from that with the vastly higher total area? Does that eventually reach an asymptote where a adding more units isn't useful? Does it reach a point where the data re-integration becomes the intractable issue? Can it ever be as good as a gigantic monolith even with an arbitrary number of units? Would the cheapness of individual units be outweighed by the number of them needed?
Say for JWST, there are 18 segments. Could you have 1800 mini Webbs and offset the inaccuracies that come from that with the vastly higher total area? Does that eventually reach an asymptote where a adding more units isn't useful? Does it reach a point where the data re-integration becomes the intractable issue? Can it ever be as good as a gigantic monolith even with an arbitrary number of units? Would the cheapness of individual units be outweighed by the number of them needed?