Earth once had giant lizards, giant insects, giant centipedes. It's not inconceivable. Neither is the tank image. For obvious reasons.

I don't think your gravity lensing telescope is better than mine. It would have poor sky coverage. Tracking a new target would require moving to a new position via the expenditure of propellant. In contrast, mine would just rotate. It would track a planet for a few minutes. In that time it would gather a wealth of data on an entire hemisphere of a planet. Think of Earth: in 5 minutes we could see the entire range of human behaviours, just by looking at a different grid on the half-world hologram. In this way, the telescope would not have to track specific locations on the planet, as the planet turns, it would only have to stay centered, or have a near zero angular rate relative to the planet it is imaging. It would pause on a planet for 5 minutes, transmit its data back to earth, then move on to the next target. In a day it would image on the order of hundreds of alien worlds, enough to keep all of Earth's scientists busy, analyzing, categorizing, head-scratching.

As for the light collection area, that's a matter of scaling rather than feasibility. The number of mirrors we can manufacture for the observatory would be the limiting factor. Other than that, it's a non-issue. Ultimately, if human beings plan on sticking around for the next few millennia (or eons, or whatever), eventually we've got to put out some feelers of this sort, regardless of how "big" the telescope is, because it's just a helluva lot easier than actually physically exploring each and every star system out there. Simple fact.

The telescope is the real gold. The gyropulser propulsion system is just incidental. I needed a way to deploy the telescope, and there didn't seem to be any really decent ideas out there.