The Very Dangerous Array, or VDA, is not so much a technology as a technique. Creating a VDA is a matter of augmenting a missile-control computer with astronomy programming, and then using the missiles' targeting sensors as nodes of a Very Large Array-style aperture-synthesis telescope . Since any warship worth its hullmetal carries hundreds of terapedoes, and these can be spread across an immense area, the technique creates an astoundingly high-resolution telescope with virtually no effort. And of course, if you happen to spot an enemy with this telescope, by definition you've already fired a barrage of missiles at them.
A VDA also has the advantage that it can be teraported to various distances from a target and report its view in real time via hypernet. In this way, the user of the array can bypass speed-of-light lag when observing a distant target, or even exploit that lag to examine a target's history. For example, a VDA positioned twelve light-hours away from a site will see what happened there twelve hours ago.
The first known VDA was deployed by Kevyn Andreyasn from the Serial Peacemaker.
Telescope arrays[]
While specifically using missiles to improvise telescope arrays was a technique invented by Kevyn, the same technology could ultimately be scaled up to create telescope arrays that spanned the whole galaxy.[1] Their size was limited to the area of spacetime that was sufficiently curved by the galaxy's gravity well to allow cheap teraporting.[2] Arrays like these could resolve objects millions of lightyears away (with a delay of millions of years, of course).
Archie and Evvin, two probablity manifold intelligences that had each observed millions of years of cyclical galactic civilization, respectively described this technology as "one beginning of the many endings" and "an early gate to the wide road to oblivion", saying that civilizations that built them would eventually decide to leave the galaxy.