The biggest complaint people have about the Vixen VC200L, VMC200L & R200SS is the thickness of the spider vanes. They are 6mm thick and they really don’t need to be that thick. At 2mm they are still very strong and no detrimental effect can be seen regards to holding the secondary mirror in place, it’s still solid as a rock.
By milling the spider vanes you gain extra aperture as well as less spiky stars. The milled area of each vane is 71mm in length, 4mm has been milled from each vane so multiply 71mm x4 and you get 284 sq mm of extra light reaching the mirror for just one vane, now multiply 284 by 4 to get the total area of extra light reaching the mirror, this is 1136 sq mm or 11.36 sq cm or in Imperial terms 1.760 sq inches which is almost the size of the secondary mirror.
