Staying with the theme of "legal" time travel, I needed a way to send pictures back to Skyler Base that effectively traveled backwards in time. So I created tiny spaceships with two opposing PPT drives and a single pixel element. I sent the device through a tiny PPT tunnel, had it take a snapshot, then return. Since stars are so far away, basically, you only "see" one photon at a time so the only object observed would be that perpendicular to the plane of the charge plate. While it was not explicitly stated in the story, there was an annular ring around the charge plate to prevent any local incidental light from entering.
The fact of the matter is, we really didn't need to do it this way. Since a PPT tunnel allows electromagnetic radiation to shine through, I could have just sent the tiny spaceships out, take their snapshot then open up a tunnel and beam the data back. But I loved the idea of having twin sets of smaller-than-pin-size spaceships blipping in and out. I interleaved them so they would be analogous to the interlaced images on standard TVs.
OMCOM used "remote control" to guarantee that as the starprobes jumped out, they formed themselves along an imaginary spherical surface so that they all "pointed" toward the object to be observed. The more concave the designated surface, the more "curved" would be the virtual mirror, determining what it would focus on. Thus they formed a lens-less time-traveling camera. MINIMCOM was trained and used the starprobes often to look ahead and later to find the discarded propulsion module of the Ark V circling around Chara in the novel entitled The Ark Lords.