The receive optical collector is composed as an N^S-way replication (called scaling out) of the aperture. An individual aperture focuses on achieving the maximum and uniform sensitivity to the signals from all probes in a swarm across a coverage solid angle Ω_A and has effective area ﹩{A}_{e}^{S}﹩. It is also responsible for achieving a sufficiently large SBR to achieve the target BPP, and it may also be responsible for separating the signals from different probes. The N^S apertures independently capture and log photon detection events, with their only coordination a common clock for time stamps. The resulting incoherent accumulation of the incident optical power across the entire collector achieves a sufficient average photon detection rate ﹩{{\rm{\Lambda }}}_{A}^{R}﹩ to recover the scientific data at rate ﹩{ \mathcal R }﹩, while influencing neither the coverage nor SBR.