I see that TerraMatrix raised a highly technical issue by saying,

been trying to find an affordable but highly capable video camera

And then went on to ask about,

Using a single lens, but hacking together several camera bodies to somehow
utilize that one lense. Each of the donor dslr cams shoot at a rate equal or
close to burst mode
A spinning central mirror to reflect the light, or

My thoughts on these proposals ...

(A) Spinning mirror

Could be problems of distortion; dust; synchronization; ...

(B) Multiple camera bodies runing in tandem/sequence

Major problems to get frame synchronism; AFIK, burst modes are
manual; you would need to do a major hack to the onboard camera
firmware to get the multiple bodies to "cooperate". 

(C) IOW, "Too many moving parts."

As I see it, the central problem is the file recording data rate -- you
should attack that issue to get your solution. 

As a matter of fact, there is a solution to that issue. One of the defined
RAID modes is data striping.  You would need enough HDDs so that
their aggregate data rate exceeded the target rate of 45MBy per second.
You would also need to engineer an interface that interfaced with the 
camera's flash card interface (either SD or CF) and (with respect to the
camera) emulated a single drive.  Software associated with the multiple
HHDs would do the data striping.  That software would also handle the
replay issues.  Linux is capable of the required data buffering and RAID-0
issues.  If someone has already created the SD or CF emulation hardware
and associated transfer cable, this is possible. 

BTW, USB 2.0 could provide sufficient data transfer rate. 45MBy/sec needs 
360,000,000 bits per second and USB 2.0 provides 480,000,000 bits per
second -- I don't know if the camera body firmware can be set to transfer
the image data over the USB connection in real time -- i.e. while the images
are being generated. 

You should check the data rates of high speed or 'professional' flash
memory cards -- discover the actual data rate in bits per second not just
the (marketing) numbers like 12X, ...

--
Martin