Recent content by Stainless Steel Fox

Okay, now that makes sense. On a separate note, the Space Fold Drive power requirements are unclear. It says the power needed is 50% of the ships mass tines the Fold Drive rating, but is that only for the moment of fold, or is it a continuous input during normal space flight, as it says it...

Though the vectoring idea gives me a thought about Z-drives, contra-gravity. They are a TL-7/TL-8 tech whereas full blown M-Drives are TL-9. What if Z-drives work by altering the acceleration vector of the natural gravity field while TL-9 is where you learn to generate your own acceleration...

This is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. If the thrust plates are at the back and along the centre line, forward/aft acceleration is in a straight line, and that 25% sideways vector would act as roll/yaw attitude control, spinning the vehicle to face a new heading. However, this...

Interesting. If the thrust vector can be altered without reorienting the drive plate, it may be similar to how a phase array radar can change the direction of the radar beam without moving the radar. Though I'd have to assume it had a limited range of vectoring. One reason I was looking at a...

M-Drive is your basic reactionless drive system, fair enough and the visible 'engine nacelles' are actually exhausts for ionisation produced by the thruster plates, from what I've read here. The question I have is, is the thrust applied to the hull of the vessel as a whole, or is it applied to...

So M-Drives are only relevant for relative motion between vessels sharing a volume of hyperspace. Seems more like the system used in Honor Harrington, where instead of a hyperspace bubble, each layer of hyperspace is a volume unto itself which maps onto lower layers but is more compressed...

In the High Technology section of High Guard, on page 66, we get a description of the FTL Hyperdrive for TL-17 onwards. Warp Drive works the same way mechanically, just travelling in realspace rather than a hyperspace. The Hyperdrive/Warp rating is in parsecs per hour, and uses power equal to...