Quote:Hmm. Thoughts this puts in my head: The original Zentradi capital ships definitely mounted some sort of reaction thrusters - they were buried in those scalloped structures they always had at the stern, and/or clearly visible on the Meltran ships. So, there's clearly a reason for ships to mount distinct engines... Or, hmm. I'd always thought that, even without the Armor platforms, the Macross had picked up a noticable amount of mass during her refit - her engine pods might be part of that.
The would work. My suggestion would be that the Zentraedi ships & original factory-fresh Macross could use the antigravity feild for propulsion, giving them more maneuverability and greater total acceleration. (IIRC we don't see much in the way of visible engine spaces on the Zent cruisers, yes/no?) The human rebuilt Macross, OTOH, can't use the antigrav for much more than basic mass-cancelling and interior gravity - the scientists working on the black box figured that much out, but can't seem to shape the propulsion fields properly, so they ended up adding thruster spaces to a ship that, if rebuilt properly by the original designers, doesn't really need them.
Something I remember from my reading on physics (for an Astronomy class, ironically) is that forces act through the transfer of, um, empherial? Transient? Short-lived? particles called bosons, which are created at one end of an interaction, then move through space to the other end, where they're absorbed/destroyed. Photons are definitely the most famous member of this class of particle, but they also include a lot of other, wierder, things, most notably the not-yet-observed graviton.
Logically, shouldn't something that can affect one class of boson be able to affect others? What would the implications of that be?
And just what is inertia, anyway? My knowledge of physics doesn't go that far... if it also works through boson interactions then we're all well and good, but otherwise...
The boson-canceller and the SIF might be the same device, since we never really defined the latter beyond what we needed it to do. If the former doesn't quite do all that we need it to do, I seem to remember hearing somewhere about a real-world theory that suggested ways to use active energy fields to increase the strength of armor, which, if true, would be helpful, particularly in combination.
Ja, -n
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."