Not necessarily.
There's a couple fun tricks you could pull with a drive like that, depending on the principles it uses. I tend to favor kinetic shearing effects, myself- a spherical 'push' surrounded by 'pull' effect is wonderfully elegant- but dropping a wormhole inside the target works just as well. Come to think of it, so does dropping them in a 10,000G field for a second or so, and letting their inertial compensators explode. Maybe flash-aging their antimatter containment pods? Stasis-locking the 'neck' of a multi-hull design, or the nose of a single hull? Bending space so that the enemy rams its prow into its keel?
If your space wizards had sufficient superiority, they could even Urenbeck Catapult their opponents into the nearest stellar body.
My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.
There's a couple fun tricks you could pull with a drive like that, depending on the principles it uses. I tend to favor kinetic shearing effects, myself- a spherical 'push' surrounded by 'pull' effect is wonderfully elegant- but dropping a wormhole inside the target works just as well. Come to think of it, so does dropping them in a 10,000G field for a second or so, and letting their inertial compensators explode. Maybe flash-aging their antimatter containment pods? Stasis-locking the 'neck' of a multi-hull design, or the nose of a single hull? Bending space so that the enemy rams its prow into its keel?
If your space wizards had sufficient superiority, they could even Urenbeck Catapult their opponents into the nearest stellar body.
My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.