On the specific setup of the Kestrel, I'm seeing something up there on the volatility scale with antimatter thermal rockets as the secondary motive source; by that point the 'wavetech speed drives will have diverted their power to inertial dampening and (more importantly) structural integrity fields to keep the motors from just grenading. Although, if this specific technobabble form is okay, it's liable to be heinously expensive to fuel, and easily explains where the Mk1 and Mk2 Kestrel went (lost in remote-controlled testing)
Or one of several other types of technobabble.![[Image: wink.gif]](http://www.ezboard.com/intl/aenglish/images/emoticons/wink.gif)
As for what happens when you turn on the speed drives above their maximum velocity... well, as I'm seeing it, they sorta work in the sense that it's a black box where you put energy in and velocity goes up, and energy comes out when the converse is true. So, again, as I see it, if you turn the suckers on above their speed limit, they start glowing funny incandescent colors (unless you do a lot of modification from the basic design for sake of cooling) and need to dump a lot of energy as the thing they're bolted to jolts down to the speed drive top speed. Failure to take care of both issues may well result in the things melting, with hilarious results!
Racing specific stuff... well, I'm deliberately trying to avoid working the math, because getting too much into hard science sorta takes away the point, y'know? But how much use acceleration drives are would depend on courses... you might have interplanetary runs where biasing towards acceldrives gets you a *lot* of benefit, or particularily messy asteroid belt runs where you're better off going for minimal mass and biasing towards speed drives.
Reaction drives as improvised beam weapons? Well... could be. But there've already been several instances in the thread where wavetech has been used as improvised weaponry. This might be another case where racing technology is eventually applied to war stuffle (ala Schnieder Cup races of the '30s) but at the point in history we're writing in, it's probably too volatile and fiddly.
Or one of several other types of technobabble.
As for what happens when you turn on the speed drives above their maximum velocity... well, as I'm seeing it, they sorta work in the sense that it's a black box where you put energy in and velocity goes up, and energy comes out when the converse is true. So, again, as I see it, if you turn the suckers on above their speed limit, they start glowing funny incandescent colors (unless you do a lot of modification from the basic design for sake of cooling) and need to dump a lot of energy as the thing they're bolted to jolts down to the speed drive top speed. Failure to take care of both issues may well result in the things melting, with hilarious results!
Racing specific stuff... well, I'm deliberately trying to avoid working the math, because getting too much into hard science sorta takes away the point, y'know? But how much use acceleration drives are would depend on courses... you might have interplanetary runs where biasing towards acceldrives gets you a *lot* of benefit, or particularily messy asteroid belt runs where you're better off going for minimal mass and biasing towards speed drives.
Reaction drives as improvised beam weapons? Well... could be. But there've already been several instances in the thread where wavetech has been used as improvised weaponry. This might be another case where racing technology is eventually applied to war stuffle (ala Schnieder Cup races of the '30s) but at the point in history we're writing in, it's probably too volatile and fiddly.