- Yes, towing an object is indistinguishable from having the object bolted on to you, for the purposes of moving it through space. Also, some drives are not designed to tow large masses - if you try to attach to much on the back, you're going to have problems.
- On being too close together - well, there's been argument on that. My personal answer would be that it's not inherently a problem, but the drive fields merge if you get close enough, meaning that you're talking about combined mass, and the combined top speed goes down accordingly. It doesn't go down *much*, but it goes down. If they're running perpendicular to one another on a quick flyby, you might throw each other off course a bit by similar means, but nothing too bad otherwise. However, I don't think we *have* a canonical answer here.
- Honestly, I always figured that handwavium stuff didn't really break - or if it did, that it responded well to percussive maintenance, impassioned pleas, or whatever. It doesn't ever stop working - it just gains character. When it gets too *much* character, you render it down for spares and scrap and replace the thing. Alternately, the hardtech portion might break somewhere, but then all you have to do is open it up, dig out the offendig bit, and replace it with somehting jsut like it, gotten through the normal hardtech channels.
Mind you, finding a handwavium mechanic, capable of looking at the symptoms and figuring out what was wrong so that you *could* fix it... well, if you didn't have the skills for yourself, that could take doing. Alternately, we could decide to take pity on poor Julian and figure that he always biomods with the salient skill set/intuition. Hmmm....
- On being too close together - well, there's been argument on that. My personal answer would be that it's not inherently a problem, but the drive fields merge if you get close enough, meaning that you're talking about combined mass, and the combined top speed goes down accordingly. It doesn't go down *much*, but it goes down. If they're running perpendicular to one another on a quick flyby, you might throw each other off course a bit by similar means, but nothing too bad otherwise. However, I don't think we *have* a canonical answer here.
- Honestly, I always figured that handwavium stuff didn't really break - or if it did, that it responded well to percussive maintenance, impassioned pleas, or whatever. It doesn't ever stop working - it just gains character. When it gets too *much* character, you render it down for spares and scrap and replace the thing. Alternately, the hardtech portion might break somewhere, but then all you have to do is open it up, dig out the offendig bit, and replace it with somehting jsut like it, gotten through the normal hardtech channels.
Mind you, finding a handwavium mechanic, capable of looking at the symptoms and figuring out what was wrong so that you *could* fix it... well, if you didn't have the skills for yourself, that could take doing. Alternately, we could decide to take pity on poor Julian and figure that he always biomods with the salient skill set/intuition. Hmmm....