Cobalt Greywalker Wrote:The problem with combining Speed and Acceleration Drives is that the drive field affects everything inside it. Which means that the thrust from the Acc-Drive down-ramps upon leaving the field to the speed it was travelling relative to the ship it was mounted on. Even drives waved specifically for acceleration don't add much.
Thus, you have to push from outside the drive field. There's the simple way, and the mind-bogglingly complex way.
The simple way is best shown by how the Fenspace Speed Record is usually done. Take a Virgil Samms type ship, tweak the drive field to make it as tight to the skin as possible, then bolt on outriggers with acceleration drives such that the acc-drives are outside the ship's drive field. The main problem with this is the spars of the outriggers have to be really strong to take the stresses involved.
Still, the current Fenspace speed record is held by Hades Station's Research Team, after Eddie discovered that it was possible. They managed to get to a respectable 0.223c in empty space. Their next attempt used a gravitational slingshot around Jupiter and made a whopping 0.24c, but this method was disallowed.
Actually.... that just gave me an idea. Take the same theory, then scale it up a bit. Most fencraft based on aircraft still have wings. Well, what are wings to a spacecraft but somewhere to mount something?
They're already going to be pretty strong after waving... they have to take the entire weight of the original aircraft as built along with combat maneuvering. So, instead of mounting the drives on the fuselage, mount them on the wingtips, with the drive field cutting off somewhere close to the engines. There is a precedent for this arrangement in aviation. However, it's not exactly condusive to being an easy to control spacecraft. A fault with one of the engines, or if one of them slips inside the drive field for whatever reason.... she's going to spin out in a big way.
Something like: http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m57/ ... 13view.gif
Prototype, painted in blue and raw metal: http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m57/ ... r-blue.jpg
So you got a big main engine... probably a fuel-hungry version of an ion drive, and then these two boosters outside the drive field. At high speeds, the interactions between the spacecraft and the edge of the drive field cause the juddering and shimmying and all round crappy handling. The wingtips are flexing, changing the thrust vectors ever so slightly.... A problem if you accidentally exacerbate the effect. And if you let it do it too long, you snap a wing off.
It's not intended to be nice to fly... or even safe.
EDIT: It wasn't my original intention... but putting those nacelles on the wings actually looks pretty cool.
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