When Noah and his nephew built the Epsilon Blade, they were expecting/hoping to get a decent acceleration drive out of the ion engines they had installed. Instead, they got a speed drive, just like everybody else at the time. From a meta point of view, I'm not sure we can get waved acceleration drives in Fenspace ... but I'm willing to be outvoted on this.
Fully-hardtech acceleration drives - even the ones in the Whole Fenspace Catalog - have that pesky delta-v issue that everyone's already mentioned. Thus, they end up being used either for long-duration trips with a lot of coasting (read: slow cruises), or very-short-duration trips (read: missiles).
And if you travel too fast, you run into time-dilation issues - the humans might not notice at .2c, but the AIs will. Why introduce the problem if there isn't a good reason for it?
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
Fully-hardtech acceleration drives - even the ones in the Whole Fenspace Catalog - have that pesky delta-v issue that everyone's already mentioned. Thus, they end up being used either for long-duration trips with a lot of coasting (read: slow cruises), or very-short-duration trips (read: missiles).
And if you travel too fast, you run into time-dilation issues - the humans might not notice at .2c, but the AIs will. Why introduce the problem if there isn't a good reason for it?
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012