Theemile wrote:Ahh - But your missing the point of the streak drive. The secret sauce is that it can use 2 additional bands - and no one can detect an up translation. In normal space it behaves like a normal hyper drive - it jumps into hyper (in the alpha band). And even if you were following a Steak ship through hyper, when it kicked in those extra gears, it would simply disappear from your scanners. You might say "it jumped to the iota band" but have no proof that is what happened. It might be some kind of stealth, hyper distortion, the ship might have dropped a band and hyper distortion blocked the signal, or they might merely shut down their drives and let you fly past. Any of those are more reasonable explanations than an unheard of drive that reaches previously walled off areas of hyper.
Even if someone pulled the hardware apart, would a knowledgeable person even know what they are seeing? It's not the normal design, and that would be a glaring item, but could you tell that it opened 2 additional hyper bands? The only hint might be in the software controlling the drive.
Actually I'd add a slight correction. Nobody can detect a translation out of the band they're in. The translation signature is always in the band they arrive in (thanks to the energy bleed of crossing that hyper wall)
So from normal space, yes, you can't detect an up translation because there's no way to translate up into normal space
But if someone were sitting in the correct part of the Alpha band they'd see the energy bleed when that upward translation arrived there. And conversely if a convoy's escort drops out of the Alpha bands to check that their destination is safe the convoy ships won't see any translation signature, but any observers in normal space would.
(It just gets talked about only as upward translations because in general we're focusing on observers in normal space)
But in your scenario, monitoring a streak drive equipped ship in the Theta bands it wouldn't matter if they went up to Iota or down to Eta; either way there's be no signature from their departure from the Theta bands.
To detect a streak ship as being something special in hyper you'd have to be in the supremely lucky situation of cruising along in the Theta bands and seeing one translate downwards through the Iota wall! (And that's probably win a lottery every single day of your prolong life levels of luck )