How fast can the Streak Drive climb hyper bands?

Relax wrote:Since impeller nodes have to be in certain positions for a given volume, your thesis seems non nonsensical. Non nonsensical in the sense, pun intended, where the acceleration given is for the volume. Either the spider ship fits or it does not. An either or proposition.

A triple skeg. Sure sounds like a triangle to me where the triangle tips are more pointy. Not a true equilateral triangle as it has 3 broadsides. No reason a triangle couldn't fit inside a cylindrical volume. Would work fine for light units. Run into problems for the Bigger classes as one hits that ol' 8M impeller ton limit. If a large portion of that 8M ton volume is empty air instead of warship it would make a piss poor accelerating capitol ship who may as well go with its spider drive for acceleration. Of course for light units a far better unit/cost/capabilities may be a straight up standard impeller design.

Even though the alpha nodes couldn't give a large better acceleration than the spider drive (for the hull geometry reasons you pointed out) they could still be worth mounting just to give the ship wormhole transit capability.

After all it doesn't really matter if you crawled through the wormhole at < 1g, it still cuts huge amounts of time off your strategic transit.


And the alpha nodes should never be slower than the spider, because if the volume is big enough that the max compensator accel is lower than the spider drive can pull w/ grav plates you can just use the same grav plates while under impeller drive and get the same accel. Then while under sail I suspect the compensator will always win because grav waves give all ships a roughly 100x boost in max accelerated compensation (due to their vastly deeper grav 'sumps', and that should more than offset how poor a 9+ Mton ship's normal compensated acceleration normally is.

I'm pretty sure that Spider Drive ships are merely Trilaterally Symmetrical, not triangle shaped. They could quite well have the standard spindle/cylindrical shape normal Honorverse ships have with the three spines of the spider drive running down them, but I doubt it unless there's a good reason, like it being dual-drive.

Now dual-drive ships are likely to be rare. While not physically impossible unless the spines of the Spider Drive have to cross the Impeller rings, it will drastically comprise the layout of an Impeller drive warship. The most likely placement would have one of the Spider Drive Spines running along the dorsal (or ventral) of the ship, with the other two low on it's sides, so it's likely blind from above and had it's broadside equipment cut in half before it has to worry about carrying that third broadside. I'm not saying that it's impossible or anything, just that an Impeller Drive warship will pay a serious price to be equipped with Spider Drive, and that will be in it's ability to fight against other Impeller Drive ships will be the area where it takes the biggest hit (Spider Drive ships with Impeller Drive don't look to be taking too many hits, but)

As for the ones that can transit WHJs? They're likely equipped with only enough Alpha Nodes to create the needed sails, but not any other nodes, Beta Nodes are used to generate a wedge to move between locations where sails are used, but they've got the Spider for that.