ThinksMarkedly wrote:
No, they could and would not have.
They could not have done it because the spider drive wasn't perfected until a short while ago. We know the Sharks were barely out of testing phase in 1921 when Operation Oyster Bay was launched. Smaller ships like the Ghosts must have existed for a little while longer, but not so long before. I know I am speculating here on when the spider drive became practical, but I'm fairly certain it couldn't have been much earlier than 1915.
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I'd back the time scale up a couple years - it takes 2-4 years to build a 5ish Mton warship. The Malign had just shy of 30 of the ships for OB, and they probably built a pilot ship first, then the experimental force. Of course, they wouldn't have built a 5ish mton pilot ship until they had perfected the drive - which as you said, would have them install the drive first in a small prototype, then test and refine it before they started to seriously plan a navy with the drive (which may have had several iterations before it go perfected.) So I'd say the Spider moved out of theory to hardware somewhere in the 1908-1910 range.
But still - it's quite new, and the Malign had to make a massive pivot in their grand plans once it paid off to start building the Spider Drive fleet.