smr wrote:The real question what are ramifications of the streak drive. This innovation period is like the time of jet before breaking the sound barrier and the age after breaking the sound barrier. Very shortly after breaking the sound barrier, we were developing planes that were going at multiple times the speed of sound. We had the Blackbird. How many hyperbands are the GA and MesaAlign going to break. Who is going to create the blackbird of the day.
Sarge
This is indeed the core question of the thread.
The streak drive is specifically stated to be comparatively larger so the question is wether the compromise becomes worth it or not.
Guaranteed is that there will be GA streak drive ships, no question about it. The question is what types of ships with it there will be. Courier ships, no doubt about those.
But then it becomes problematic, on the one hand, smaller ships that can "run" faster is always an advantage and while the offset is greater, they wouldn´t be designed for maximum battle-ability but for a mix between strategic mobility and combat power, but how big would the offset be? Would it be worth it?
And then for large ships, where the generator is a comparatively smaller part of the total, but at the same time, the big ships are already having quite a noticeable sizecreep because their very reason for existance is to have the most combat ability possible.
Strategic mobility can be a BIG and very dangerous killer, but if the compromise of adding a "streak drive" mod lowers a SDs combat power by 10%, then it may not be worth it.
My own first reaction, if the size penalty is indeed a doubling, is leaning towards having something like a 1M ton BC as THE streak drive ship, big enough to kill any light ship, fast enough to easily outrun any SDs, and large enough to defend against quite heavy firepower and so on...
Then, you use them in couples as fast scouts and in large packs as a strategic "knife in the back" that can run circles around any defenders, and in large enough packs are still capable of hitting even fairly well defended locations, as long as they dont have massive
mobile defenses.
Lets say you build 60 of them, and another 20 depot ships with streak drives, then you send off 5 packs of 12 each with 4 depot ships to provide assistance and more importantly offship pods to allow massive first strikes. Send those out to raid 2-3 systems each in their own areas, then repeat, if a system has heavy defense, launch your first strike at max range and leave.
Very soon, it will be hard for an opponent to know where to put their fleet units and how to defend at all.
And even if they figure out where the fast BC group will go to strike next,
even their couriers probably wont get there in time to warn them.
Possibly also something smaller, a more limited heavy scout, maybe 25-33% larger than a Roland, with similar combat ability. With David´s stated dislike for specialisation, i doubt this though.
In the comparison you took from the real world history, the SR-71 never became the fighterplane it was meant to be, but it became a valuable recon plane, the Valkyrie bomber was utterly dropped, while the counter to the Valkyrie, the MiG-25 was completed and while having massive drawbacks was later refined into the extremely deadly MiG-31(even if the latter dropped a bit of dashspeed to achieve it´s ability overall).
So where the development goes will be interesting.
