Core world vulnerability

Weird Harold wrote:

Zakharra wrote: I'll have to reread the book again, but I thought the drones were spider drive equipped so they could sneak in so close without detection, but the ships that launched them were streak drive equipped.

The Streak Drive is just a hyper-generator on steroids. The Ghost class ships were Spider Drive ships and the Grazer Torpedoes were also Spider Drive equipped.

Remember the search for the "Hyper Ghost" conducted by a squadron of destroyers when the MAN ships first arrived? That "Hyper Ghost" was caused by a very slow downward translation from Hyper which implies that they were able to get into hyper in the first place,

n7axw wrote:There is truth to what you are saying about the streak, Harold. But there has to be more to it than that for them to survive as high as they get in the hyper bands. I seem to be missing a trick here or don't quite understand what I am reading.

Don

Mission of Honor
Chapter Four
wrote:The streak drive represented a fundamental advance in interstellar travel, and there was no indication anyone else was even close to duplicating it. For centuries, the theta bands had represented an inviolable ceiling for hyper-capable ships. Everyone had known it was theoretically possible to go even higher, attain a still higher apparent normal-space velocity, yet no one had ever managed to design a ship which could crack the iota wall and survive. Incredible amounts of research had been invested in efforts to do just that, especially in the earlier days of hyper travel, but with a uniform lack of success. In the last few centuries, efforts to beat the iota barrier had waned, until the goal had been pretty much abandoned as one of those theoretically possible but practically unobtainable concepts.

But the Mesan Alignment hadn't abandoned it, and finally, after the better part of a hundred T-years of dogged research, they'd found the answer. It was, in many ways, a brute force approach, and it wouldn't have been possible even now without relatively recent advances (whose potential no one else seemed to have noticed) in related fields. And even with those other advances, it had almost doubled the size of conventional hyper generators. But it worked. Indeed, they'd broken not simply the iota wall, but the kappa wall, as well. Which meant the voyage from New Tuscany to Mesa, which would have taken anyone else the next best thing to forty-five T-days, had taken Anisimovna less than thirty-one.