Dafmeister wrote:They're two very different things.
The spider drive, rather than generating a wedge, uses three (I think) sets of what are basically ridiculously overpowered tractor beams to grab onto the alpha wall and pull the ship forwards, then release and grab on further forward. The down side is that, without the wedge, not only do you not have the primary passive defence of a warship, you can't run an inertial compensator either. You have to rely on grav plates, which limits max accel to about 200g. It also means that the ships are radically different in design, with trilateral symetry and their decks arranged so that 'up' is toward the bow.
The streak drive is an overpowered hyper generator (twice the size of a conventional generator) with some technical tweaks that allow it to translate through the previously impenetrable iota wall (the one HMS Apollo 'bounced' off during Alice Truman's dash from Grayson in Honor of the Queen, nearly losing the ship with all hands) and then the kappa wall, which increases apparent n-space velocity by almost half over travel in the theta bands.
Daffmeister, thank you for that explanation. I cannot remember ever having read those details in any of the books, so I appreciate it.
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