MaxxQ wrote:Zakharra wrote:John Roth has it right. There's no reason why some merchant ships wouldn't be using the better rad/particle shielding, inertial compensator and such, other than being cheap. It also might be simply, that the military spec hyperdrive engines simply aren't allowed to be used by select authorized users. Hauptman clearly is one such authorized user. His corporations build warships so they have access to the parts.
Another consideration might be a scarcity of spare parts. There's likely a much higher chance of replacement parts for the commercial hyperdrives merchant ships use. But also take this into considerations; Manticore merchant ships likely have better engines, shielding and compensators than most Solarian vessels do, but you don't see the Manty ships downgrading to Solly level of drives and such. It would be cheaper after all to use such, but it's also somewhat slower. So speed is a factor to be taken into consideration. Hence my idea of some commercial vessels using things like the milspec drives or even streak drives. There should be a market for very speedy vessels that can carry decent cargoes -fast-. This wouldn't affect bulk transport which would move by slower ships, but it can mean a nice bottom line for some select companies that do follow this model as they satisfy a niche market.
First, why would anyone downgrade? That's stupid and costly. If you *already* have a speedier ship than the Sollies, why would you drop to their level? Even new-build, why would you do that?
Second, we both seem to be saying the same thing as far as special, or specialized ships. I just don't think the *general* merchant ships will get anything like a civilian version of a streak drive, or improved rad and particle shielding, or compensators.
Vince summed up the types of ships that might get those improvements pretty well.
It's basically cost-benefit. Being able to go up one hyper band results in faster transit times which saves money on a lot of fronts. The "streak drive" is the result of improvements in a number of apparently unrelated fields. Can a commercial hyper generator benefit from those improvements without ruinous additional cost? Only RFC knows, and I suspect that it's beyond the time horizon he's got for the end of the series.
The same logic goes for improved compensators. The longer the voyage, the less important compensator efficiency becomes. However, if the improvements eventually trickle down to the basic commercial systems at a cost that doesn't eat up reductions in transit times, I don't see why they wouldn't be adopted. Right now, they're military secrets, so I expect that nobody is working on applying the same principles to commercial engines.
