Countering the Spider – Real World Inspirations

SWM wrote:What that says is that a normal ship cannot maneuver in a grav wave without sails. That's because the only drive they have that works in a grav wave is the Warshawski sails. If the spider drive works in a grav wave, then that is not a problem for spider drive ships.

True, but I'd be very surprised if a spider drive (which is after all still a gravimetric based drive system, could work in a grav wave without fatal interference between the spider 'legs' and the grav wave's "current".

I guess you could have some kind of 'tuner' to allow you to 'trim' the legs to avoid that (kind of like how the sails have to be tuned for turbulence detected by the Warshaski sensors), but I'd guess that the hardware to allow that would vastly drive up the size and complexity of each spider drive node - way beyond what I assume you'd need in order to use it in n-space where you don't have grav anomalies to tune for.

dreamrider wrote:Agree with all your points, though I still 'feel like' the thoughts/language of some of the MAlign characters implies perhaps a little larger than 10MT. On the other hand I am NOT in the 20MT+ school. As one of our colleagues here always says, "I'm waiting as fast as I can."

Eh, consider that outside the Haven sector, people are still fielding sub-7MT "SDs". 10 MT is nearly half again as big as a Scientist. Heck, it's almost 25% bigger than an Invictus. I mean, for fanfic purposes they're 12 MT in my alt-Honorverse, but that's just spitballing.