drinksmuchcoffee wrote:Hyper drives are very large. The smallest ships with hyper drives seem to be courier vessels which are around 10k tons. That is about a hundred times larger than a large MDM.
It isn't at all clear from the textev whether you could miniaturize a hyper drive very much.
There is also a question of how you would use such a weapon tactically. Most engagements are fought within the hyper limit. As you would guess from the name, you can't use a hyper drive inside the hyper limit. Even if you could or would fight outside the hyper limit, you have a hellacious target acquisition problem and also a quite substantial guidance problem.
One thing I don't think you're taking into consideration is that hyper drives are generally associated with *ships*, not anything else. Ships are *manned*, and require all the things living organisms do - namely life support, crew space, storage space for food, air, and supplies, inertial compensators to keep the crew from getting squashed, etc. That all adds to the size and mass of the final vessel. Theoretically, if one had designed just a drone controlled by computers while in hyper and maybe by remote control in n-space, you could probably make it *much* smaller.
That said, we don't have any real idea of the minimum size of a hyperconverter. I'm not sure I've even ever noticed in the text any physical size comparisons between hyperconverters on small vs large vessels.
One could reasonably expect that the larger the vessel, the larger the necessary field, and thus the larger and more "durable" the converter, but we don't have any actual conformation of this.
However, if we postulate that the required field size *does* influence the physical size of the converter, a converter for something the size of a missle would likely be much smaller than that of even a courier.
It would seem that if they could shrink a fusion reactor to a size that could be fitted into a missle, doing so to a hyperconverter shouldn't be all that more difficult. Fusion reactors require ultra high intensity magnetic fields to keep the star-temperature plasma away from the walls of the reaction chamber, since no known element or alloy can withstand the heat without either melting or vaporizing. And an incredible amount of power just to create the fields. While it's never been, to my knowledge, explicitly explained, I doubt the missle's power systems could "spin up" by themselves. Missle pods, and, of course, ships, probably supply the "seed" energy necessary to each missle to create the necessary magnetic bottles prior to the initiation of the fusion reactions within them and subsequent onboard energy generation that can then "take over" supplying the power for the necessary containment.
Back in my college years, there was an ongoing project at my university - the Laser Fusion Feasibility Project. While I wasn't personally involved, most of the theoretical physicists, engineers, and researchers tended to spend a lot of time (and use a lot of resources) at the campus computing center where I worked part time. Like all good researchers, they bounced problems off anyone they tended to come into regular contact with, since no one has a monopoly on ideas, and sometimes someone more distant from the problem might spot something someone more involved didn't see. They basically had 2 major problems - generating consistent power output, and, somewhat related, generating more power OUTPUT than the required INPUT for the containment fields. I don't recall them actually solving either of them. While I was there, or, for that matter, afterwards. Which is probably why we don't see fusion reactors in operation today replacing the much maligned fission ones. LOL.
But the point to all this is that it is likely to be far more difficult to shrink a fusion reactor to the size to fit in a missile than something that just has circuits to generate and control a field, with no stellar temperatures involved.
