munroburton wrote:Loren Pechtel wrote:I seriously doubt you can have two drives running at the same time. Remember, when a wedge hits a wedge one or perhaps both of the drives are catastrophically destroyed. Shielding the nodes from each other wouldn't change that.
Except military starships are known to generate a "double wedge" anyway. Two layers of something. That is possible because the impeller rings are calibrated/tuned to work together, IIRC.
Yes for ships, but the missile wedges are specifically designed for a much more powerful wedge and a very limited lifetime. If I remember correctly, generally a missile is either "maximum thrust, 1 minute burn" for minimum range snapshots or "maximum range, 5 minute burn" obviously for long range. Granted those were for single drive missiles, but Manticore still treats it's MDMs like SDMs, just capable of longer ranges.
In Enemy Hands, Chapter Two wrote:
"Certainly she came up with the concept, but R&D took it and ran with it. We're talking about a 'multistage' missile—one with three separate drives, which will give us a degree of tactical flexibility no previous navy could even dream of! We can preprogram the drives to come on-line with any timing and at any power setting we wish! Simply programming them to activate in immediate succession at maximum power would give us a hundred and eighty seconds of powered flight . . . and a powered attack range from rest of over fourteen and a half million kilometers with a terminal velocity of point-five-four cee. Or we can drop the drives' power settings to forty-six thousand gees and get five times the endurance—and a maximum powered missile envelope of over sixty-five million klicks with a terminal velocity of point-eight-one light-speed.
Bolded the critical portion, at least in the first generation MDMs. Activating a second/third drive too early, starts putting the nodes 'on the clock' earlier, which means you sacrifice drive time. By activating the next set of nodes only femto-seconds(ish) before the first burns out, you would have two missile drives up at once, but only for ~1 second and then the first drive burns out. The second drive is already online and providing thrust and there's no bobble on the wedge to indicate to an attacker something happened to the missile's wedge; no information they are MDMs, only ridiculously longer-duration missiles that gets 180 seconds at maximum thrust to their 60 seconds. Good evidence was the original use of the Gen-1 MDM's on Barnett, the only thing the Peeps saw was missiles screaming in at maximum power far longer than normal missiles, without any clue as to how/why.
