Several issues here that people seem to be overlooking:
1) higher accelerations translate into negligible differences in transit times - hours at most, on trips lasting weeks. Very little time is actually spent accelerating on any given transit, and you would probably reap greater returns from better maintenance of existing equipment than from upgrading it.
2) the Grayson-style compensator doesn't magically multiply the acceleration produced by a given set of nodes. Even if a civilian version became available, you would need to install more powerful, and therefore more costly and complex, impellers to exploit it. And pay the increased operating costs thereof, for little if any return.
3) everybody seems to be forgetting that a major reason most shipping eschews the upper hyper bands is risk: the higher you go, the less likely you are to arrive in one piece, and the better trained and more alert your crews have to be to achieve that. Even warships never ride the ragged edge of their drive capabilities on routine passages. The streak drive will make no difference in that; on the contrary, it opens access to even _more_ dangerous bands which I wouldn't be surprised to learn even very few couriers will want to enter on a routine basis. [The Detweilers may have been getting their mail faster than anyone else, but one has to wonder what percentage of it didn't arrive. And to what degree their being caught short in various ways was due to the 'want of a message']
4) I may have missed something, but I don't see any reason to believe that streak hypergenerators do anything to ease the transitions between bands everyone else can already reach. What they've done is to finally make it possible to cross the iota and kappa walls. Something that will be of no interest whatever to those who already regard crossing the delta or epsilon wall to be an unjustifiable risk. The nature of that breakthrough hasn't been explained, but then neither has the reason why hypergenerators that can cross the epsilon wall are so much more complex than those that don't.
The breakthrough that _would_ make a difference to merchant shipping operations is the improvement of rad shielding to make it economically feasible to move cargo at 0.7c local rather than 0.5c or less. And it wouldn't surprise me if that, or a path to it, is indeed buried somewhere in the new technologies introduced in the last decade.
Dauntless wrote:IT is well know that even before manticore started improving its compensators that merchies were slow, both in normal space and hyper.
I'm, wondering if now that the wars are over some merchies might start considering speed upgrades. now obviously they aren't going to mount top of the line Mil spec compensators but average speed i've seen listed for a normal merchie is about 200g. though i think the passenger liners Hauptman used, particularly for silesa were more like 400 but they were an abnormality.
Time is money and while a rise of 200 to 300g might only shave a day of the trip to hyper, surely that along with sightly improved hypertech, the non classified parts of the streak drive research maybe, though just stronger rad shielding would probably do. might take a week or 2 off journeys.
over a year/2 that has to improve profits. especially if they start serving the newly free verge worlds.
i undrestand it all comes down to money but especially the compensators should be cheap enough now after 20 years of research.
