penny wrote:Jonathan_S wrote:(You'd then, presumably, need to quickly release and grab a new point closer to you and repeat the process -- each grab from each drive projector implying a brief force that collectively works to cancel out your base velocity)
Yes! The truth is in your own words. You need to grab a point closer to you. What's even better is to grab the point
closest to you. Which would be the same for a spider-drive as it is for a train. The point on the rails of a train which are the closest is where the train actually sits.
Very late edit: To be clear, each tractor is reaching out and grabbing the wall closest to it. Therefore, there are as many overpowered Brembo brakes as there are tractors.
But all the tractor-like beam constantly reaching and grabbing, pulling, and releasing in microbursts is
exactly how the spider drive works to acceleration the ship -- so why should this same action pull harder when applying acceleration in the opposite direction (e.g. showing down)?
The spider node emitters are going going to be rated for so much pulling power. Their attachment to the ship structure is only going to be designed to be so strong -- making it capable of transmitting far more power than usual would have significant trade-offs. And the crew still can only survive so many gs -- so there's not much engineering point in building a drive with pulling power (or stopping power if those are different) and anchor points capable of applying far more force than the crew can take.
Also, it's not clear how much the spider node emitters -- which I'd assume need to be very solidly attached to the ship, to pull it along at up to ~300g in it's limited duration emergency power settings - are build with a wide arc they can aim at. The ones built into the MAlign's various spider ships may not be able to grab beside or behind the ship; since accelerating it seems to only require them to grab somewhat ahead of it. So we don't know whether it's range of motion could even allow it to grab the closest point (which would be beside the ship) and, like a wedge or rocket powered ship might have to flip over to slow down
So we might have a situation where, in theory, it might have more power slowing down but, in real-world practice, the limits or its engineering and physiological limits of its crew means i doesn't. (Kind of like, in theory, a wedge could accelerate instantly to lightspeed; but, in practice, things propelled by it very very much can't