penny wrote:Thank you. IOW, hyper raiders are beginning to sound like a real possibility. If Grayson could manage more efficient inertial compensators from scratch, without instruction, then the Mesan Alignment should be able to increase efficiency more than just marginally for those hyper raiders to do their thing.
Do what? How does finding more efficiency in compensators allow for hyper raiders?
The hyper raiders required three things, from the past discussion:
First, the ability to follow a ship through the transition to other bands. This
should be possible, but we don't have any evidence of this. In fact, all evidence points to ships completely breaking contact the moment they transition and being completely safe.
Second, the significantly increased range of the sensors in hyper. The range seems to be a few light-minutes. If the hyper raider needs to follow using a spider drive, it will fall so much behind that it has little hope of retaining a sensor lock on the ship.
Third, the ability to reach a higher top speed in hyper so they could overtake the ship they're following. This is a limitation of the particle shields, not the compensator.
I don't see how Grayson having ideas on how to improve compensators influences any of that.
If the hyper-raider is a hybrid spider-wedge ship, then things change a little. For one, it can out-accelerate freighters that can only get to 150 gravities and you don't need Grayson innovations for that (Solarian technology had been reaching over 200 gravities for 400 years). Since it can out-accelerate the freighters, then the raider doesn't need to reach a higher top-speed: it will start overtaking the target much earlier than that.
But if it keeps the wedge up, the gravitic sensors in the target will see the raider coming. An escort or a Q-ship would be very bad news for the raider. It could cut the wedge earlier, but that means having achieved a higher speed, so it needs to start from further behind and thus needs those better sensors.
But, hyper raiders optimized for combat in a grav wave would be even more deadly you all say?
How so? What do you propose to add to it to make it better than a random warship?
Remember the ground rules: all ships must keep sails up and can't fire weapons (other than energy ones) because they'd get destroyed in the process.