message 0165

• Speculations on spaceship (esp. Rider) drive and fuel

>From: Onno Meyer <Onno.Meyer@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de>
>Subject: cherryhlist
>Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1993 09:06:20 +0200 (MET DST)

One more addition to the ridership/engines discussion, I've just
found the following quote:

_The Pride of Chanur_, p.30
The _Pride_ leapt forward by her generation pulses, borrowed
velocity at the interface, several wrenching flickers, whipped
into the between.

I think this shows clearly that the compact ships use their
jump-engines to change their realspace-speed. If the human
ships use the same technology, I see three possibilities:

- Riderships are unable to perform major vector changes without
  their carriers, they have to get hauled up to speed and 
  get collected by the carriers at nearly the same speed.

- The speed change is done by a part of the FTL-engines that is
  installed on the riders.

- Riderships use a third, entirely different engine-type for
  their realspace-operations.

I can't believe the second explanation, since the pulses are usually
generated by the vanes and a rider has no jump-vanes. The third
explanation seems unlikely since it is unnecessaryly(sp?)
complicated and I can think of no quote that directly supports
it. 
The only evidence for inertialess/reactionless engines on the
riders is their guard duty in the outskirts of a system.

Any comments? (Or reasons why I totally screwed up? :-)

Onno