Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

If someone can come up with a backronym for "OGRE drive" I would be very happy.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

It's the O that I find trickiest.

Opalescent Gravitic Reaction Engine
Oppositional Gravitic Reaction Engine
Ordinate Gravitic Reaction Engine
Orthopositronium Gravitic Reaction Engine
Overdamped Gravitic Reaction Engine
Ornery Goblins Riding Elephants

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

This one wins. Doubly so if OGREs explode randomly.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

I mean, onion is sitting right there in the question.

OnionSpace Gravitic Realm Expansor Drive
OnionSpace Geometry RealSpace Emulator Drive
OnionSpace Gödel-Riemann-Einstein Drive
OnionShell Generalised Reality Equi-valence Drive

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

How about the OrthoGraphic Reversal Engine?


Orthographic has the normal meaning of presenting a three dimensional object in two dimensions, for context.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

Building on this one a little:
O'Reilly-Gödel-Riemann-Einstein Drive
Ogawa-Gödel-Riemann-Einstein Drive
Oberto-Gödel-Riemann-Einstein Drive
Opeyemi-Gödel-Riemann-Einstein Drive

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

Onion Graphing Relativity Emancipating Drive (it analyzes the "onion" spacetime is shaped as, and frees the ship from the "can't go past lightspeed" bit of relativity).

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

My general preference is to design my drives around the story type I want. For example, in a space opera setting I have drive fields where it's mostly pointless to shoot at the ship from outside the field, but you can intercept and merge drive fields to allow close range combat, including boarding actions; to prevent this from just turning into a missile duel, drive fields require psionic ability (reasonably common among humans and aliens, but nonexistent for computers) from their pilots.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

Optimal-Geometric-Residual Engine

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

I have an after the long night setting, where things were mostly TL10 / near TL11 before the nanoburn wars.

After the wars, the main human location is TL9, with most other planets less than that (some down to TL4 or 5 before climbing back up during the night).

The superscience available: Artificial Gravity, Rotary Reactionless Drives, and Hyperdrives. All powered by exotic post-transuranic alloys; the manufacture of these "PTU"s are the limiting valve for high TL societies. Reactionless drives have a "limit" of about 0.05c, due to "relativistic effects causing the metastable PTU alloys destabilize due to the relativistic quantum effects that make them metastable failing". Technobable at its finest. I also use the "accelerator tube limits" design switch on. Not that it affects the PCs much at TL9, but there are higher TL races about.

Hyperdrive speed is 1 pc/day per drive, with navigation rolls affecting how close you get to your target. Longer shunts are harder (-1 per pc), and with most ships having 0.1 or 0.2g acceleration, being way off is time consuming.

Communication (with no FTL radio) is via "comm cyclers": autonomous hyperdrive probes with extensive communication systems and 5 pc/day speed, that just go back and forth between worlds. Survey and military ships will carry one or two for emergencies.

The Kaa were the aggressors in the wars, and are around but TL8. They have hyperdrives, but are one-tenth the speed, but also have cloaking technology. The Engai are present too, at TL12 withwarp drives that are x100 speed, subwarp fast reactionless drives, and all the medical tech you can find in the book.