Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos
Spaceships beam damage table. Treat as a neutral particle beam. Four by ten to the nineteenth MJ. Nineteen powers of ten from 3 MJ => nineteen doublings from 3 dice decadal damage. Three million d6 of damage going "dink!" every second.
|
The trick with inertialessness is that collision with a particle never inflicts damage. You just stop dead in space. So what you have to be doing with those fields is not blocking out damage, but shoving the particles to the side so that you can move forward.
If the particles themselves aren't free, then they can't move aside faster than light. If your frontal surface is at a 45° angle, then it has to shove them sideways one km to move forward one km; so you can't move faster than light either. You need a more acute geometry to get multiples of c. Though I don't think Smith had worked out the details, for all that he talked about spherical and other shapes of interstellar craft.