[Spaceships] Reactionless Drives, Pseudovelocity, and NOT breaking a setting (much)

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Or toss the momentum conservation and have pseudovelocity travel mess up your banked real velocity.

Or prevent you from acquiring any - inertialessness could work, while your pseudovelocity drive is on, you have no mass, so there are no gravitational forces acting on you. But ultimately you aren't going to be able to close all the loopholes with a mathematical solution - reactionless motion violates conservation of energy somewhere *by definition* and once you have energy from nothing, there's some way to turn that into a hugely destructive weapon. Theoretically you might set it up so you always destroy energy, but I'm pretty sure if you do this the drive must consume more energy than a photon drive capable of moving the same mass the same distance in the same time, which makes it pretty useless.

It's really simplest to just declare it to work [however] for propulsion purposes and for all free energy or destructive exploits to simply fail regardless of how that contradicts the way it works for propulsion.