Coolant [Spaceships]

[Polkageist]

Eh, I still maintain that the correct answer to "Why aren't people smashing ships into planets when they disagree over lunch?" is "Because we're not playing genocide simulator the RPG."

Anyway, another neat toggle to reactionless-ish drives is that they have some sort of 'drag' that happens on spacetime. It would pay off the many examples in fiction of a spaceship needing to both 1) be under thrust always, and 2) have an upper speed limit.

The drive itself 'drags' on spacetime (or the ether, or the local gravity well, or whatever) such that if the ship isn't thrusting the drive and the ship it's connected to will decelerate down to a relative stop in whatever medium it's dragging against, which can conveniently be a nearby planet or something. And, because this means now that there's a drag component to moving through space, there's a top-speed of a sort that can apply to a given ship.

Endless possibilities on cool ship designs or nifty engine gadgeteering to reduce drag, or maybe mess with an opponent's ship say with an anchor-missile that when it hits a ship attaches an etheric anchor that kills a ship's velocity. Maybe even drags the engine out the back, that'd be a cool (weird, spectacular) way to disable a spaceship.