I've got a question about the Drift Engine Max Size

[Fallen_Mage]

I've been looking at the Drift Engine table on page 298, and I'm a little confused.

The Max Size seems to be backwards to me. I would think that the most powerful Engine wouldn't be limited to such a small ship size. I know Medium isn't really small, but it prevents Capitol Ships from truly benefiting.

Am I wrong? Or is this actually a typo?

[Lane_S]

It prevents the enemy's 7 mile long dreadnought from traveling faster than the scouts reporting it.

[Ithnaar]

I think that Lane_S has the right of it: It's for game balance and storytelling purposes.

It's a pretty standard Space Opera conceit left over from the Age of Sail and wet Navies in general: Smaller ships are frequently faster and more maneuverable than larger ones.

[Fallen_Mage]

Ah, okay, that makes sense. Thanks.

[Metaphysician]

Think of it like this: Drift Drive efficacy does not scale up as fast as ship size does. As you attempt to make a stronger Drift field, you hit a point where the power demand increases exponentially. The bigger the field? The sooner that point hits. So, a tiny ship is easy, comparatively, to fit in a super fast field. . . but a colossal ship, your starting to approach the point where a drift field at *all* is near the exponential knee.

( This would, incidentally, mean that ships *bigger* than Colossal? Either can't have Drift Drives at all, or require specialized ones that have whole high end reactor cores dedicated purely to powering them. )

[Lane_S]

Even in modern ships the smaller ones tend to be more maneuverable and faster. Aircraft carriers are the exception, they tend to be fast for their size, due to requirements for launching planes. The trade off is they need bigger engines proportional to size than other ships. By bigger I mean enough to power a mid size city.

Surprisingly,before gas turbines became the norm for smaller warships the larger ships could go faster over long distances. From WW I until the 90's most warships were powered by steam turbines. Since no steam system is perfectly sealed they need to constantly add water. Larger ships had more space to store and could make more distilled water than smaller ships. A large ship may only do 20 knots but could do it for 4 days. A smaller ship might do 25 knots for a day but then could only do 10 for the next day.