with it from the day it opened its doors aboard HMSS Weyland.
There were a lot of them, those problems. If there hadn’t been, someone else would surely have tried strapping extra drives onto a missile already, after all. And the more Jonas and his people had looked, the better they’d come to understand why no one had ever been crazy enough to attempt it before.
First, there was the problem of power supply. Even with the improvements in capacitor technology, just feeding the energy appetite of a multidrive weapon was going to require an enormous missile body. At the time they’d started what had become Project Mjølner, they couldn’t have squeezed the thing into even the largest system defense missile ever built—they would have required something bigger than any existing recon drone, actually, which was far too large for anyone to consider carrying in the sorts of numbers which would be needed when waller met waller in missile-range combat.
Second, there’d been the question of node endurance. Design lifetimes had been increased markedly since the very first impeller drive missile was introduced in 1256, but it had taken all the weary years since just to get to where they’d been at the moment Roger had his inspiration. The notion that it could be pushed still higher in a relatively short time frame had seemed . . . unlikely, and they still hadn’t managed to increase the drive’s lifetime. They had, however, managed to increase the power levels it could sustain, which was going to lead to significant increases in missile acceleration rates. More importantly, at least in the short term, counter-missiles relied on their insanely over-powered impeller wedges, using those wedges as huge, immaterial brooms that destroyed anything they hit. With the new drive nodes, Manticoran CMs were about to become markedly more potent. Coupled with the RMN’s already existing advantage in electronic warfare systems and fire control, that was going to increase Manticore’s missile combat advantage still further. The trick, after all, was to hit the bad guy while he couldn’t hit you, and one way to accomplish that was to kill his shipkillers short of their target more efficiently than he could do the same thing to you.
But the third problem—the really killer problem—had been that there were only so many places on a missile where you could put the impeller rings. They literally couldn’t be put anywhere else without fatally compromising some other aspect of the weapon’s design . . . which wouldn’t have been so bad if an active impeller node didn’t rip hell out of the basic matrix of any other impeller node in its immediate vicinity. The nodes of a single impeller ring were tuned to one another, and (at least in a missile drive) all of them were up and fully powered at the same time. In a starship, or even a purely sublight light attack craft, the rings themselves were far enough apart to obviate any problem of mutual interference, and the nodes were big enough to incorporate the tuners which synched the alpha and beta nodes of each individual ring to one another. Even a starship, however, had to bring all of the nodes in a ring online, whether it intended to power all of them to fully operational levels or not, in order to get all of their tuners synched into the ring at once. Otherwise, the gravitic stress pouring off the active nodes warped the molecular circuitry of the inactive nodes. They had the same effect on other molycircs in the vicinity, as well, which was the reason starship impeller node heads had to be kept well clear of the hull and any other important systems they might affect. LAC nodes were weak enough they didn’t have to project very far, but superdreadnought nodes were enormous and required clearances—even from one another in the same ring, and even with the tuners in the circuit—which were measured in meters. The warping effect wasn’t a huge, gross, easily observable thing, but it didn’t have to be, because impeller node engineering tolerances were incredibly tight and demanding.
And, of course, there was no way to do that with a missile. There just wasn’t anyplace else to put them, and you couldn’t move them farther up, space them along the length of the missile body (even if that wouldn’t have compromised sensors and lasing rod deployment), because of their effect on other critical systems. They had to be concentrated in a very narrow chunk of the