Buyer's Remorse

To assuage his buyer’s remorse he stood in the hold of his cargo ship and looked at the lines of the craft he had purchased. It wasn’t alien in design, there being no confirmed contact with aliens that could design anything beyond rock tools, but it was a human attempt to make the craft look alien. The design really didn’t work that well, there were a many awkward intersections of otherwise smooth flowing curves. But he hadn’t bought it for the looks, he had bought it for its new power plant design.

The new power plant, supposedly technology stolen from the Terra Faction, allowed a cube less than a cubic meter to supply the twenty-five meter craft with enough power to supply a navy space cruiser, generally rated at 4 times the length and not quite 64 times the mass, with power to spare. That meant the small ship could mount engines and sub-space generators that were well over powered for a ship its size. The gravitic technologies could be strained to a point where they might theoretically give out under massive acceleration. Although it was a theoretical failure point of around 15,000 m/s2, he wasn’t going to get that close to test the theory. He had figured out that his acceleration could probably be pushed up to a point where 0.3c would likely be twenty seconds, give or take five seconds.

Usually a craft half this capable was first of all twice as massive, with about a third of the mass going toward the power plant and another third going to engines. As it was the engines still took up a third of the mass of the ship, but that was it, the cube was a tiny percentage and the rest was free space, if someone hadn’t designed the cabin space as awkwardly as they had the outside intersections of curves.

He shook his head, when he got through customs he would probably have to just build a new one, he had really bought it for the powerful new power plant. At least it wouldn’t be too much a pain to install in a new craft, a cube was a cube, not built for a specific ship like most power plants.