Talk:AFOH/@comment-27015223-20151013144344/@comment-11135771-20151015024920

So, um, hi. Just wanted to throw in my two cents here - I figure I might be able to lend some insight seeing as I was the one who warp drives in RP.

(And yes, I still lurk here; I'm just inactive for an indefinite period due to a lack of time)

As far as I'm concerned, warp-boarding vehicles are possible, but just really, really inefficient. Yes, you can stick a warp drive in a large tank or APC I suppose, if it can be done with fighters (honestly I don't think it should be possible to fit a warp drive to anything smaller than a seagoing frigate due to both size and power constraints, but warp-capable fighters are kinda already a part of RP history so whatever). However, you'd have a very difficult time of making such a vehicle justify itself functionally.

Thing is, warp drives are both expensive and not all that accurate. Warp was created to be used for anything between intercontinental to interstellar travel, not jumping over to an enemy ship's hangars. Thus, warp was only ever really accurate enough to fill that role effectively - when we're talking about those kinds of distances, arriving within a kilometre or two of the destination is plenty accurate.

Theoretically, warping with that kind of pinpoint accuracy would be possible, but it would require immense computational power to do it in any reasonable amount of time. Maybe if you had a squadron of dedicated CPU ships along with your fleet that had the sole purpose of calculating warp jumps and then feeding the data to the tanks, it might be possible. Of course, that introduces another big vulnerability into the system - and you would need excellent bandwidth for both the processor ships and tanks for it to be workable. And, naturally, that's all going to be extremely expensive... which brings me to the other major issue.

Warp drives are expensive. They aren't frequently used at smaller scales because it's hard to do that cost-effectively. You could make a whole bunch of tiny little warp-capable fighters, but then you run into the point where the warp drive costs more than the entire rest of the craft - hence why they're usually only used on larger vessels. It's just not worth it to stick a warp drive on something which is relatively small and weak, because doing so drives the cost up too high for such to be terribly practical.

So yes, it's possible. But you're going to need either a complex, expensive, and vulnerable system to make it work, or a major time/money investment in warp-related research to get the idea into more practical territory.