Hyper Drives (and Still More) Part 3

 I hate reaction-less drives but I love getting places quickly. I don't mind gravity control, except it makes a lot of things too easy and makes your spacecraft into a boat or plane with extended range.

So entry into Hyper-space is via a node. Node can be any size. You create a node and it moves towards matter, to send it into Hyper-space and vice versa.  If you you create a node between two objects they will both be drawn to the node. Fix the objects and you get a gravity source. Make enough little nodes and you have grav plating. Yay! 

You'll want to shut it down when you approach a planet. The same forces drawing you to the deck will also be tugging very hard the opposite way on your ship's belly and landing gear. The tension on the different parts of the ship don't create any thrust over all. Newton is not mocked. 

Note you want to shut off the artificial gravity when coming in for a landing or docking, unless you want to speed it up and void your insurance coverage. 

At lower tech levels gravity generated might be cruder. Instead of a floor of gravity plates you ave a single point source at the bottom or tail of your ship. At lower levels, the gravity force varies from the tail to the nose. Note that if the gravity changes are too severe they can trigger things like vertigo and nausea. A good gee suit or medication could probably minimize this. Or you could limit the habitable portion of the ship to a single deck, and shut down your gravity when people need to move between decks.

As I said I don't see Hyper-space rides as allowing thrust by themselves. However, direct a stream of propellant at a node. If you do it right the stream gets accelerated a lot by the Hyper-force. The stream holds the node in place. The propellant is accelerated and to keep the books balanced the ship gets an arbitrary but large bonus to its thrust an delta vee, say ten to a hundred times. Whatever does it for you.

The blowtorch exhaust vanishes after doing its job. If you move the nodes around you may vary the direction of thrust. You don't have unlimited delta vee, but you can set it high enough to not worry about it for ordinary usage. You might still need plasma vents in an emergency and people might think they are rocket thrusters.

If you're using a 2d6 system then generally, power plants take a few percentiles of the ship's mass for a month's power (1-6% which includes the maneuver drive). FTL requires roughly ten times that amount for a single jump (10-60%). You might want to refigure fuel use, since some of that fuel is now propellant (you use fuel to generate energy, and propellant gets squirted out the back of your ship to generate thrust.. Reverse it or figure out something amenable to your setting. Ships will likely have enough fuel for a couple of jumps but be a little more limited in where they can drive in a system. Micro jumps could be more common in a system depending on fuel use.