quote:
Older races like the Centauri, Hyach, and Mimbari use gravitic drives (normal SE4 movement) while younger races like the EA use a Newtonian system.
Just because you use a gravitic drive dosen't really mean you're not following the laws of physics.
If you're using a gravity gradient to accelerate your reaction mass, you could perhaps get better fuel efficiency and higher thrust per KT of engine, but you'd still need thrust to accelerate.
Any ship that accelerates has to accelerate something else the other way in order to conserve momentum.
The quasi-newtonian propulsion is for systems where a bigger ship needs bigger (or more) engines.
This is the case in B5 even minbari ships, since the engines on thier biggest ships take up about the same fraction of the hull as on their littler ships. We can assume a little bit of "buy in bulk" efficiency improvements, too, so scaled up engines are overall smaller than the pile of smaller engines needed to do the same job.
There are so many advantages to QNP, including a huge variety of useful ship designs (ie. there is a useful design that dosen't max-out on engines
) Slow & powerful, or fast and weak, your choice.