Within the Castle Federation setting, fitting only four class-one components leaves a ship vulnerable to the loss of any one of them. A fifth provides a reserve against a failure that could otherwise collapse the ship's field. A later proposal distributes the components among two groups of four gunboats and claims that surviving boats could combine for the journey home. Each group, however, requires four precisely matched and connected ships, and boats from different groups cannot simply replace one another. Losing boats can therefore strand undamaged partners even when enough hulls survive in total. The claimed savings depend on interoperability that the fictional technology does not provide.
Notable Point · 2:48:11-2:52:44
Coupled gunboats make damaged ships a problem for the whole group
A fictional scheme to spread FTL hardware across gunboats fails because damaged groups cannot freely exchange ships, leaving apparently usable survivors unable to return.