doublepost D:
I've made some thoughts on the appearance of H-T-Drive ships and a bit about the equipment mechanics of HTDrives.
The drive itself could be an internal component that cannot be seen from the outside but it needs projectors on the hull of the ship to work (at full capacity?)
The central generator is a singular device that is present only a single time in any ship, or at extreme only one can be running at any given time as they would interfere with each other.
connected to this central core are the projector heads, these projectors are like the thrusters from an conventional drive, except that they are distributed along the hull of the ship and glow in all the facy colors that we would miss otherwise
The intensity of the glow is proportional to the throttle setting. the color of the glow is modified by the energy settings of the drive, just as the current engines in-game are.
the projectors themselves can have lots of shapes, spikes, plates, plates on spikes, but generally smaller and more decent on fighters than on capships
The projectors have modifiers as increased speed or efficiency, but those modifiers should not be that large in magnitude, as the core should be the defining part of the drive.
Projectors can be mounted and dismounted like any other hardpoint-system and take some amount of energy but cannot be managed seperately in the energy management screen.
They take their share from the drive energy allocation