I'm rather a fan of Tenny's points, that things run on electricity (which I'd quibble with, but a jule is a jule) You can create force however you want, and we've this flawed assumption that speed would require more and more energy, which is fine until you bring in the fact that we're dealing with FTL in a lot of cases anyway: Causality is already being violated. Once you've got causality violated, you don't actually need to move very fast, or expend much energy...and fusion cores are much more expensive than combustive motors.
By the way, cold fusion is stupid. In terms of energy production, anyway. Costs more energy than it produces. But, it does provide a method for alchemy.
Oh, and Gallia is retarded. The whole story behind it has holes the state of Texas could fit through, the society is ridiculous, and the math is wrong. We're probably best off thinking about Rhienland, where things are at least internally coherent.
