User blog comment:Arbington/The Next Cycle/@comment-2094653-20120803225240/@comment-5267262-20120804121716

well according to conservation of charge, as the drive core builds up static, some other bit of the ship is loosing it (and the overall ship should either gain or loose charge to the dust clouds when they go through nebulae) so you just need to find a way to safely ground the drive core to those specific parts of the ship every so often (would require dropping out of FTL and disabling gravity at least every other day). The reapers travel on average 2.5 times faster than organic fleets and then on top of that, they don't have the drive core issues so a trip that the reapers make in a few weeks will last a couple of months if you knew where (exactly) to find them. otherwise you are trying to trawl search a volume that is hundreds of light years in every direction. To do this you will need to make self sustaining ships in terms of food, hence bringing plants, having huge tanks of fuel for propulsion and electricity. This makes the ships larger so drive core issues become more prominent and common. (this is what is meant by issues of surviving dark space) Then for searching, you could bring comm bouys and other sensors but you can bet anything that getting pinged by one of these would wake up the reapers and compromise the whole operation and possibly the cycle.

Conclusion a pre-emptive strike is not practical.