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Procession Drive

The procession engine is by far the most effective means of sub-light travel available. The technique produces a generous propulsion of 300 to 600 kG without exhaust for most ships. The technique is very simple in words, but very complex in ideas. At the core of design is a mass generator. It produces one enormous, very dense mass in front, and one enormous, very dense antimass behind. The positive mass is attached to the gravhull with a gravity tether, while the negative mass is monitored and modulated to keep it from wavering (some spectacular accidents have resulted from a machine failure to do this). The positive-mass body attracts the negative-mass body, while the negative-mass body repels the positive-mass body. The pair would accelerate off to infinity if it were not for a few limiting factors:

  1. The masses are not real in the sense of stars and things, they are curvatures in spacetime, and so require energy to maintain. This maintenance energy becomes greater as the ship approaches light speed due to dilation in this mass-equivalence.

  2. The masses themselves approach light speed and so more and more of their energy is devoted to their own mass accretions

  3. Higher speeds such as 0.8 and 0.9 of light are near impossible as the space curvature becomes so large in the procession chamber that no engineering materials will prevent the ship from tearing itself apart.

These considerations leave an effective maximum velocity of about 0.75 of light. Most procession engine set ups dont come near this velocity.

Procession Engine Arrays​

Modern strikers don't have a single procession engine but an array, enabling the control of roll, pitch and yaw.

End Normal Cruciform​

One of the most common arrangements is called the "end normal cruciform array". In this arrangement there are eight procession engines at the front of the ship and eight at the back. All engines are in a forwaring-revering pair, increasing the steering options.

Any pair on the top of the ship is referred to as dorsal pitch (because of its role in pitch steering), so there is the fore dorsal pitch and the aft dorsal pitch. The engines at the bottom of the ship are referred to as ventral pitch, so there is the fore ventral pitch and the aft ventral pitch.

The rmaining pairs lie at the port and starboard and these all affect the yaw steering, and bear the names aft starboard yaw, aft port yaw, fore starboard yaw and fore port yaw.

It is possible to perform roll steering with this arrangement, but that is one of this arrangement's weaknesses.

End Diagonal Cruciform​

The end diagonal cruciform array is a close relative of the normal cruciform. Rather than have engines at the top (dorsal) and bottom (ventral), they lay at the corners as in doral-starboard, dorsal-port etc. This arrangement allows more subtlle controll of pitch and yaw steering, at the expense of power.

End Normal-Diagonal Cruciform​

The end normal diagonal cruciform array essentially uses a combination normal and diagonal arrangements, by making the back normal and the front diagonal, or more rarely, the other way around.

Offset-Roll Helical​

This is a complex array, allowing for excellent steering and power, but suffers in fuel efficiency and in some respects redundancy. Offset-Roll Helical arrangements are more common amongst ronite ships, particularly of the Xamelorn class battle strikers.