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--- Warbwunian Library Datum 3658745 ---

Celestial Drive

The celestial drive, also called the Gaffen-Shuma drive, the godship drive, or the cathedral drive, has served as the primary mode of interplanetary and interstellar travel since the dawn of the 21st Eon. It is a glyphic device that cloaks the ship in a mythic illusion, causing space to treat the ship as it would treat a planet.

This is a trivial application of glyphic technology, despite its evident grandeur, since planets are so strongly linked with mythology and divinity. By changing the glyphs to take on the legends and appearances of different heroes (and thus, different planets), a godship pilot can take the cathedral ship on different (always circular) courses through Broken Space. A godship swings artfully through space, never traveling in a straight line, starting as the satellite of one world and ending up in close orbit around another.

Due to the limits of glyphic technology and objects' abilities to take on divine characteristics, godships must maintain a certain size: a minimum of about 415 thousand cubic meters, of which no axis may be more than four times that of any other, a number called the Eiyangda Limit. Smaller space vessels, called boats, use aether-turbines, propellers, or thrusters, and travel too slowly for long-distance travel.

By their very nature as "false planets," cathedral ships cannot approach actual gravitational bodies: attempting to merge the two planetary fields produces an ever-growing repelling force, followed shortly by the godship blowing up. Major worlds use Hwabboonkaia, or "polar towers," to produce vortices of space over a planet where a godship can touch down, but most ship-to-planet interaction takes place via boat or shuttle.