Mass Driver

A Mass Driver is a starship configuration which centers around a main engine, for acceleration, and detachable modules. Use of mass drivers was seen as far back as the Mage Wars and was a common stepping stone for developing cultures on the road to space travel.

Mass drivers had one primary advantage over conventional integrated starship designs: that the drive section could be detached and returned to the point of origin, while the rest could remain at its destination.

The key characteristic of a mass driver is a large engine module that pushes or "drives" the main ship module, which would be otherwise ballistic without the engine. The advent of modern FTL systems and the Ion vacuum drive effectively doomed the mass driver concept, and betweem the mid Golden Age and late Third Age mass drivers were virtually non-existant.

Late in the Third Age, Advanced Dynamics, a colonization initiative, turned to a re-imagined form of the initial concept, called the ADMD (Advanced Dynamics Mass Driver), which used modern hardware to produce one of the most successful mass space transportation systems ever devised.