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"...a market economy is essentially a genetic algorithm for solving resource allocation problems..."
- Charles Stross
 |
| Launching Laser | ||
| A set of very high-powered lasers used to power spacecraft. |
| Jerome Finney... showed that the spectrum was the light of our own sun, drastically blue-shifted. Some kind of mirror was coming at us, moving at a hell of a clip, but slowing as it came.
"That would mean a light-sail!" "Why the big deal, Frazer? I thought you already knew." "No. This is the first I've heard of it. I don't read the Sunday supplements." Morris was exasperated. "But you knew enough to call a laser cannon a launching laser!" |
| Technovelgy from The Fourth Profession,
by Larry Niven. Published by Quark in 1971 Additional resources -
|
Interested readers should also see the entry for laser cannon from Niven and Pournelle's 1974 novel Mote in God's Eye.
The idea of using light pressure to move a spaceship has been around for a long time; it was suggested by Jules Verne in his 1867 novel From the Earth to the Moon; see the entry for light pressure propulsion. The method was explicitly described by Edmond Hamilton in his 1929 short story The Comet Doom; see the entry for ship propelled by light pressure.
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| Can A Human Land A SpaceX Rocket On Its Tail? |
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
