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"I'm a fairly visual thinker. In doing science, I think in terms of pictures of things happening, and then do the mathematics."
- Gregory Benford
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| Reason Hypervelocity Railgun | ||
| Multichamber weapon accelerates tiny splinters of metal. |
| Fisheye is up on his knees now and has torn away the canopy and space blanket that have covered him until this point. In one hand he is holding a long device a couple of inches in diameter, which is the source of the whirring noise. It is a circular bundle of parallel tubes about pencil-sized and a couple of feet long, like a miniaturized Gatling gun. It whirs around so quickly that the individual tubes are difficult to make out... The device is attached to a wrist-thick bundle of black tubes and cables that snake down into the large suitcase... The suitcase has a built-in color monitor screen with graphics giving information about the status of the weapon system...
"See, I told you they'd listen to Reason," Fisheye says, shutting down the whirling gun. "...See, it fires these teeny little metal splinters. They go real fast - more energy than a rifle bullet. Depleted uranium." |
| Technovelgy from Snow Crash,
by Neal Stephenson. Published by Bantam in 1992 Additional resources -
|
This device is a high-tech upgrade to the needle pipe described in Ray Cummings 1928 novel Beyond the Stars. David Gerrold wrote about something similar in his War Against the Chtorr novels.
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'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
'Gaines and Harvey mounted tumblebugs, and kept abreast of the Cadet Captain...'
Accompanied by a small selection of similar ideas from science fiction.
'...war-balloons, or, as it would be more correct to call them, navigable aerostats.'
