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"As the rate of technological development speeds up, the gap between science fiction and what we’re living now is getting narrower all the time."
- Richard Morgan
 |
| 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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| Worm Disrupts Physics Simulations Undetected For A Decade |
| Moscow Attacked By Hundreds Of Drones |
| China's Handheld Electromagnetic Gun |
| Is The Seattle Ultrasonics C-200 A Heinlein Vibroblade? |
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'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'
'His sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form...'
'It sounds to me as though you had invented a kind of metal earthworm.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors that circulate around the satellite, making it habitable.'
'The steel tortoise gave MacKinnon a feeling of Crusoe- like independence.'
'...then back to their work, though little enough it was on these automatic cultivators.'
