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"In 1970 I found little difficulty staying 30 years ahead of the man in the street, and now I find it difficult to stay 18 months ahead of the man on the street."
- Vernor Vinge
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| Wunderland Treatymaker | ||
| A weapon based on a power mining technique - a bit more advanced than a shovel. |
One of my favorite things about science fiction is you can effortlessly (some people do find exercising imagination effortless) create your inventions on a grand scale.
| The Wunderland Treatymaker was used only once. It was a gigantic version of what is commonly a mining tool: a disintegrator that fires a beam to suppress the charge on the electron. Where a disintegrator beam falls, solid matter is rendered suddenly and violently positive. It tears itself into a fog of monatomic particles.
Wunderland built, and transported into the Warhead system, an enormous disintegrator firing in parallel with a similar beam to suppress the charge on the proton. The two beams touched down thirty miles apart on Canyon's surface. Rock and kzinti factories and housing spewed away as dust, and a solid bar of lightning flowed between the two points. The weapon chewed twelve miles deep into the planet, exposing magma throughout a region the size and shape of Baja California on Earth. |
| Technovelgy from Ringworld Engineers,
by Larry Niven. Published by Del Rey in 1980 Additional resources -
|
Now, that's a weapon. It kind of reminds me of the largest mechanical trench excavator ever built; the T-1455 by Vermeer Manufacturing. It looked a lot like a standard chainsaw, except that the "saw" part was over forty feet long. Feel the power with the current model - the T1255 Commander.
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'He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors...'
'The robant and the tiny old woman entered the control room slowly...'
'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?'
'It is as you thought when you constructed the time crystal, my master Vaylan.'
'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
