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"If we're going to be consistent and advocate freedom of speech we have to advocate freedom of encrypted speech too. The genie is out of the bottle, cryptologically."
- Neal Stephenson
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| Reaction-Motors | ||
| A spacecraft engine that works by firing matter out at high speed. |
This idea makes use of conventional physics.
| For three days Captain Grant had kept his great space-liner… ahead of the questing disintegrator rays of the Black Hawk only by burning his full battery of reaction-motors at their maximum power. |
| Technovelgy from Twelve Hours To Live,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Wonder Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Here's what the drive looked like in operation:
The glow, he knew, was a fluorescent, electronic discharge in the radioactive gases jetting from the rockets of the racing ship...
The idea behind a reaction-motor is Newton's Third Law of Motion, which decrees that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. For a spacecraft to move forward, you must throw matter out the other end.
Compare to the reactionless drive idea, which encompasses the various hyperdrives that allow a ship to move from one point to another in space, without traversing the space in between. See the inertialess drive from 'Doc' Smith's 1934 novel Triplanetary.
…Grant saw a vague pink glow come into being in the jet, star-sprinkled sky behind…
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Tech news articles related to Twelve Hours To Live
Tech news articles related to works by Jack Williamson
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| Amazing Photonic Crystal Light Sail |
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'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
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'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
