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"The immediate problem with our meat brains is that they have no back-up. We can lose the most precious information we have from one bump on the head or stroke. You want a mind system with back-up that can access other databases."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Momentum Screen | ||
| Allows a spacemen to avoid the problem of "high gee" forces on take-off. |
A clever twist on the idea of artificial gravity, or a gravity shield, inside a spacecraft.
| The two wipers jumped to their bunks, threw up a lever and lay down. I followed suit; in a few seconds there was a grinding roar and our beds slid on quadrantal rollers up against the bulkhead. There was a moment of crushing weight and just when I thought I'd never get the strength to draw in another breath, the beds slid back off the bulkhead and were parallel with the floor again. In those days the momentum screens were inoperable inside the Heaviside Layer, and during the few seconds it took to get outside, the acceleration was really rough... |
| Technovelgy from Completely Automatic,
by Theodore Sturgeon. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
|
The Heaviside layer (also called the Kennelly-Heaviside layer) is a layer of ionized gas that occurs at about 56-93 miles above the earth's surface. It makes possible radio waves that can propagate beyond line-of-sight.
Compare to the gravity screen from Edmond Hamilton's 1929 classic Crashing Suns.
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'Deveet unhooked his catch and laid it on the bank beside him. It was a metal fish.'
'...waldoes in the screen followed in exact, simultaneous parallelism.'
'Seen close it was not completely flexible, but made instead of pivoted and smoothly finished segments.'
'...great rectangular slabs of muscle, slung into a rectangular frame.'
'If the biological robots were not living creatures, they were certainly very good imitations.'
"Everybody and his dog, it seemed, wanted to live out in the country; transportation and communication were no longer isolating factors."
