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"I never saw why I had to give up science in order to write, or the other way around, so I didn't!"
- Gregory Benford
 |
| Beam-Powered Propulsion | ||
| Using a powerful energy source as motive power for a projectile. |
| Then Bill, with his eye at a telescope, saw a little spark of purple light appear beside the blue globe. A tiny, bright point of violet-red fire, with a white line running from it, back to the center of the sphere. The purple spark grew, the white line lengthened. Abruptly, the newspaperman realized that the purple was an object hurtling toward him with incredible speed.
Even as the realization burst upon him, the spark became visible as a little red-blue sphere, brightly luminous. A white beam shone behind it, seemed to push it with ever-increasing velocity. The purple globe shot past, vanished. The white ray snapped out... "A solid projectile !" Brand cried. "And driven on the positive ray! Our experts have tried it, but the ray always exploded the shell..." |
| Technovelgy from The Prince of Space,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Amazing Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the Ships Propelled By Light Pressure from The Comet Doom (1927) by Edmond Hamilton.
Compare to these propulsion systems: Light Pressure Propulsion (1867),
apergy (1880),
Beam-Powered Propulsion (1931),
Granton motor (1933),
Vibration-Propelled Cruiser (1928),
geodynes (1936),
ion drive (1947),
Planetary Propulsion-Blasts (1934),
stardrive (1953),
solar sail (light sail) (1962),
Lyle drive (1961),
laser cannon (1966),
Bussard ramjet (1976),
asymptotic drive (1976),
Interstellar Laser Propulsion System (1985).
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
