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"I think we're still on that topic, still trying to figure out what computers are, how they change us, why we use them."
- Neal Stephenson
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| Landing Pit (Drydock and Construction) | ||
| A cylindrical hole with anti-gravity screens for use in spacecraft landings and repair. |
| The square mile of unfenced concrete (what fence could bar a jaunter?) comprising the shipyard, looked like a white table covered with black pennies neatly arranged in concentric circles. But on closer approach, the pennies enlarged into the hundred-foot mouths of black pits dug deep into the bowels of the earth. Each circular mouth was rimmed with concrete buildings, offices, check rooms, canteens, changing rooms.
These were the take-off and landing pits, the drydock and construction pits of the shipyards. Spaceships, like sailing vessels, were never designed to support their own weight unaided against the drag of gravity. Normal terran gravity would crack the spine of a spaceship like an eggshell. The ships were built in deep pits, standing vertically in a network of catwalks and construction grids, braced and supported by anti-gravity screens. They took off from similar pits, riding the anti-grav beams upward like motes mounting the vertical shaft of a searchlight until at last they reached the Roche Limit and could thrust with their own jets. Landing spacecraft cut drive jets and rode the same beams downward into the pits. |
| Technovelgy from The Stars My Destination,
by Alfred Bester. Published by Berkley in 1956 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the splashdown from From the Earth to the Moon (1867) by Jules Verne, landing arms from Creatures of the Comet (1931) by Edmond Hamilton, landing stage from Atomic Fire (1931) by Raymond Z. Gallun, landing cradle from The Radium World (1932) by Frank K. Kelly, landing on an asteroid from Murder on the Asteroid (1933) by Eando Binder, docking-cradle from They Never Came Back (1941) by Fritz Leiber, landing-grid from Sand Doom (1955) by Murray Leinster and launching cradle from Needler (1957) by Gordon Randall Garrett.
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'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
