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"Retire? Yeah, I want to die with my head in the typewriter. That's my idea of retirement."
- Alfred Bester
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| Half-Sphere Force Field | ||
| A protective force field that can manifest even as a half-sphere. |
Anybody can make a spherical force field, but I enjoyed this brief excursion into solid geometry from Heinlein.
| There flickered into being over the bench, hanging in the air unsupported, a silvery ball some two feet across... it made Don think of a Christmas tree ornament. ...Conrad bent over the controls. "Act two," he announced. "We now cancel out half of the locus..." Another shape took being, a perfect half-sphere otherwise like the last. |
| Technovelgy from Between Planets,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1951 Additional resources -
|
It is invulnerable to harm, and ordinary processes (like a burning cigarette) inside the sphere are uninterrupted. And how does it work?
"...There is no popular way to explain it. If you were willing to spend five hard years with me, working up through the math, I could probably bring you up to the same level of ignorance and confusion that I enjoy. Some of the tensor equations involved are, to put it mildly, unique..."
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Tech news articles related to Between Planets
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Half-Sphere Force Field-related
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| The Desert Ship Sailed In Imagination |
| The Zapata Air Scooter Would Be Great In A Science Fiction Story |
| Could Crystal Batteries Generate Power For Centuries? |
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'Compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone...'
'The car faltered as the external command came to brake...'
'It is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized...'
'The greatest problem of all was the elimination of the human element of braking together with its inevitable time lag.'
'Across the ancient sea floor a dozen tall, blue-sailed Martian sand ships floated, like blue smoke.'
'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
