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"The trouble with too much genre SF is that it's so obviously the product of the conscious mind."
- William Gibson
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| Flash Suit | ||
| Special suit for practice battles. |
| It was the largest compartment that contained the prize. It looked like a spacesuit at first glance, complete with helmet and gloves. But it wasn't. There was no airtight seal. Still, it would effectively cover the whole body. It was thickly padded. It was also a little stiff...
The flash suits were designed for wars fought with harmless light; they offered little protection and seriously hampered movement if it came to hand-to-hand fighting in nullo. Half the boys were flashed, anyway, and couldn't fight; but the stiffness of their suits made them potentially useful... |
| Technovelgy from Ender's Game,
by Orson Scott Card. Published by Tor in 1985 Additional resources -
|
The flash suits were lighted; they went dark wherever they were 'frozen':
It's important to note that the novel is based on Card's 1977 short story of the same name. It contains the battleroom material. It's important because people familiar with Lazer Tag and its variants weren't developed until the mid-1980's.
As it turns out, there really is such a thing as a "flash suit" - it's unrelated to Card's idea. It is a thermal-protective garment made of heavy weight NOMEX, PBI or other flame-retardant material. They can provide protection for temperatures of up to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.
From the number of lights showing on their flash suits, Bee could see that three of them were disabled and two of them damaged...
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from Ender's Game
More Ideas
and Technology by Orson Scott Card
Tech news articles related to Ender's Game
Tech news articles related to works by Orson Scott Card
Flash Suit-related
news articles:
- BRUISE Smart Injury Detection Suit
| Will Space Stations Have Large Interior Spaces Again? |
| Reflect Orbital Offers 'Sunlight on Demand' And Light Pollution |
| Chrysalis Generation Ship to Alpha Centauri |
| The First Space Warship For Space Force |
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
