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"We were essentially being shell-shocked by rapid change. That was one of the things you needed science-fiction writers for back in the Sixties, because we could cope with the future."
- Peter Watts
 |
| Overdrive | ||
| A propulsion technology that allows a craft to travel at faster-than-light speed. |
| A nebula is a gas. It is so thin that a comet's tail is solid by comparison, but a ship traveling on overdrive - above the speed of light - does not want to hit even a merely hard vacuum. |
| Technovelgy from First Contact,
by Murray Leinster. Published by Street and Smith Co. in 1945 Additional resources -
|
Raymond Z. Gallun uses the same expression with more details in his 1951 story Brother Worlds, published in Thrilling Wonder Stories:
Or there might be a small fault of function — improper matching of transdimensional coordinates. It could be that when we came out of overdrive at last we would be changed to monsters. The Centaur’s complicated engines needed constant fine adjustments...
We spent most of that trip dozing in our bunks. Hyperspace dulls the mind. Everyone knows that now. And old time-scales just don’t apply. Earthtime our journey took many months. But it didn’t seem anywhere near that long.
Compare to this first use of the phrase faster than light from John W. Campbell's 1931 story Islands of Space.
A few thousand miles out from the Moon, those marvelous new engines of the Centaur went to work and we swung into overdrive. Vision blurred. One felt impossibly but painlessly twisted. A vagueness, characteristic of hyperspace, lingered. And there was fear lest that intricate wonderful apparatus, still short of perfection, might fail entirely, ending our lives in an explosion of matter-energy shifts and phases that we would not feel or know about.
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from First Contact
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and Technology by Murray Leinster
Tech news articles related to First Contact
Tech news articles related to works by Murray Leinster
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| The First Space Warship For Space Force |
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'The observation vehicle was of that peculiar variety used in conveying a large number of people across rough terrain.'
'The real border was defended by... a swarm of quasi-independent aerostats.'
'I ... set my automatic astronomical instruments to searching for a habitable planet.'
'...haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?'
'... oblongs were all over the floor and surfaces.'
