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"We didn't have a telephone and our family until I was about 15, in high school."
- Ray Bradbury
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| Wunderland Treatymaker | ||
| A weapon based on a power mining technique - a bit more advanced than a shovel. |
One of my favorite things about science fiction is you can effortlessly (some people do find exercising imagination effortless) create your inventions on a grand scale.
| The Wunderland Treatymaker was used only once. It was a gigantic version of what is commonly a mining tool: a disintegrator that fires a beam to suppress the charge on the electron. Where a disintegrator beam falls, solid matter is rendered suddenly and violently positive. It tears itself into a fog of monatomic particles.
Wunderland built, and transported into the Warhead system, an enormous disintegrator firing in parallel with a similar beam to suppress the charge on the proton. The two beams touched down thirty miles apart on Canyon's surface. Rock and kzinti factories and housing spewed away as dust, and a solid bar of lightning flowed between the two points. The weapon chewed twelve miles deep into the planet, exposing magma throughout a region the size and shape of Baja California on Earth. |
| Technovelgy from Ringworld Engineers,
by Larry Niven. Published by Del Rey in 1980 Additional resources -
|
Now, that's a weapon. It kind of reminds me of the largest mechanical trench excavator ever built; the T-1455 by Vermeer Manufacturing. It looked a lot like a standard chainsaw, except that the "saw" part was over forty feet long. Feel the power with the current model - the T1255 Commander.
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'Not like me. A T-1000, advanced prototype. A mimetic poly-alloy. Liquid metal.'
'It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels.'
'The massive feet working the pedals, arms and hands flashing and glinting...'
'There were cubic miles of it, and it glistened like a silvery Christmas tree...'
'Jason had been guiding the caravan of cars as usual...'
"The robot solemnly hit a ball against the wall, picked it up and teed it, hit it again, over and again...'
'There was a wall ahead... It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels.'
'...support the interior human structure against Jupiter’s pull.'
