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"The first thing that's wrong with being a science-fiction writer today is that the present has caught up with the future and surpassed it."
- Peter Watts

Ball and Hammer Ship  
  Spaceship comprised of two sections connected by a shaft.  

"As you probably saw when you were moving in to come aboard, the Class 4J is ball-and-hammer ship.

" ... A sphere thirty meters in diameter, connected by two slim shafts a hundred meters each in length to a rhomboid-shape that was the ship's thrust unit, some five meters in diameter at it's thickest and looking like a large child's spinning top, pivoted on two wires that clamped it at the middle. This was the "hammer". The ship, proper, was the "ball".

Technovelgy from Dorsai!, by Gordon R. Dickson.
Published by Ace Books in 1960
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Thanks to Gatomon41 for contributing this item.

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