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"Does it open a new horizon for my thinking? Does it lead me to think new kinds of thoughts, that I would not otherwise perhaps have thought at all? These qualities are what [make] science fiction ...unique."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Reaction-Motors | ||
| A spacecraft engine that works by firing matter out at high speed. |
This idea makes use of conventional physics.
| For three days Captain Grant had kept his great space-liner… ahead of the questing disintegrator rays of the Black Hawk only by burning his full battery of reaction-motors at their maximum power. |
| Technovelgy from Twelve Hours To Live,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Wonder Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Here's what the drive looked like in operation:
The glow, he knew, was a fluorescent, electronic discharge in the radioactive gases jetting from the rockets of the racing ship...
The idea behind a reaction-motor is Newton's Third Law of Motion, which decrees that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. For a spacecraft to move forward, you must throw matter out the other end.
Compare to the reactionless drive idea, which encompasses the various hyperdrives that allow a ship to move from one point to another in space, without traversing the space in between. See the inertialess drive from 'Doc' Smith's 1934 novel Triplanetary.
…Grant saw a vague pink glow come into being in the jet, star-sprinkled sky behind…
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| Reflect Orbital Sunlight On Demand |
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
