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"I do think there is a link in that in both cases, writing fiction or writing a computer program, at any given moment you're focusing on a very specific and particular thing—one word, one line of code, whatever."
- Neal Stephenson

Right Angle Projectile  
  A missile that turns at right angles after being fired.  

“Now look here—” His voice trailed away. The intruder was still unscrewing the supports of the easel and rejoining the sections into something which—“My God, that’s a gun!”

“Yes, ingenius, isn’t it? Now we’ll see what happens when we knock one of those black sausages out of the sky.” He raised the weapon to his shoulder experimentally. “Yes, nicely balanced.” He laughed softly. “I know what you’re thinking—you’re thinking that Mother will be able to plot back the point of impact to angle of trajectory in about ten seconds flat, only we thought of that. This little weapon ejects a rather ingenius missile; a device inside it will turn it at right angles 1.02 seconds after it leaves the barrel. Mother will, therefore, take at least six times longer than necessary to calculate the spot from which the missile was fired.”

He paused and fitted a chronometer-like device to the short stock. “We call this the fruit machine; it tells me at what angle I should fie to hit the target head on. Must have puzzled you in the past—I mean the ease with which we could knock a man off without even being in the same street.”

Technovelgy from The Mad Metropolis, by Philip E. High.
Published by Ace in 1966
Additional resources -

Thanks to Winchell Chung (aka @nyrath of Project Rho) for contributing this item.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Mad Metropolis
  More Ideas and Technology by Philip E. High
  Tech news articles related to The Mad Metropolis
  Tech news articles related to works by Philip E. High

Right Angle Projectile-related news articles:
  - EXACTO Bullets Change Course In Mid-Air
  - Dilbert Writer Scott Adams Plans For Immortality
  - Eterni.me - To Skype With The Dead

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China's Handheld Electromagnetic Gun
Is The Seattle Ultrasonics C-200 A Heinlein Vibroblade?

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