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"As the rate of technological development speeds up, the gap between science fiction and what we’re living now is getting narrower all the time."
- Richard Morgan
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| Delayed Action Stereoscopic Principle | ||
| Distinguishing far off space craft by relative speed against the fixed stars. |
| But electromechanical vision has an advantage over bare sight; it is potentially able to discern lower angular speed than the eye. To the
eye, a spaceship any distance awayis a dot of light, and all dots of light
differ only in intensity, be they stars or spaceships. If the relative angular
speed of a ship against the stars is low, the eye will miss it. But an
instrument can be designed to detect it. The delayed-action stereoscopic
principle, long used in naval range finders and in asteroid-belt pilot alarms, had been built into the entire spread of view screens. If a dot
of light reproduced on a screen declined to hold steady, but progressed from cellet to cellet—relative angular movement—the gradient so established would trigger a circuit causing the moving dot to far outshine
its fellows, and with a color which ran down the spectrum according to the angular speed. All this if the pilot threw in the proper
test circuit.
Lazarus threw in the circuit. The high speed of the New Frontiers gave a long, effective base line for the pseudo-stereoscopy. Half a dozen dots of light obliged by glowing angry red, several times that number in other colors. He disregarded the rest, examined the half a dozen, running up the electronic magnification to the limit. None of them appeared to be on courses which would cross their own course ahead of them, or at all, for that matter. |
| Technovelgy from Methuselah's Children,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
'So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches...'
'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
