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"I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
 |
| 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. |
| From Methuselah's Children,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
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'... with large padded feet, who were apparently polishing their way the whole length of Rama's six artificial suns.'
'Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray on its upper surface...'
'the human seats took up two-thirds of the room in each'
'the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits...'
'Over her lacerated right shoulder he sprayed art-derm...'
Now, that was a Pontiac Trans Am with some real style.
'There is a built-in microphone that hears everything you say, and an electric brain that selects a suitable answer.'
