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"It's hard to tell stories about critters that are not human. John W. Campbell tried it, in "Twilight," and everybody says it's a wonderful story, and nobody ever reads it twice."
- Jerry Pournelle
 |
| Pilot-Robot | ||
| The piloting gear of a space tug. |
The gritty life of a space tug owner, in the tiny pilot's cabin.
| A sturdy, utilitarian craft, the tug had no broad and dangerous ports.The low walls and bulging roof of the tiny pilothouse, lined with spongy gray plastic, were cut only with thin tubes for the instruments. Beside the dial-topped case of the pilot-robot, Captain Rob McGee pulled his square leather face out of a black periscope hood, and looked at them with mild, squinted eyes.
 (The pilot-robot from Collision Orbit>) |
| Technovelgy from Collision Orbit,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Astounding in 1942 Additional resources -
|
See how the pilot-robot keeps the ship safe by using thermalarm relays to detect small objects in the ships path and maneuver around them.
See also automatic navigator in A Matter of Size (1934) by Harry Bates, the
chart cabinet in One Against the Legion (1939) by Jack Williamson, the
3D tank display in Triplanetary (1930) by 'Doc' Smith, the article on astrogation in Methuselah's Children (1941) by Robert Heinlein and the
telechart in Crashing Suns (1928) by Edmond Hamilton.
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| Is China Mining Helium-3 On The Moon's Farside? |
| Solitary Black Hole Wanders In Space |
| Spaceplane From Virgin Atlantic |
| Taikonauts Exercise In China's Tiangong Space Station |
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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.'
