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"The world is really so surreal these days that it's necessary for us to blunt it somehow in order to stay sane. The artist functions to short-circuit the buffering mechanism, so that people can occasionally perceive the weirdness of things as they are."
- William Gibson
 |
| 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>) |
| 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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| Space Station Shutters |
| MIT Proposes Space Bubbles To Combat Climate Change, Misses The Point Of Space Bubbles |
| Study Reveals Effect Of Space Travel On The Brain |
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'... we were supposed to be forming five unit composites first."
'We send our eyes on their appointed rounds, and they can hover or soar or back up...'
'Light from the sun hit those little spheres and bounced.'
'... the two pairs of waldoes in the screen followed in exact, simultaneous parallelism.'
