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"The point sticks in your head: physics rules. Virtue does not triumph unless the physics allows it."
- Larry Niven
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| Sounding Projectile | ||
| Provides a way to tell whether there’s a soldid surface on a cloudy planet. |
In the 1930's, little was known (or correctly inferred) about the planets. Obviously, Saturn is intensely cloudy. But can you find a solid surface?
| His hands clutched a switch. A slight movement shot a sounding projectile from a point on the undersurface of his craft. It darted down, and in a few seconds burst into a clouded patch of incandescence. That meant that it had struck something firm enough to discharge its percussion cap. |
| Technovelgy from Mad Robot,
by Raymond Z. Gallun. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1936 Additional resources -
|
See the article on Impactor Determines Composition from The Mechanical Monarch (1958) by E.C. Tubb.
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| The First Space Warship For Space Force |
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'Compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone...'
'The car faltered as the external command came to brake...'
'It is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized...'
'The greatest problem of all was the elimination of the human element of braking together with its inevitable time lag.'
'Across the ancient sea floor a dozen tall, blue-sailed Martian sand ships floated, like blue smoke.'
'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
