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"Does it open a new horizon for my thinking? Does it lead me to think new kinds of thoughts, that I would not otherwise perhaps have thought at all? These qualities are what [make] science fiction ...unique."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Emergency Corrective Rockets | ||
| Used when you seem to be off-course in your spaceship. |
| "Two hundred fifty thousand miles off, you say? Which way?" Burns steady tones revealed no perturbation over the alarming news... "Have you tried the emergency corrective rockets?"
"Sure have. Used as many as I dared. The explosions didn't have the slightest effect!" |
| Technovelgy from The Emperor of the Stars,
by Nat Schachner (w. AL Zagat). Published by Wonder Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
They also use "corrective side rockets" to make routine course corrections.
As far as I know, the earliest reference to the idea of altering course (or stopping altogether) by using the reactionmass of small rockets was from Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon; see the entry for retro-rockets.
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Emperor of the Stars
More Ideas
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Tech news articles related to The Emperor of the Stars
Tech news articles related to works by Nat Schachner (w. AL Zagat)
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'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
