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"Why does a creative person create? It's a type of compulsion. I like to explore new ideas."
- Bart Kosko
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| Reaction-Motors | ||
| A spacecraft engine that works by firing matter out at high speed. |
This idea makes use of conventional physics.
| For three days Captain Grant had kept his great space-liner… ahead of the questing disintegrator rays of the Black Hawk only by burning his full battery of reaction-motors at their maximum power. |
| Technovelgy from Twelve Hours To Live,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Wonder Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Here's what the drive looked like in operation:
The glow, he knew, was a fluorescent, electronic discharge in the radioactive gases jetting from the rockets of the racing ship...
The idea behind a reaction-motor is Newton's Third Law of Motion, which decrees that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. For a spacecraft to move forward, you must throw matter out the other end.
Compare to the reactionless drive idea, which encompasses the various hyperdrives that allow a ship to move from one point to another in space, without traversing the space in between. See the inertialess drive from 'Doc' Smith's 1934 novel Triplanetary.
…Grant saw a vague pink glow come into being in the jet, star-sprinkled sky behind…
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from Twelve Hours To Live
More Ideas
and Technology by Jack Williamson
Tech news articles related to Twelve Hours To Live
Tech news articles related to works by Jack Williamson
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| Solitary Black Hole Wanders In Space |
| Spaceplane From Virgin Atlantic |
| Taikonauts Exercise In China's Tiangong Space Station |
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'...small electric motors at the principal joints worked the prosthetic framework by means of steel cables...'
'Living protoplasm incorporated into the Ampek F-a2 recording system...'
'Twoflower's Luggage, which was currently ambling along on its little legs...'
'He came to as the ship went into free flight, arching in a high parabola over the plains...'
'The peculiar quality of this light, which gave it its great preeminence over all other penetrating rays...'
'The overworked leg motor would have to cool down before he could work on it...'
‘Where to, sport?’ the starter at cab relay asked.
