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"I'm very taken by mythology. I read it at a very early age and kept on reading it. Before I discovered science fiction I was reading mythology."
- Roger Zelazny
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| Flip to Brake | ||
| Maneuver to put the tail end (with rocket output) in the forward direction of travel to use for lowering velocity. |
A clever, and realistic, strategy. This is an early use of this idea; I can't think of an earlier one.
| “Unless I’ve gone cuckoo, I saw that three-cornered
rock,” he muttered as he set the keys for a complete
half turn. “And not just one of those strangely familiar rocks, but the very same one I saw by that platinum bed!”
The cylindrical vehicle gently swung in a half circle at his manipulations with the keys, and blasted the rear tubes straight into its course of flight. But Timothy put on all the rocket force it was safe to use to slow the boat. He was pressed uncomfortably back into the seat. Far in front he could see the black outline of the asteroid he wanted to reach, that he had just passed. It grew smaller for a while as the rockets cut down the forward inertia, then began to grow in size as the boat was pushed back along its previous course. |
| Technovelgy from Murder on the Asteroid,
by Eando Binder. Published by Wonder Stories in 1933 Additional resources -
|
Robert Heinlein described this idea in his 1941 classic Methuselah's Children:
He figured the relative vector, gunned the gig, flipped, and gunned to brake-homed-in three minutes off estimate, feeling smug. He cradled the gig, hurried inside...
See also Cargo for Colony 6 (1958) by Christopher Anvil:
The whole ship sprang forward, ramming New far back in the acceleration couch and choking the breath out of him. There was a high, squeaking screech, and his insides seemed to twist sidewise and up. A nauseous sense of being wrenched two ways at once gripped him, and he was swallowed in a rush of blackness. His last dwindling sensations were of a heavy crash and an abrupt silence...
"...just exactly what . . . did you do just then?”
"Spun the ship like a gyro,” said Hughes proudly, "jammed on full forward acceleration, then gave her everything I had to jerk the tail side-wise and around in a new direction. She really jumped, and then I improvised a little.” He chortled.
The 2016 series The Expanse is very true-to-life in space; this maneuver is shown.
As Lazarus approached his rendezvous with the Chili he signaled from the gig; the Chili's transponder echoed, to his relief-he had little faith in gear he had not personally overhauled and a long search for the Chili at this point would have been disastrous.
There was the soft chime of a bell over the earphones, then a wash of colors. Then a violent slam back into the acceleration chair as the ship sprang forward, swung head-for-tail, then braked hard...
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Murder on the Asteroid
More Ideas
and Technology by Eando Binder
Tech news articles related to Murder on the Asteroid
Tech news articles related to works by Eando Binder
| Sunbird Pulsar Fusion Like Leinster's Space Tug |
| Crystalline Structures In Space, You Say? |
| Amazing Photonic Crystal Light Sail |
| The New Habitable Zones Include Asimov's Ribbon Worlds |
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'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
'She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.'
'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
'It hurtled on down with inconceivable speed until it was visible as thousands of tiny robot planes...'
'Then she looked up with a smile and moved closer to the camera.'
'... folios and tapes and playable discs of platinum alloy.'
'... another corner of his mind began to think about the shields.'
