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"The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. You look at the world around you, and take it apart into its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Wunderland Treatymaker | ||
| A weapon based on a power mining technique - a bit more advanced than a shovel. |
One of my favorite things about science fiction is you can effortlessly (some people do find exercising imagination effortless) create your inventions on a grand scale.
| The Wunderland Treatymaker was used only once. It was a gigantic version of what is commonly a mining tool: a disintegrator that fires a beam to suppress the charge on the electron. Where a disintegrator beam falls, solid matter is rendered suddenly and violently positive. It tears itself into a fog of monatomic particles.
Wunderland built, and transported into the Warhead system, an enormous disintegrator firing in parallel with a similar beam to suppress the charge on the proton. The two beams touched down thirty miles apart on Canyon's surface. Rock and kzinti factories and housing spewed away as dust, and a solid bar of lightning flowed between the two points. The weapon chewed twelve miles deep into the planet, exposing magma throughout a region the size and shape of Baja California on Earth. |
| Technovelgy from Ringworld Engineers,
by Larry Niven. Published by Del Rey in 1980 Additional resources -
|
Now, that's a weapon. It kind of reminds me of the largest mechanical trench excavator ever built; the T-1455 by Vermeer Manufacturing. It looked a lot like a standard chainsaw, except that the "saw" part was over forty feet long. Feel the power with the current model - the T1255 Commander.
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'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'
