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"As the rate of technological development speeds up, the gap between science fiction and what we’re living now is getting narrower all the time."
- Richard Morgan
 |
| Acceleration Couch | ||
| A chair designed for use in during periods of high acceleration (multiple gravities). |
This chair seems more like a chaise lounge; it is designed for comfort at high accelerations.
| Ship's gravity edged upward, slowly enough to give the crew time to adjust, a full minute to rise to three gravities. Blaine felt two hundred kilos settling into this acceleration couch. Throughout the ship men would be moving with the wary attention one gives to lifting weights, but it was not a crippling acceleration. Blaine felt very much at ease in his contoured armchair. It had headrest and fingertip controls, lapboard, power swiveling to that the entire bridge was in view without effort, even a personal relief tube. Warships are designed for long periods of high gravity. |
| Technovelgy from The Mote in God's Eye,
by Larry Niven (w/J. Pournelle). Published by Simon & Schuster in 1974 Additional resources -
|
When I first read the term, I thought it might refer to a couch version of an acceleration chair; that is, a device shared by three or four people.
For the more information on traveling at high acceleration, see acceleration chair, also from Mote in God's Eye.
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'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.'
