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"I'm a fairly visual thinker. In doing science, I think in terms of pictures of things happening, and then do the mathematics."
- Gregory Benford
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| Robot Spectra Analyzer | ||
| Device used to find ones position in real space. |
So, you're lost in real space. There must be some way to determine your position relative to the known positions of the stars.
| It was a twenty-hour jump, ship's time, and I came through in the middle of nowhere. The robot analyzer chuckled to itself and scanned all the stars, comparing them to the spectra of Proxima Centauri. It finally rang a bell and blinked a light. I peeped through the eyepiece.
A last reading with the photocell gave me the apparent magnitude and a comparison with its absolute magnitude gave me its distance. Not as bad as I thought - a six-week run, give or take a few days. After feeding a course tape into the robot pilot, I strapped into the acceleration tank and went to sleep. |
| Technovelgy from The Repairman,
by Harry Harrison. Published by Galaxy Science Fiction in 1959 Additional resources -
|
Acceleration tanks were used to make boosting under high gravities less trying. SF audiences were used to the concept by the time this short story was written; see the entry for acceleration-tank from Doc Smith's 1934 novel Triplanetary.
Compare to the Astroposit from The Hunch (1961) by Christopher Anvil.
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'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
'Gaines and Harvey mounted tumblebugs, and kept abreast of the Cadet Captain...'
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'...war-balloons, or, as it would be more correct to call them, navigable aerostats.'
