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"[Science fiction is] anything that turns you and your social context, the social you, inside out."
- Gregory Benford
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| Gyroscope Seats | ||
| Your best bet for remaining at the right angle to the force of acceleration. |
| The machine is very nearly complete now. All we need are the seats - they are to be air-inflated gyroscopically controlled seats, to make it impossible for a sudden twist of the ship to put the strain in the wrong direction...
"Captain Mason," Arcot explained to the Air Inspector, "these seats may be a bit more active than one generally expects a seat to be..." "You'll notice that my controls and the instruments are mounted on the arm of the chair really; that permits me to maintain complete control of the ship at all times, and still permits my chair to remain perpendicular to the forces. The gyroscopes in the base here cause the entire chair to remain stable if the ship rolls, but the chair can continue to revolve around this bearing here so that we will not be forced out of our seats." |
| Technovelgy from The Black Star Passes,
by John W. Campbell. Published by Amazing Stories in 1930 Additional resources -
|
Take a look at these other sfnal chairs we'd all like to sit in: the spacecraft ejection seat from Murray Leinster's 1953 novel Space Tug, the pod-chair from Jack Vance's 1954 novel The Houses of Iszm and the suspensor chairs from Frank Herbert's Dune
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Black Star Passes
More Ideas
and Technology by John W. Campbell
Tech news articles related to The Black Star Passes
Tech news articles related to works by John W. Campbell
Gyroscope Seats-related
news articles:
- Bose Ride System Smooths Your Ride
| Mechazilla Arms Catch A Falling Starship, But Check Out SF Landing-ARMS |
| Solar-Powered Space Trains On The Moon |
| JWST Finds Bucking Centaur 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 |
| First Trips To Mars Announced By Elon Musk |
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'...the rocket’s landing-arms automatically unfolded.'
'...points and patches of light... sliding all over their faces in a programmed manner that had been designed to foil facial recognition systems.'
'...the combined Wind-Suncatcher, like a spray of tulips mounted fanwise.'
'I went to the control room where the three other men were manipulating their mechanical men.'
'The low-slung monorail car, straddling its single track, bored through the shadows on a slowly rising course.'
'It was a smooth ovoid floating a few inches from the floor...'
'... he thrust in his charging arm to replenish his store of energy.'
'...the terrible Jovian gravity that made each movement an effort.'
