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"The wealth of the universe is all over your head. We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth..."
- Larry Niven
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| Overdrive | ||
| A propulsion technology that allows a craft to travel at faster-than-light speed. |
| A nebula is a gas. It is so thin that a comet's tail is solid by comparison, but a ship traveling on overdrive - above the speed of light - does not want to hit even a merely hard vacuum. |
| Technovelgy from First Contact,
by Murray Leinster. Published by Street and Smith Co. in 1945 Additional resources -
|
Raymond Z. Gallun uses the same expression with more details in his 1951 story Brother Worlds, published in Thrilling Wonder Stories:
Or there might be a small fault of function — improper matching of transdimensional coordinates. It could be that when we came out of overdrive at last we would be changed to monsters. The Centaur’s complicated engines needed constant fine adjustments...
We spent most of that trip dozing in our bunks. Hyperspace dulls the mind. Everyone knows that now. And old time-scales just don’t apply. Earthtime our journey took many months. But it didn’t seem anywhere near that long.
Compare to this first use of the phrase faster than light from John W. Campbell's 1931 story Islands of Space.
A few thousand miles out from the Moon, those marvelous new engines of the Centaur went to work and we swung into overdrive. Vision blurred. One felt impossibly but painlessly twisted. A vagueness, characteristic of hyperspace, lingered. And there was fear lest that intricate wonderful apparatus, still short of perfection, might fail entirely, ending our lives in an explosion of matter-energy shifts and phases that we would not feel or know about.
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from First Contact
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and Technology by Murray Leinster
Tech news articles related to First Contact
Tech news articles related to works by Murray Leinster
| ISS Plagued By Leak - Again! |
| Sunbird Pulsar Fusion Like Leinster's Space Tug |
| Crystalline Structures In Space, You Say? |
| Amazing Photonic Crystal Light Sail |
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'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
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'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
