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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

Ball and Hammer Ship  
  Spaceship comprised of two sections connected by a shaft.  

"As you probably saw when you were moving in to come aboard, the Class 4J is ball-and-hammer ship.

" ... A sphere thirty meters in diameter, connected by two slim shafts a hundred meters each in length to a rhomboid-shape that was the ship's thrust unit, some five meters in diameter at it's thickest and looking like a large child's spinning top, pivoted on two wires that clamped it at the middle. This was the "hammer". The ship, proper, was the "ball".

Technovelgy from Dorsai!, by Gordon R. Dickson.
Published by Ace Books in 1960
Additional resources -

Thanks to Gatomon41 for contributing this item.

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