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"If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Space Craft Rope Ladder | ||
| Equipment used for debarking from a space craft. |
Russell makes good use of the fact that, in traditional Fifties-style rockets, entrance to the rocket was gained far up on the side (when the rocket has landed on its tail).
| After scrambling down the precipitous side of the ship on a rope ladder... |
| Technovelgy from Diabologic,
by Eric Frank Russell. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1955 Additional resources -
|
There is a long (!) tradition of using ladders from the side of upright rockets that have landed on their fins. For example, in the 1932 story The Radium World, Frank K. Kelly writes:
Here's an illustration of the idea from a 1951 Galaxy magazine:
He took her arm politely, stepped out beside her on the top of the narrow steelite debarking-ladder that led down to the ground.
(Ladder to ground on tail fin rocket)
Find more illustrations on Winchell Chung's Embarking page.
Here's how the problem was solved in the 2015 film The Martian. Note that the ladder extends from the center of the bottom of the MAV (Mars Ascent Vehicle, a small shuttle ship designed to go from the surface to orbit only).
Compare to the escaladder from Neutron Star (1966) by Larry Niven.
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'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...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
