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"The point sticks in your head: physics rules. Virtue does not triumph unless the physics allows it."
- Larry Niven
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Atoplane |
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An airplane powered by nuclear energy, capable of tremendous speed and distance. |
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The greatest achievement of the century was the release and control of atomic energy, which was now doing the world’s work. The secret had been learned in the Murden laboratories, in 1963. Except for lighting and minor power purposes, electricity had been shelved in limbo. Steam power was only a memory. Giant bird-like atoplanes, made of duralumin, filled the air, carrying on much of the world’s travel and commerce. Atomobiles, both ponderous and small, constituted the traffic problem in the cities. Colossal atomotors turned the wheels of industry. It was the age of the atom.
The atoplanes were capable of indefinite flight, and the swiftest of them could go two thousand miles an hour. Gargantuan atoliners made daily roundtrips from both Europe and America. Ships had practically vanished from the seas, and railroads from the land. Atomobiles, Speeding along hard-surfaced roads that radiated everywhere, transported passengers and some of the lighter freight. Most of the passenger travel, however, was in small, privately owned atoplanes which had a speed of about five hundred miles an hour. Every city had its atofield, and many of the older houses and nearly all of the office and industrial buildings had been covered with flat-topped structures affording landing stages, while all of the new buildings were being constructed on this plan. Elevators, opening on the roofs, provided descent into the structures. Equipped with super-helicopters, the machines needed only their own displacement in which to land or rise. Atoheat supplied warmth in all buildings, while all but the smaller dwellings used atolight for illumination.

The principal metamorphosis caused by the development of the atoplane had to do with the redistribution of population in nearly all countries. The population of the large cities had decreased in keeping with the growth of suburban life, while new communities had sprung up like mushrooms, especially on the sides of mountains, the residents flying to and from the cities which were still the centers of industry, education, science, art and amusement. |
Technovelgy from The Moon of Doom,
by Earl L. Bell.
Published by Amazing Stories Quarterly in 1928
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Because of the disaster enfolding both planets, it was possible to pilot atoplanes directly to the Moon!
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