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"Evolutionary success ... is going to absolutely require mobility on, at a minimum, an interplanetary scale. We either go or we die out."
- Richard Morgan

Rocket Float  
  A sea-going floating platform for rocket launches.  

THE Rocket III was berthed on her huge float, fifty miles off Montauk Point. A monster dirigible from the mainland had just discharged its cargo, the highly concentrated liquid explosive which provided tremendous propulsive energy for the liner in limited storage space, and was headed for home. Scores of smaller private aircraft hovered at a respectful distance, awaiting the take-off of the great vessel — a sight they had come hundreds, even thousands, of miles to witness...


(From Rocket float from 'Too Many Boards!' by Harl Vincent)

The time for departure was at hand, and the shrill siren on the float warned the surrounding visitors to withdraw to a safe distance. The screaming exhaust of the vessel's rocket tubes was a thing to be feared, an incandescent blast that could wither and destroy the greatest of the ships of the lower air.

With its five hundred feet of glistening length resting in the chute, its blunt nose pointed skyward at an angle of thirty degrees, the Rocket III was a thing of beauty, a monument to the genius and scientific attainment of mankind. But, when the mighty energies were released from within, it became a monster of terrifying power, a mechanism that went roaring into the skies ahead of a trail of blinding magnificence, splitting the protesting air with a screech whose intensity was beyond all belief.

Precisely on schedule, the Rocket III hurled itself into the heavens. When the last vestige of its flaming tail had vanished, the awed spectators turned their ships homeward, stunned and silenced by this marvel of the twenty-first century.

Technovelgy from Too Many Boards!, by Harl Vincent.
Published by Amazing Stories in 1931
Additional resources -

Compare to the artificial island for ocean rockets in Between Earth and Moon (1930) by Otfrid von Hanstein.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Too Many Boards!
  More Ideas and Technology by Harl Vincent
  Tech news articles related to Too Many Boards!
  Tech news articles related to works by Harl Vincent

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