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"At its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we can't predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe."
- John Brunner
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| Joystick Controls w/Remote Display | ||
| A fire-by-wire remote-controlled weapon system. |
This remarkable prediction contains several interesting elements. The rifles are aimed by what amounts to a joystick controller; the rifleman is protected from enemy fire, observing the field of fire with a remote display.
| The riflemen [in the ironclad, armored infantry vehicle] each occupied a small cabin of peculiar construction. Their rifles, however, were very different pieces of apparatus from the simple mechanisms in the hands of their adversaries. These were in the first place automatic [weapons, reloaded] from a magazine each time they fired... and they had the most remarkable sights imaginable, sights which threw a bright little camera-obscura picture into the light-tight box in which the rifleman sat below. This ... picture was marked with two crossed lines, and whatever was covered by the intersection of these two lines, the rifle hit. [The rifleman's one hand] held the [control like a draftsman's dividers] for judging distance, and the other grasped a big knob like a door handle. As he pushed this knob about the rifle above swung to correspond ... and then [he] pressed a finger upon a little push like an electric bell-push, conveniently placed in the centre of the knob. Then the [target] was shot. |
| Technovelgy from The Land Ironclads,
by H.G. Wells. Published by Unknown in 1903 Additional resources -
|
I found a cool-looking model of the Ironclads from the story here at H.G. Wells' Land Ironclad. Thanks to S. Jones for contributing this item and a quote.
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'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
