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"...science fiction is sort of like a sociological genome. It's a huge range of possible futures, most of them useless; some vital. You never really know in advance."
- Peter Watts
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| Flash Suit | ||
| Special suit for practice battles. |
| It was the largest compartment that contained the prize. It looked like a spacesuit at first glance, complete with helmet and gloves. But it wasn't. There was no airtight seal. Still, it would effectively cover the whole body. It was thickly padded. It was also a little stiff...
The flash suits were designed for wars fought with harmless light; they offered little protection and seriously hampered movement if it came to hand-to-hand fighting in nullo. Half the boys were flashed, anyway, and couldn't fight; but the stiffness of their suits made them potentially useful... |
| Technovelgy from Ender's Game,
by Orson Scott Card. Published by Tor in 1985 Additional resources -
|
The flash suits were lighted; they went dark wherever they were 'frozen':
It's important to note that the novel is based on Card's 1977 short story of the same name. It contains the battleroom material. It's important because people familiar with Lazer Tag and its variants weren't developed until the mid-1980's.
As it turns out, there really is such a thing as a "flash suit" - it's unrelated to Card's idea. It is a thermal-protective garment made of heavy weight NOMEX, PBI or other flame-retardant material. They can provide protection for temperatures of up to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.
From the number of lights showing on their flash suits, Bee could see that three of them were disabled and two of them damaged...
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Flash Suit-related
news articles:
- BRUISE Smart Injury Detection Suit
| Elon Musk Wants Data Centers In Space |
| ISS Plagued By Leak - Again! |
| Sunbird Pulsar Fusion Like Leinster's Space Tug |
| Crystalline Structures In Space, You Say? |
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'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
'I could look down at that face of carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the doctor's living flesh.'
'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...'
