See In The Benjamin Franklin.
Two more crew members:
Torpedo man Yule;
Linguist Murdoch.
Our first introduction to this novel's FTL drive (see also here):
"There was little sense of motion. The paragravitic drive maintained identical pseudo-weight inboard, whether the ship was in free fall of [sic] under ten gravities' acceleration...or riding the standing waves of space at superlight speeds, for that matter." (p. 11)
If the drive maintains weight, then why are "...weight maintainers..." (p. 11) needed?
3 comments:
Paul:
"The paragravitic drive maintained identical psuedo-weight inboard, whether the ship was in free fall of [sic] under ten gravities' acceleration...or riding the standing waves of space at superlight speeds, for that matter." (p. 11)
If the drive maintains weight, then why are "...weight maintainers..." (p. 11) needed?
At a guess, I'd say the weight-maintainers are components of the drive, distributed throughout the ship, that take care of the artificial gravity aspect of its function and make sure the felt weight is the same everywhere in the ship, rather than decreasing, even if only slightly, the farther a crewmember gets from the "engine." Also, I don't recall it being made clear what the internal layout is like: is "down" aft, or are the decks parallel to the direction of movement as in an airplane, space shuttle, or most science fiction spacecraft?
David,
We are not told.
Paul.
David has clearly elucidated what I might have vaguely understood the "weight maintainers" to be.
Sean
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