 

 

 

 

 

 

Latest By
Category:


Armor
Artificial Intelligence
Biology
Clothing
Communication
Computers
Culture
Data Storage
Displays
Engineering
Entertainment
Food
Input Devices
Lifestyle
Living Space
Manufacturing
Material
Media
Medical
Miscellaneous
Robotics
Security
Space Tech
Spacecraft
Surveillance
Transportation
Travel
Vehicle
Virtual Person
Warfare
Weapon
Work

"The best fuzzy rules, the best knowledge, deal with the turning points of the system. If a race-car driver teaches you how to drive, you don't need him to show you how to drive on the straightaway. It's how he handles the curves that matters."
- Bart Kosko

Acceleration Couch  
  A chair designed for use in during periods of high acceleration (multiple gravities).  

This chair seems more like a chaise lounge; it is designed for comfort at high accelerations.

Ship's gravity edged upward, slowly enough to give the crew time to adjust, a full minute to rise to three gravities. Blaine felt two hundred kilos settling into this acceleration couch. Throughout the ship men would be moving with the wary attention one gives to lifting weights, but it was not a crippling acceleration.

Blaine felt very much at ease in his contoured armchair. It had headrest and fingertip controls, lapboard, power swiveling to that the entire bridge was in view without effort, even a personal relief tube. Warships are designed for long periods of high gravity.

From The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven (w/J. Pournelle).
Published by Simon & Schuster in 1974
Additional resources -

When I first read the term, I thought it might refer to a couch version of an acceleration chair; that is, a device shared by three or four people.

For the more information on traveling at high acceleration, see acceleration chair, also from Mote in God's Eye.

Comment/Join this discussion ( 2 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This |

Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Mote in God's Eye
  More Ideas and Technology by Larry Niven (w/J. Pournelle)
  Tech news articles related to The Mote in God's Eye
  Tech news articles related to works by Larry Niven (w/J. Pournelle)

Articles related to Space Tech
How Many Systems In That Galactic Empire Now?
Britain To Build Spaceport, First In Europe
Testing New Spacesuits In 1929 And 2015
Space Station Kitchens 1929 and 2015

Want to Contribute an Item? It's easy:
Get the name of the item, a quote, the book's name and the author's name, and Add it here.

<Previous
Next>

Google
  Web TechNovelgy.com   

 

 

Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.

 

 

 

 

More News

XM82 Personal Flamethrower Now In Development
'Skeletons in tatters. Burned by a flesh gun'

Graphene Cytobot - Cyborg Bacterial Spores May Help Astronauts
'[It] had not yet objected to being made over into a portion of an electronic system... '

LiquiGlide Will Be Everywhere
'They poured the remnants of eggs out of their frictionless cups...'

How Many Systems In That Galactic Empire Now?
'An Empire to twenty million stellar systems...'

Petman Robot Pushes Itself To The Limit
'There was the butler robot, hard at work, his copper face expressionless...'

Coleus LED 'Skylight' Dispenses Natural Sunlight Indoors
'How do they work it so that the sky is visible at every level of the city?'

UR3 Robot At Work On Copies Of Itself
'I don't mean that you should construct this ultra-microrobot with your own fingers, of course...'

3D Printing 'Terminator T-1000-Style'
Not quite 'a mimetic polyalloy...'

More SF in the News

More Beyond Technovelgy

Home | Glossary | Invention Timeline | Category | New | Contact Us | FAQ | Advertise |
Technovelgy.com - where science meets fiction™

Copyright© Technovelgy LLC; all rights reserved.
 
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=443
www.technovelgy.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-14
23978
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:E3NF26AE6WBX5DNX56BCBTWEEWPKO3FY
<urn:uuid:a35885af-17ac-4bb4-b552-64bfee22ddb1>
2015-03-27T15:40:06Z
64.78.51.83
sha1:PUJWFALGF3N5ZEOZX6PUDONDNQVFI76P
<urn:uuid:06a425e1-6fa8-464d-aeaf-8496edc2a071>
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=443
response
<urn:uuid:441147d5-8692-4fb7-880c-9485b59b199f>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-14
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for March 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf