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Our ship was the most unconventional seagoing vessel ever to come off a drawing board. There was a definite family resemblance to our stealth fighter. Only the floating version had no wings. It was a series of severe flat planes at 45-degree angles that sat above the water on struts connected to a pair of submerged pontoons. The ship would be powered by the diesel-electric propulsion that drives electric generators. Cables carried the current to a pair of powerful electric motors in each submerged pontoon that spun counter-rotating propellers. Careful shaping of the pontoons and the propellers cut down sharply on noise and wake.
Skunk Works
Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos
We can’t resist quoting some numbers, because the effect can be startling. Space travel is most comfortable for those onboard the spaceship if the rockets are firing in order to sustain an acceleration equal to “one g.” That means that the space travelers feel their own weight inside the rocket. So let’s imagine a journey of 10 years at that acceleration, followed by 10 more years decelerating at the same rate, at which point we turn the spaceship around and head back to Earth, accelerating for 10 more years and decelerating for a further 10 before finally arriving back. In total the travelers onboard the spaceship will have been journeying for a total of 40 years. The question is how many years have passed on Earth? We’ll just quote the result because the mathematics is (only a little) beyond the level of this book. The result is that a breathtaking 59,000 years will have passed on Earth!
Why Does E=mc2?
Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
As a result, Washington was instructed to recruit men for an expedition to expel the French from the Ohio valley, and at twenty-two he became a lieutenant colonel, in command of a force of Virginia volunteers and Indians, with instructions to build a fort at a river junction called the Ohio Forks, near present-day Pittsburg. He found the French had been established at the Forks for some time and had constructed a stronghold they called Fort Duquesne. He built a rival at Great Meadows, which he called Fort Necessity, an ironic reference to his struggles with Governor Dinwiddie over supplies. He then ran headfirst into an armed French camp under Lieutenant de Jumonville, and when the French ran for their piled muskets, Washington, who kept as usual a diary of events, recorded: “I ordered my company to fire.” So shots rang out and his Iroquois Indians also attacked with their tomahawks. Washington halted the killing and accepted the surrender of the remaining French. But by then ten, including their commander, were dead. This incident angered the French deeply; they termed it l’affaire Jumonville and treated it as assassination. If Washington had fallen into their hands it is likely he would have had to stand trial for murder. As it was, French retaliation was immediate and on a large scale, leading directly to the outbreak of the Seven Years War, 1756-63, which has been termed the first world war, raging in North, Central, and South America, in the Caribbean and the Atlantic, in India and the East, as well as Europe. Washington got his first taste of fame, as the man who started it. Voltaire wrote: “A cannon-shot fired in America gave the signal that set Europe in a blaze.” In fact there was no cannon shot. Horace Walpole in his History of the Reign of George II put it more precisely: “The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.”
George Washington
Paul Johnson
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