| 1976 G. K. O'Neill High Frontier (1978) 140
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For convenience I call this device a ‘mass-driver’. As presently conceived it is a kind of recirculating conveyor belt. By the action of magnetic impulses driven by electric energy, it can accelerate a small ‘bucket’ containing a payload of compacted lunar material, to the lunar escape speed of 2.4 kilometers per second.
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| 1979 J. Oberg Farming Planets in O. Davis Omni Bk. of Space 24
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Mass driver is only the current name for this concept.
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| 1979 J. P. Hogan Two Faces of Tomorrow (1987) 3
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The mass-driver was a five-mile-long, ruler-straight track flanked by two “hedges” of continuous electromagnetic windings—an immense linear accelerator stretching westward across Tranquillatis.
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| 1990 A. Steele Clarke County, Space 119
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He lumbered down the giant torus—passing other armored beamjacks at work on the skeleton, glimpsing construction pods transporting material from one side of the torus to another, spotting through the gridwork the floating hulk of a mass-driver barge which had hauled aluminium cassettes up from Descartes Station on the Moon.
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| 1991 L. Niven et al. Fallen Angels 101
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Gordon looked puzzled. “Driver license? For what, mass driver? Disk drive?”
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| 1993 K. S. Robinson Green Mars (new ed.) 71
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Robots on another facet of the asteroid were constructing a mass driver, an engine that would use the deuterium from the indigenous water to fire crushed rock away from the asteroid at speeds of two hundred kilometres a second.
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| 1993 A. C. Clarke Hammer of God 111
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As I'm sure you know, plans for a mass-driver that could deflect an asteroid of reasonable size were drawn up years ago.
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| 1994 I. McDonald Necroville (1995) 154
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Checking the command ‘ware, monitoring the construction of the mass driver, adjusting the attitude jets to stop Tessier 813's rotation—my first EVA.
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| 1997 Interzone July 39/1
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Lady Mac 's radar showed Marcus a serpentine line of one-tonne ice cubes flung out from Lazaro's equatorial mass-driver, gliding inertly up to the Lagrange point for collection.
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| 2001 I. Stewart & J. Cohen Wheelers 339
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A keen eye could also pick out the glinting surfaces of a mass-driver. This particular device—the Pitching Machine, as it was colloquially known—was one of the most powerful of all the mass-drivers deployed throughout the Belt, the pride of New Tibet Habitat's workshops. In essence it was little more than a giant rail-gun with a seventeen-mile barrel and a stubby stock that housed its electrical capacitor banks. Around the long, hollow tube formed by the rails, however, the engineers had woven an intricate framework of active struts, designed to keep the rails from flexing as the slings accelerated along them. Ugly electromagnetic coils were spaced along the rails in a complex progression, designed to transfer as much momentum as possible while using the least amount of electrical power.
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