Solar Guard

“ The two boys felt the metallic thump of something hitting the hull of their rocket scout. They realized immediately that it was the sound of the jet boat coupling [Pg 130] on their ship and they turned to face the air-lock hatch.
Captain Newton was the first to step through the air-lock hatch and he was followed by six Space Marines, holding their ray guns leveled.
"I am Captain Newton of the Solar Guard, in command of the rocket cruiser Regulus," he announced. "I arrest you in the name of the Solar Alliance." The officer handed over the standard warrant that was used by the Solar Guard. ”

“ These photoelectric devices convert sunlight into 200 watts of electricity for powering spacecraft equipment. Auxiliary power is furnished by two silver zinc storage batteries which are used when the solar panels are not functioning, particularly during launch when they are still folded and during mid- course correction. During its flight, Ranger must be positioned so that its solar panels face the sun for power and its high-gain antenna points to earth. A complex system of sun and earth sensors, gyroscopes, and nitrogen gas jets keep the craft oriented. ”

“ When the stands first saw me enter, they came to their feet and began a cheer that should have echoed and reechoed—but didn't. It died almost before it began. When they saw my equipment, the cheer faltered, then died in shame.
They realized, those citizens from all over the Solar System, what was happening. The stakes were too high. The Solar System was trading honor for security. Instead of being armed with the traditional sword or spear, battleaxe or boomerang, I was laden with the most deadly devices our scientists could develop. ”

“ Many attempts have been made to produce power directly from the sun through solar engines, or by concentrating it in furnaces. At the St. Louis Exposition a few years ago, a Portuguese priest exhibited a solar engine called a heliophore, in which, by means of the sun's rays, the temperature was raised to 6000 degrees F., and a cube of iron placed in it melted like a snowball. The sun helps to raise the tides and some day they may be used to produce power. ”

“ The source of solar energy is not to be found in the sun itself, but in his environment; and he himself, in all his glory, is but the king, crowned with gold, blazing with rich apparel, and scattering benefits among his satellites, not from his own private treasury, but who himself is enriched by the mighty tribute with which his willing subjects continually endow him, and to whom alone he owes all his pride and power and wealth and magnificence, and which he, in turn, so freely expends, transmuted in form alone, in the perpetual improvement and welfare of his domain. ”

“ The millennia of delay in initiating the Task imposes inescapable hardships on the Solar Community.
Accordingly, when justified as essential to the Objective, solar governments divert work forces, systems, and material resources from throughout their jurisdiction to the Task. The consequences of these diversions are expected to significantly curtail construction, activities, lifestyles of Earth and space colony populations, the distribution of the solar system's residual resources and, possibly, the independence of governments, organizations, and individuals throughout the solar realm. ”

“ Still other conditions enable these suns to transform and send forth much of the energy of space which comes their way in the established space circuits, Many phases of physical energy and all forms of matter are attracted to, and subsequently distributed by, the solar dynamos. In this way the suns serve as local accelerators of energy circulation, acting as automatic power-control stations. ”

“ Thanks to the splendid astro-physical researches at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California under Doctor Hale’s direction, we know to-day that enormous electrical currents circulate on the surface of the sun, and we know also from other researches that negative electricity is shot out from all hot bodies, even from those not nearly as hot as the sun, and that the solar corona is, in all probability, closely related to this electrical activity on the sun. ”

“ I have addressed hundreds of audiences in Great Britain and America on the subject of recent solar discoveries, and I have conversed with many hundreds of persons of various capacity and education, from men almost uncultured to men of the highest intellectual power; and my invariable experience has been that solar research derives its chief interest when viewed in relation to the sun's position as the mighty ruler, the steadfast sustainer, the beneficent almoner of the system of worlds to which our earth belongs. ”

“ Among other clauses designed to protect the fragile environment, so long and senselessly abused, it specified that no more than one-hundred military vessels of any given nation, and these of limited size and destructive capability, were to enter the parochial Solar System at any one time, and that no more than half that number could engage an Earth orbit or rest upon the Moon. ”

“ Driven forth from the society of their fellows by their own unbalanced energies, these anarchists of the sky may form loose aggregations, granulated about multitudes of self-constituted minor centers; but, cut loose from all effective solar control during their period of coalescence, they must forever lack the consolidated form and complex organization of their prosperous and rotund brethren, the planets and their satellites, or even the tiny asteroids, who stayed home and, like the little pig, had bread and butter for breakfast. ”

“ Juba, wearing his eye shades, shrank into a corner and hid his face.
"It is well that we are protected by the walls of the car and the thick glass windows," said Edmund, "for I do not doubt that there are solar radiations in abundance here which scarcely affect us on the earth, but which might prove dangerous or even mortal if we were exposed to their full force." ”

“ When we talk about transforming our energy system and moving away from fossil fuel and making our homes more energy efficient and building solar panels, moving toward solar thermal power, in the Southwest of this country—New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada—we have some of the best solar exposure in the entire world. ”

“ The heat motion then disappears as heat by its conversion into work, just as the motion of a belt in a mill disappears in the work of the machine which it drives. One two-hundred-and-thirty-two-millionth part of the radiant solar energy, we know, is caught by the flying planets of our system in the forms of heat and light, adapted to sustain life and its continued [140] potentiality, and we know that this solar energy is the sole source of all the development and maintenance of the planets as the possible abodes of organic life, past, present or future. ”

“ Many attempts have been made in tropical and sub-tropical climates to utilize the sun's heat directly for power, and Ericsson in Sweden, Mouchot in France, and Shuman in Egypt have built successful and efficient solar engines. ”

“ Passengers and crews of foreign space transports, passenger liners, and utility and pleasure craft, whatever their points of foreign origin or destination, required visas, local pilots, and armed escorts upon arrivals and departures. Suspicions festered on all sides.
It was an era of international and interregional political tensions and harassment, and military, technological and industrial sabotage and espionage. The history of Earth's ancients had returned to haunt the solar community.
The rate of depletion in the Solar Community's reserves of vital but nonrenewable substances rose rapidly. ”

“ Buildings could host over a third of PV potential
For building-based PV, the approach in this study is broadly consistent with other studies. Based on floor area, an estimate of sun-facing roof and fac ̧ade area is obtained, followed by a suitability factor. For the resulting available area the annual irradiation is multiplied by the system efficiency of the solar panel which results in the net potential. ”

“ It is possible that when all the stores of coal and other fuel which form the source of the mechanical power and commercial greatness of northern and western nations shall have been exhausted, a method of directly utilising solar radiation may be discovered. And if so, then the seat of empire will be transferred to parts of the earth that are now burnt up by the intense heat of the sun, but which then will be the most valuable of all possessions. ”

“ By the nebular hypothesis the whole course of development, of necessity, is rigidly forward to its culmination; but by employing the analogies presented to us in other operations of nature, we can readily account for variations, haltings, ineffectual efforts, uncompleted processes, and even reversals and redistributions into other secondary sources of energy. They equally comprise the agencies for the production of a single solar system or of a myriad, just as we see the vortical water-spouts or sand-storms either single, double, or multiple ”

“ Of the 72 facets, 60 are used for the solar cells that are the satellite’s main power source. When Telstar is in sunlight, these cells convert solar energy into electrical power; at full capacity the 3600 solar cells will supply about 15 watts. As time goes by, this power slowly diminishes as the cells are gradually damaged by such hazards of space as radiation particles and micrometeorites. To reduce this damage, the satellite’s cells are covered with a thin layer of man-made sapphire. ”

“ The power crew was having trouble with the solar furnace. Three of the nine banks of mirrors would not respond to the electric controls, and one bank moved so jerkily that it could not be focused, and it threatened to tear several of the mirrors loose. ”

“ Indeed, a practical solar motor might make habitable even the Sahara Desert. And it can be used in many other ways besides for pumping water. Threshing machines might be run by this power, and, converted into electricity and saved up in storage batteries, it might be used for lighting houses, even for cooking dinners, or in fact for any purpose requiring power.
These solar motors can be built at no great expense. I was told that ten-horse-power plants would cost about $200 per horse-power, and one-hundred-horse-power plants about $100 per horse-power. ”

“ But the techniques that gave them a faster-than-light drive gave them as well a weapon that threatened solar systems, not cities; that could detonate a sun as readily as uranium could destroy a building. ”

“ Ericsson estimated that the mechanical power that would result from utilizing the solar heat on a strip of land a single mile wide and eight thousand miles long would suffice to keep twenty-two million solar-engines, of one hundred192 horse-power each, going nine hours a day. ”

“ The poorest person, almost, could conveniently run his own electric car; for the expense 36of construction was light, and by a simple process of the conservation of energy the supply of electric force was sustained at a small cost.
By this time the concentration and conservation of solar energy was in general practice; usually large manufactories favoured its use, for the storage of the sun’s rays had become practicable and was superseding electricity to some extent. The ocean was no impediment to personal locomotion, for seas were skimmed over by means of electrical flying machines ”

“ To demonstrate the power of the self-replication technique in large-scale enterprises, the Telefactors Working Group assumed a sample task involving the manufacture of 106 tons of solar cells on the Moon for use in solar power satellites. A goal of 500 GW generating capacity - to be produced by entirely self-contained machinery, naturally occurring lunar materials, and sunlight for energy - was established. ”

“ Though the team can offer no conceptual designs for such systems, it is intriguing that the solar wind output of most elements rivals or far exceeds their corresponding current annual terrestrial production rates. ”

“ We must also bear in mind that sun-spots do not diminish the solar heat, as they are the result of increased and not of diminished energy. Electric currents of high potential pass directly, as we know, along the lines of least resistance to their opposite center of polarity, so that two planets nearly in conjunction with each other transmit their currents almost directly towards the sun’s center, and upon the same point of solar latitude, while, if at right angles with the sun, they must deliver their electricity along converging lines and thus strike the solar surface at different points. ”

“ Because the small Ray guns upon the battleplanes are useless against the glow paint on the Guards’ fortress, and the Guards’ great Ray artillery will pick off our battleplanes one by one as they expose their unprotected parts while evolving in the air. It is impossible to protect the parts of a plane around the solar storage batteries, because the glow rays disturb their action. Then, again, when each of our men has discharged his Ray rod, where is he to replenish it without access to the solar storage within 212the Guards’ fortress? ”

“ Solar energy powers the systems which gather nonterrestrial materials for conversion into refined materials products. These "products" can be additional power systems, materials gathering/processing/ manufacturing systems, or simply support for other human and machine systems in space. ”

“ Taking the most general view of the facts, we must therefore say that, solar radiation being the source of those forces by which life, vegetal and animal, is carried on, and being, by implication, the source of the forces displayed in human life, and consequently in social life, it results that there can be no considerable social evolution on tracts of the earth's surface where solar radiation is very feeble. ”