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Dragonlance -- Dan Parkinson - The Gates Of Thorbardin
Atec Март 01 2008 15:03:31
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. The raisin basket -- resting just
in front of him in the soarwagon's wicker cab -- had
shifted and fouled his control lines, and so far he had
been unable to correct them. His lateral and pitch pulls
were crisscrossed in some fashion, somewhere beyond
his reach. The result was that he could gain altitude more
or less at will. To descend, however, he had to wait for
the air currents to make proper adjustments on the vehi-
cle's forward foils, and hope that the positioning would
hold long enough to get near the ground again before it
reversed itself and climbed. Worse still, he could not turn
left. Only right.
The dilemma was symptomatic of the basic control
problem in the soarwagon's design. In building it, Bob-
bin had underestimated the craft's buoyancy and mis-
judged the sensitivity of its control surfaces.
The other gnomes were right, he told himself. I am in-
sane. Had this contrivance been built in proper gnomish
fashion -- designed by a committee, sublet out among
several guilds, and then assembled by a task force, it
wouldn't have these problems. But then, it wouldn't fly
at all.
The problem of the airfoils and their controls wasn't
insoluble. Within the first week of his plight, Bobbin had
deduced what was wrong and how it could be corrected.
Part of it was the result of something unforeseen, a phe-
nomenon that Bobbin simply had not known existed.
The air near the ground was denser and more turbulent
than that higher up, and all drafts within twenty or thirty
feet of the ground were updrafts
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