Word: rotor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...companies have survived setbacks as stunning as the one that befell Japan's Toyo Kogyo Co. Ltd., the maker of Mazda cars and trucks, in the mid-1970s. At the time, nearly half of Mazda's vehicles used the revolutionary Wankel engine, in which a rotor instead of pistons produces the power. When the world oil crisis began in 1973, the gas-guzzling Wankels became a sales disaster because they delivered a maximum of only about 15 miles to the gallon. The company seemed headed for the corporate scrap heap. Recalls one executive: "Every day felt like doomsday...
...Edward Noelke whumps out across his 18,000-acre ranch in his Bell bubble helicopter. "This mesquite," he shouts above the rotor clatter, "is a very competent adversary." Noelke can run his eye across the vast dun-brown landscape (gentle hills, a sweep of mesas off toward the horizon), and although the land is comparatively featureless to a stranger, Noelke can tell precisely what campaigns he waged in what year upon what stands of mesquite...
...down canyons until Crawford, in the copilot's seat, spots a band of bobbing heads in a grove of cedars. The men use their craft as an earthbound cowboy uses his horse at roundup time, circling and feinting and cutting off lines of escape. Biggs sets the rotor low and at the mustangs' tails. When they break again, the copter sets down, Crawford leaps out and waves them back on the trail...
...metallic fuse in back of the bullet, creating a cloud of electrically charged particles, or plasma. Simultaneously, it generates a strong magnetic field between the rails, like those in an electric motor. The field exerts a force against the plasma, just as it would against a motor's rotor. But instead of spinning, the plasma moves forward, guided by the rails and pushing the projectile ahead of it. Not constrained by any sonic limitation, the plasma could, theoretically at least, approach the speed of light...
...Regiment, which is charged with border surveillance in the central sector at Fulda. "But we are forbidden to interfere until someone actually gets across the line. And we must make sure that we don't violate that line on patrol, not with a single footprint, tire track or rotor blade." Crow assigns daily helicopter patrols to fly "the trace," as the border is known, always with specially trained pilots. Ground patrols operate within a few feet of the frontier, occasionally augmented by new M-60A3 tanks, says Crow, "to remind the other side that we have a wartime capability...