Word: rotors
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...been circulating at Nevada State Prison in Carson City for nearly five years, but no one took it seriously. Finally, the new warden dispatched a special security squad to check it out. Sure enough, there in the prison shop were a three-wheel gocart, a motorcycle engine, a rear rotor blade-in short, more or less everything needed to build a helicopter except the main overhead blade. The criminal masterminds were a welder, a plumber and an electrician serving long sentences in maximum security. Warden George Sumner contends that the plot would never have flown anyway: "If they had tried...
...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...