From: jack.bohn64@gmail.com   
      
   nu...@bid.nes wrote:   
   >    
   >   A replicator- a transfer booth that didn't "destroy the original" when it   
   made a distant copy.   
   >    
   >   "Leftovers" by Matthew Joseph Harrington, in Man-Kzin Wars XIV. Obviously   
   written after the first mention in "World of Ptavvs".   
      
   I'm trying to think if the transfer booths in Known Space were of the "destroy   
   it here, rebuild it there" variety.  The ones in his teleport series weren't,   
   they sent the mass through, and had to deal with various conservation laws,   
   e.g., it took more    
   energy to teleport uphill than down.  (The booths send and draw momentum to a   
   large weight in a lake; it's always bobbing up and down and back and forth.)    
   The ones in _A World Out of Time_, however, do take apart and reassemble.   
      
   In _The Ringworld Engineers_, the stepping disk to the Hindmost's quarters has   
   a mass limit, and one sent on a probe to one of the oceans has a filter that   
   it will only transmit deuterium (heavy water? no, I think only the hydrogen   
   atom... if they also    
   broke down the water molecules by electrolysis, it might be either way, but   
   this implies it tears the molecule apart by itself... but wait, the stepping   
   disk in their fuel tank would have to have enough matter to rebuild the   
   deuterium to fill the tank,    
   and couldn't there be a way to build many atoms of deuterium from one   
   example?)  I think there was some mention about only being able to go so far   
   spinward and antispinward before the fact that you are moving in different   
   directions becomes a problem.   
      
   --    
   -Jack   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)