"Trajectory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the game—while it lasted; she swung her slim brassy with all the old-time fire and satisfaction in the clean, sharp whack, as the ball flew through the sunshine, rising beautifully in a long, low trajectory against the velvet fair-green. ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... a man to have my knowledge of these guns unless he had obtained it first hand from the works in Glasgow. Of course that brought the testimony into technicalities. I managed to involve the Admiral in a heated altercation on the trajectory and penetrating power of the so-much disputed fourteen-inch gun. One word led to another and notwithstanding that he ranked at that time as a rear admiral of the British Navy, the Admiral showed that he did not ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... bounds, while the animal's power to escape remains unchanged; all the conditions for their survival constantly become more difficult. Man has, in its perfection, the rapid-firing rifle, which, with the use of smokeless powder, gives him an enormous increase of effectiveness in its flat trajectory. This is quite as great an element of its destructiveness as its more deadly power and capacity for quick shooting, since it eliminates the necessity for accurately gauging distance, one of the hardest things for the amateur hunter to learn. If man so desires, ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... man who had played blindfold baseball, it was plenty. He knew that someone not ten paces behind him had thrown something heavy, and he knew its exact trajectory to within a thousandth of a millimeter, and he knew exactly how to move his head ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of course. In that case, I set my flitter into a projectile trajectory like this, whose objective is the center of the vortex, there. See? Ten seconds or so away, at about this point, I take my instantaneous readings, solve the equations at that particular warped surface for some certain ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... labelled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks of a man in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed thus close by me, in action, so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and as it drew near to its target;—carrying in its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the impression of her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but to the friend who called to her, everything that, while she uttered the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... makes its journey from the tree to the ground with a similar curve. On neither the one side nor the other is there any action by the moving body to regulate the fall; nevertheless, the descent takes place according to a scientific trajectory, the 'parabola,' of which the section of a cone by a plane furnished the prototype to the geometer's speculations. A figure, which was at first but a tentative glimpse, becomes a reality by the fall of a ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... for instance the aeroplane is speeding along at 60 miles an hour, the bomb when released will have a speed in the horizontal plane of 60 miles an hour, because momentarily it is travelling at the speed of the aeroplane. Consequently the shell will describe a curved trajectory, somewhat similar to ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... birds moreover differs in the form of the trajectory in space; in the inclination of the plane in which the wings beat; in the role of each of the two alternating (and in an inverse sense) movements that the wings execute; as also in the facility with which the air is decomposed during these different movements. ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... engulfed Western Europe after the fall of Rome, and the generation of those vital forces that for two centuries were to infuse society with a vigour almost unexampled in its potency and in the things it brought to pass. The parabolic curve that describes the trajectory of Mediaevalism was then emergent out of "chaos and old night" and Abelard and his opponent, St. Bernard, rode high on the mounting force in its swift and almost ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... ricochetted across the ripples, and Courtenay saw that the savages did not understand the sighting appliances. They were aiming point-blank at the vessel, in so far as they could be said to aim at anything, and the low trajectory caused the first straight shot to rebound from the surface of the water and strike a plate amidships. The loud clang of the metal was hailed by the Alaculofs with shouts of delight. Probably they had no fixed idea of the distance the tiny projectiles would carry. Joey ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... of course there is the whizz-bang coming from close, along his flat trajectory: he has little to say, but comes like a sudden wind, and all that he has to do is done and over ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... projectile we get a flat trajectory, and accuracy at short ranges is increased. With a heavy projectile the resistance of the air has less effect and the projectile is advantageously employed at ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... of liquid, as much as anything I can think of like those lines called "trajectory curves" which ballisticians do so love to draw in books on rifle-shooting; only, these curved lines began at the hollow point of Mr. Cobra's poison-fangs, and were meant to end in Mr. Ratel's eyes. They didn't. Old man ratel, he was standing on his hind-legs, with his sturdy ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... of the lunar shadow upon the surface of the Earth is traced beforehand on maps that serve to show the favored countries for which our satellite will dispense her ephemeral night. The above figure shows the trajectory of the total phase of the 1900 eclipse in Portugal, ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... motion; one is the size of the skipper, relative to its weight, and the other is its speed. If the speed is slow it will quickly wend its way to the earth in a gradual curve. This curved line is called its trajectory. If it is not very large diametrically, in proportion to its weight, it will also make a gradual curve in descending, without "skimming" up and ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... differentials and my minimum integrals, when a very simple idea overturned my slippery scaffolding. The calculation of variations has nothing to do with the matter. The animal is not the moving body of the mathematicians, the particle of matter guided in its trajectory solely by the motive forces and the resistance of the medium traversed; it bears within itself conditions which control the others. The adult insect does not even enjoy the larva's privileges; it cannot bend freely in all directions. Under its harness it is almost a stiff cylinder. To simplify ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... bear climbing up through the thicket, and he had overshot and missed. R.C. had espied a big black bear walking a slide some four hundred yards down the canyon slope, and forgetting that he had a heavy close-range shell in his rifle instead of one of high trajectory, he had aimed accordingly, to undershoot half a foot and thus lose his opportunity. Nielsen had been lost most of the day. It seemed everywhere he heard yells and bays down in the canyon, and once he had heard a ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... red end of a ruined Sullivan make a fine trajectory as it flew to leeward between ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... never been completely explained. But certainly jatos flared briefly at some point, and the object reached ninety thousand feet where a jet motor would certainly be useless. And then, almost certainly, rockets flared once more and well south of the Dakotas it started down in a trajectory like that of an artillery shell, but with considerably higher speed ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... in armour; the bayonet affixed to the musket superseded the pike; the rifle outranged the musket; the breech-loader and the magazine attachment progressively increased the rate of fire; smokeless powder rendered a firing line almost invisible; the flat trajectory of the small-arms bullet increased the danger-zone in an advance; the increased power, mobility, and accuracy of the field gun[4] rendered certain {22} formations obsolete in the attack; the general ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... The trajectory is not a plane curve, but one which, at a certain point, deviates and goes down a little way to the lower surface of the cornice, returning to the top some eight inches farther. I marked these two points of deviation ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... of the Civil War the United States purchased a great quantity of these arms, and before their worthlessness became apparent a considerable number was issued. The calibre of most of them was .75; the rifling was very deep; the recoil and trajectory were abnormal, and accuracy of shooting was conspicuous by absence."—Sawyer, "Our ...
— A Catalogue of Early Pennsylvania and Other Firearms and Edged Weapons at "Restless Oaks" • Henry W. Shoemaker
... a heavy rain that was accompanied by thunder—or indications of disturbance aloft—but by no visible lightning. The sea is close to Hindon, but if you try to think of these fishes having described a trajectory in a whirlwind from the ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... adopted the opinion that the human race is in a state of necessary progression. The reciprocal action between circumstances and human nature, from which social phenomena result, must produce either a cycle or a trajectory. While Vico maintained the conception of periodic cycles, his successors have universally adopted the idea of a trajectory or progress, and are endeavouring to discover its law. [Footnote: Philosophical writers in England in the middle of the century paid more attention to Cousin than to Comte ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... to swing round and head back into the narrow channel free from sand bars, which he could discern by the rougher water, when bullets began to come from the dory. They were aimed at the wheel and whether sent low or not, the trajectory, even from a high-powered gun, would pull them down to the danger level. One struck the mast directly in front of him. One hit the deck and glanced singing. The music from another flattened bullet was ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple
... though he got through himself he lost more men, amongst whom was a splendid fellow, his second in command, named Berwkoff, who was greatly loved by us all. A Magyar soldier seeing Kalmakoff with his Ataman banner borne by his side, took a point-blank shot at his head, but he forgot the high trajectory of the old Russian rifle, and the bullet merely grazed the top of the Cossack leader's head and sent his papaha into the mud. His banner-bearer could not see his leader's cap so left, and jumped off his horse to rescue it. Raising the cap from the ground, he found himself challenged with ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... of sand, or some equally inelastic substance, on which the gun can repose firmly and steadily; and a little practice with such aid will enable the shooter to realize the relation of the line of sight to the trajectory under varying circumstances of wind and light, and thus to proceed knowingly in his subsequent training. But we are unwilling to give this advice without accompanying it with the caution not to continue the practice till it becomes habitual. It ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... close alongside him and invading his observing stations. The captain also got on his nerves, for he was somewhat excitable, and his shells were numerous that burst prematurely, whilst a house only 100 yards off, which should have been well under the trajectory of his shells, was several times hit by them. However, he doubtless caused much ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... must attain the night Before endless processions Of lamps Push us back. A clock with quivering hands Leaps to the trajectory-angle ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... The food chain of weapons systems ranges from the most valuable systems such as ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and stealth bombers, to less valuable, but useful, stealth fighter and long-range surface-to-surface high trajectory fires. ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... ruin in silence, and when he spoke it was only to ask a question concerning the trajectory of the guns which had once furnished it. The Commandant walked by his side, a man torn by many emotions. For the first time in fifteen years he, an enthusiast in gunnery, had an opportunity to talk with one ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... keen for marks and goals—a big, clean-limbed, thoroughbred horse that will break his heart to get under the wire first; a high-power rifle, slim of muzzle, thick of breech, with its wicked little throaty cry, doing its business over a flat trajectory a thousand yards away: I love her as a man should love those. Little did I dream that she ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... takes it up: Candle, camoufle. Thereupon, the ordinary tongue gives camouflet[42] as the synonym for soufflet. Thus, by a sort of infiltration from below upwards, with the aid of metaphor, that incalculable, trajectory slang mounts from the cavern to the Academy; and Poulailler saying: "I light my camoufle," causes Voltaire to write: "Langleviel La ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... cannon-ball, and the precise character of the line which it traverses for a yard of its course, is necessitated by what he knows of the laws of nature to conclude that it came from a certain spot, whence it was impelled by a certain force, and that it has followed a certain trajectory. In like manner, the student of physical geology, who fully believes in the uniformity of the general condition of the earth through geologic time, may feel compelled by what he knows of causation, and by the general analogy ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... better. With it I could easily handle the members of my own watch, and I did not doubt that with the assistance of Percy Darrow even a surprise would hardly overwhelm us. I did not count on Dr. Schermerhorn. He was quite capable of losing himself in a problem of trajectory after the ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... smoothbores were effective with case shot up to about 600 or 700 yards, and maximum range of field pieces went from something less than the 1,566-yard solid-shot trajectory of the Napoleon to about 2,600 yards (a mile and a half) for a 6-inch howitzer. At Chancellorsville, one of Stonewall Jackson's guns fired a shot which bounded down the center of a roadway and came to rest a mile away. The performance verified the drill-book ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... fired at him point blank." This usually is intended to mean directly, or at short range. But point blank means the point at which the line of sight is crossed downward by the trajectory—the ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... exception of the Guardia Civile, is a most excellent weapon for those who like clean, gentlemanly warfare, in which the object is to wound or to kill outright, and not to "shock" the enemy nor to tear his flesh in pieces. The weapon has hardly any trajectory up to one thousand yards, but, in spite of its precision, it is as useless in the hands of a guerrilla or the average Spanish soldier as a bow and arrow would be. The fact that when the Spaniards say "within gun fire of the forts" they mean within one hundred and fifty yards of them shows how they ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... up, but because of the angle, their trajectory was too great, and like rays of death the lances flashed harmlessly overhead to plunge over the summit and wreak death among those ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... mentioned the wind as a factor in obtaining the swerve. It was a head-wind that Stott required. I have seen him, for sport, toss a cricket ball into the teeth of a gale, and make it describe the trajectory of a badly sliced golf-ball. This is why the big pavilion at Ailesworth is set at such a curious angle to the ground. It was built in the winter following Hampdenshire's second season of first-class ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... can't," said Ives flatly. "Survey traverses those boxes through second-order space. They materialize near a planet and drop in. No computation on earth or off it could trace their normal-space trajectory, let alone what happens in the second-order condition. The elements the box is made of are carefully averaged isotopic forms that could have come from any of nine galaxies we know about and probably more. And all it does ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... The trajectory is practically flat up to 675 yards. In destructive effect there is not much difference between the various high velocity bullets used in different armies; they will kill up to a distance of two miles. The hard covering is employed to enable the bullet to take the grooves ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... shadow. Whatever had been its speed (and it could not have been insignificant), its period of occultation continued. That was evident, but perhaps that would not have been the case in a supposedly rigidly parabolical trajectory— a new problem which tormented Barbicane's brain, imprisoned as he was in a circle of unknowns which he could ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... held the ball for a few moments, rolling it over in his hands. An instant later, he unbent. Then he let drive. The ball went slowly toward the plate, with flat trajectory. ...
— The High School Pitcher - Dick & Co. on the Gridley Diamond • H. Irving Hancock
... carried an ounce spherical ball) was 1 1/2 dram, and the sights were adjusted for a maximum range of 200 yards. Although at this distance considerable accuracy could be attained at the target upon a quiet day, it was difficult to shoot with any precision at an unmeasured range owing to the high trajectory of the bullet. Thus for sporting purposes it was absolutely essential that the hunter should be a first-rate judge of distance in order to adjust the sights as required by the occasion. It was accordingly rare to meet with a good rifle-shot fifty years ago. Rifle-shooting ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... also learn the elevation or trajectory at which his arrows fly at various distances. Shooting in the woods over hanging limbs may interfere with a good shot. In this case the archer can kneel and thus lower his flight to ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... soldiers who have used it have the utmost confidence in their weapon. Up to 500 yards there is no difficulty about judging the range, as it shoots quite straight, or, technically speaking, has a flat trajectory. This is of the greatest value. Of the bullet it may be said, that its stopping power is all that could be desired. The Dum-Dum bullet, though not explosive, is expansive. The original Lee-Metford bullet was a pellet of lead covered by a nickel case with an opening at ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... therefore peculiarly dangerous. Unthinking persons talk of the fearful rapidity of a lion or tiger's spring. It is not rapid at all: it is a slow movement, as must be evident from The following consideration. No wild animal can leap ten yards, and they all make a high trajectory in their leaps. Now, think of the speed of a ball thrown, or rather pitched, with just sufficient force to be caught by a person ten yards off: it is a mere nothing. The catcher can play with it as he likes; he has even time to turn after it, if thrown wide. But the speed of a springing ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... flying on a lower trajectory, it seemed, shrieked over our heads and burst beside the road so close to the first motor that it threw mud into it. Apparently we were both observed and sought after, and as the range of these main highways, up and down ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... in shape to a double- headed rail. It is claimed for this powder, that it does not corrode the barrel in the way cordite does, that with equal pressure it gives greatly increased velocity, and therefore flatter trajectory. That the effect of temperature on the pressure and velocity with axite is only half that with cordite. That the maximum flame temperature of axite is considerably less than that of cordite, and the erosive effect is therefore considerably less. That the deposit left in the barrel ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... accompanied only by an orderly; then, lying down and resting the express on a rock, I covered him. The rifle, like all expresses, was only sighted to three hundred and fifty yards, so to allow for the drop in trajectory I took him half-way down the neck, which ought, I calculated, to find him in the chest. He stood quite still and gave me every opportunity, but whether it was the excitement or the wind, or the fact of the man being a long shot, I don't know, but this was what happened. ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... TRAJECTORY. An astronomical term for the orbital curve described by a planet or comet, now seldom used in that science, but generally employed for the path described by ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... talking hard, until his dark beaming phiz quite interposes between your food and its destination. So that to avoid combing his baldish pate with your fork you must pass the items of your meal in quite a sideways trajectory. And if, as happened to our companion (the present Cornell don), you have no special taste for a plump landlord breathing passionately and genially upon your very cheek while you strive to satisfy a legitimate ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... the object which moves be said to 'be' at any point in its path? It passes over, or, in other words, it could 'be' there. It would 'be' there if it stopped there, but, if it stopped there, it is no longer the same movement with which we are dealing. It is always at one bound that a trajectory is traversed when, on its course, there is no stoppage. The bound may last a few seconds, or it may last for weeks, months, or years, but it is unique and cannot be decomposed. Only, when once the passage has been made, as the path is in space, and space is infinitely ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... can do better than that," declared Tom, after looking at the various recording gauges, and noting the elevation of the gun. "I think I can get a little flatter trajectory, and that will give a greater distance. I'm going ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... all games, especially la balle au camp. I used to envy the graceful, easy way he threw the ball—so quick and straight it seemed to have no curve at all in its trajectory: and how it bounded off the boy it nearly always hit ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... embryo within an equation, the mysterious nut which must be artistically cracked to extract the rich kernel, the theorem! Take this or that term, place the sign before it and forthwith you have the ellipse, the trajectory of the planets, with its two friendly foci, transmitting pairs of vectors whose sum is constant; substitute the—sign and you have the hyperbola with the antagonistic foci, the desperate curve that dives into space with infinite tentacles, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... club flashed down in a quick circle. Crack! It struck the gutta-percha squarely. The little white sphere zipped away like a rocket, rose in a far trajectory, up, up, toward the water-hazard at the foot of the grassy slope, then down ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... and swellings which afforded good cover to the sharpshooters, and the solid line behind the zeriba was an easy target. The artillery now began to clear out these depressions by their shells, and in this work they displayed a searching power very remarkable when their flat trajectory is remembered. As the shells burst accurately above the Dervish skirmishers and spearmen who were taking refuge in the folds of the plain, they rose by hundreds and by fifties to fly. Instantly the hungry and attentive Maxims and the watchful infantry opened on them, sweeping them ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... and precision of range. All modern guns are capable of being made to shoot straight; but their precision of range depends partly on the successful designing of the gun and ammunition, so as to give uniform velocities, and partly on the flatness of the trajectory. The greater the velocity, the lower the trajectory, and the greater the chance of striking the target. Supposing a heavy gun to be mounted as in the fortresses round our coasts, and aimed with due care, the distance of the object ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various |
