craft n.

A vast fleet was assembled at a short distance from London, ready to dash into space…. There were in all nearly 300 huge first-class battleships, 800 of the second class, 1,600 third, and…a countless host of small craft that performed the same functions as the torpedo-boats of the old days of war on the sea.

The lights flared up over the vessel, hull shutters slid suddenly into place, and the craft was sealed up for her long flight through the heavens. [Ibid. 151/2] The vast concourse sheltered a busy crowd, for not only was the Trenton sailing for Mars that forenoon, but a Jupiter liner was due at any moment…. Thirty minutes later he was aboard the Trenton…when a sudden lightness in his legs and a lack of weight in the suitcase he held in his hand told him that the boat was sealed, and that the gravitation screens were in place, while the sudden succeeding rise in temperature gave evidence that the craft was under way and scudding through the thin layer of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Each craft bore the symbol of its home-world. The Mharzions bore the Looped Dart in gold, even as we of Venhez painted upon the nose of ours the Looped Cross—but the symbols of the worlds are too well known to require description.

Through gate after massive gate they went, until finally they were out in open space, shooting toward distant Tellus at the maximum acceleration of which their small craft was capable.

Installation of pyros in interplanetary craft was the most forbidden thing of the starways.

Beneath the spaceboat the desert rolled…. Then, all of a sudden, before the eastward hurtling craft, it was daylight, as the tiny sun burst over the horizon.

As the falling craft came closer to the planet, his wonderment became knowledge.

He and Li had honed themselves for one purpose: to land the spidery craft on the surface of Jupiter’s second-largest moon.

When laser propulsion for pre-Contact interstellar craft was developed, they were able to drop robot ships that could hover and, by the thermodynamics of using a high temperature laser, they could dump excess heat and cool the probe’s interior.

Cavorite had carried half the colony from orbit down to the Crab. Leaving Spiral Town the same craft carried forty in roomy comfort along with a hydroponics garden, stores of seeds and fertilized eggs, considerable medical facilities and lab equipment.

Of course, there was really no pressing need to pursue a purely intrasystemic craft. Where could it go, after all?

The remaining four astronauts would remain on orbit to begin assembling the core modules of Luna Two, an orbital station, which would support the reusable Wyverns and Dragonets…. Castor and Pollux would return three months later to bring fresh crew home, a process that would be repeated every six months, with up to six Wyvern and Dragonet craft. [Ibid. 145/1] ‘Pollux is in lunar orbit.’ ‘Welcome to the neighborhood,’ Johnson broadcast to their sister craft.