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There are two smaller interior balloons, or COMPENSATORS, into which can be pumped air by means of a mechanically-driven fan or ventilator, to make up for contraction of the gas when descending or meeting a cooler atmosphere. The compensators occupy about one-quarter of the whole volume.
There were no acceleration dampers, no temporal compensators, no autopilot, no four-space computer, and the primaries operated on nuclear rather than binding energy. The control chairs weren't equipped with forcefields, but instead had incredibly primitive safety webs that held one in place by sheer tensile strength. Taking a ship like that into space was an open invitation to suicide.
To secure the necessary inclination of the balloon while in flight, air can be transferred from one of the compensators, say at the fore end of the ship, into the ballonet in the aft part.
The old ships didn't have temporal compensators, nor could they travel through upper bands of Cth where subjective and objective time were more nearly equal. They were trapped in a semi-stasis of time as the ship fled on through the distorted monochromatic regions that bypassed normal space. The Egg slipped smoothly out of the hyper jump, back into the normal universe.
An upward or downward inclination is, as we have seen, effected by the ballonets, but in cases of emergency these compensators cannot be deflated or inflated sufficiently rapidly, and a large movable weight is employed for altering the balance of the vessel. In this country the authorities have hitherto favoured the non-rigid air-ship for military and naval use.
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