Yet another request for help finding an old book / story

[Mario Butter]

It was a short story (novella?) and was published in an anthology I believe sometime in the 60s or possibly the late 50s. When I read the book in the mid-70s it was already quite old, falling apart. Story was about a group of people who were trying to develop a working FTL drive. Initial testing was done in Earth orbit, but all the prototypes would blow up. It was thought gravity was causing the failures, so they first moved testing out to Jupiter? Uranus? But at the end of the story they had built a station past Pluto. The first test of that drive also failed, but when the failure threatened the station, they activated a spare drive on the station turning the station itself into an FTL ship. Anyway, any help would be appreciated....

 

[Danny McG]

It was a short story (novella?) and was published in an anthology I believe sometime in the 60s or possibly the late 50s. When I read the book in the mid-70s it was already quite old, falling apart. Story was about a group of people who were trying to develop a working FTL drive. Initial testing was done in Earth orbit, but all the prototypes would blow up. It was thought gravity was causing the failures, so they first moved testing out to Jupiter? Uranus? But at the end of the story they had built a station past Pluto. The first test of that drive also failed, but when the failure threatened the station, they activated a spare drive on the station turning the station itself into an FTL ship. Anyway, any help would be appreciated....

This is making me think of the precursor to the James Blish Cities in Flight series.
Memory says it was along similar lines but I can't think of the title

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Those books were all based on the so-called spindizzy drive - a theoretical drive that only became efficient when the mass being transported was larger - ie cities not spaceships. I don't remember an origin story for the drive, but I know other writers have used the spindizzy drive as the basis for their works. It's possibly one of theirs.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Danny McG]

Looking back at this again.
I think it's They shall have stars by James Blish.
That has the prototype drive being tested way out past Jupiter

 

[Bagpuss]

I think it's They shall have stars by James Blish.
That has the prototype drive being tested way out past Jupiter

In They Shall Have Stars there's a platform that's built on Jupiter called "the Bridge", and it's manned by remote control. The platform is testing a gravitational theory, using Jupiter's gravitation and rotation as the test-bed. Basically, the story is about the Blackett Equation being tested by a mega-project on Jupiter against a background of McCarthy-type political persecution on Earth (Senator Wagoner is a dissident).

The prototype drive is never tested "way out past Jupiter" in that story and there are no "Pluto stations" in the story, no near-Earth explosions and no activating a spare drive to turn the station into a spaceship. So none of those points in the OP's post corresponds to Blish's story. Planetary gravitation definitely does not cause any kind of failure or problem for Blish's fictional spindizzy drive. Indeed, in the story, an early version of the spindizzy drive powers a ship from Earth to Jupiter in a couple of hours plus manoeuvring time (that last point it slightly from memory, but I think it's right).

I don't know what story the OP is looking for, but it doesn't sound like any of Blish's Cities in Flight. Sorry Danny.

 

[Danny McG]

I don't know what story the OP is looking for, but it doesn't sound like any of Blish's Cities in Flight. Sorry Danny.

Ah well, it's got to be at least 35 years since I read it - memory failure!