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Matthew Reilly Wiki

Magneto Drives are disc-shaped devices which allow object to hover.

History[]

Hover Car Racer[]

When Wilfred Wilmington was building his prototype hover car, he developed magneto drives in order to achieve hovering. By fusing ferromagnetic metals and high-end superconductors, Wilmington was able to create a device that, when active, could repel itself off the ground due to its opposite magnetic charge to the Earth's core. Because the magneto drives that kept the vehicle afloat would never cease unless the Earth's core stopped spinning, the potential for this vehicle was near-limitless.

Rather than patent or sell the schematics behind the magneto drives (even in spite of a U.S. delegation arranged by the President asking him not to do so) Wilmington gave his technology to the whole world. As magneto drives didn't require petrol/gasoline to run, countries who possessed oil such as Saudi Arabia found themselves out of business with their usual contractors like the United States. Freed from one of the largest carbon emitters globally, the entire world reveled in magneto drive technology, as hover cars began selling fast. Car manufacturers found unexpected competition as aircraft-designing companies such as Lockheed-Martin and Boeing used their own knowledge of aerial vehicles to start constructing some of their own civilian class vehicles.

As well as cars being fitted with magneto drives, other vehicles such as motorcycles, tractors, planes, helicopters, boats and even scooters were modified to adapt to the technology. Magneto drives also found use in more mundane objects; from loading carts, grandstands, and even furniture (though the latter appears to be a commodity for the more wealthy).

Within years of the first hover car's creation, the sport of hover car racing became a huge hit around the world, with pit stops for participating vehicles requiring regular changes of magneto drives due to the extreme conditions occurring in a race draining them of power quickly. Some races also featured demagnetising strips, light-like emitters that were lined along entire sections of track which would drain power from magneto drives if a driver was careless enough to drive over them.

Attributes[]

Every hover car is equipped with a set of six magneto drives in order to achieve flight. While a standard hover car could potentially use the same set of drives for at least a few days before becoming worn out, a race car can exhaust a single set within hours due to the extreme conditions occurring in a race. Coolant is required to prevent the drives from overheating.

It is never stated how high a hover car can go (or any other vehicle with hover technology), though certainly hover-planes and hover-copters would be able to reach high altitudes. Since a magneto drive works in conjunction with the earth's core's rotation, it is theoretically possible that they could even reach the stratosphere.

Trivia[]

  • Hover technology had been previously alluded to in one of Reilly's previous (unrelated) novels, Area 7. In that story, as Book II listed off technological conspiracies, he mentioned one claiming that the Air Force had developed a magnetic propulsion system to allow vehicles to float in mid-air.
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