Spindizzy scale?

[Khaat]

I'm having some trouble tracking down a copy of James Blish's Cities in Flight book locally. I'm trying to find a particular answer to a rather particular question, so I figured I would take it to the forum:

Is there mention of how big a spindizzy has to be to move the planet? If so, how big?

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Not that I could find. All Blish's stories had to say was what you probably already know, that spindizzies are more efficent with increasing mass.

[Khaat]

Still no success on my search, though I did find a webpage with a quote suggesting it isn't a big device:

This ship came to Ganymede directly from Earth. It did it in a little under two hours, counting maneuvering time. That means that most of the way we made about 55,000 miles per second, with the spindizzy drawing less than five Watts of power out of three ordinary No. 6 dry cells.

Sounds like I could carry one around in a messenger bag, or a doughnut box. I'm drawing this conclusion from the idea that even basic resistance would keep anything bigger from functioning so efficiently, but I could be wrong: electronics and wiring are not in my repertoire.

[Purple]

That would depend on the properties of the materials used. And frankly this is a discussion about portable devices moving planets. I'd say physics is far enough out of it that we can assume they might have superconductors.

[Elheru Aran]

Spindizzies are a pretty good example of Golden Age SF gadgets... they just work, nobody bothers to explain why or how, and as long as the writing is pretty decent nobody really worries about the details. Blish wasn't a bad author. His Trek work was pretty derivative, but that was the nature of the beast-- mostly they were novelizations of the various TOS episodes (and some TAS stuff too, IIRC). His original work was better.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Spindizzies are a pretty good example of Golden Age SF gadgets... they just work, nobody bothers to explain why or how, and as long as the writing is pretty decent nobody really worries about the details. Blish wasn't a bad author. His Trek work was pretty derivative, but that was the nature of the beast-- mostly they were novelizations of the various TOS episodes (and some TAS stuff too, IIRC). His original work was better.

Most of the TAS novelizations were done by Alan Dean Foster, of Humanx Commonwealth fame. Blish also wrote the Star Trek novel Spock Must Die!.