Heart of Gold
The starship Heart of Gold was the first spacecraft to make use of the Infinite Improbability Drive.
The Heart of Gold is 150 meters long. It is shaped like a running shoe, and it is generally rather white.
The cabin is mostly white, oblong and about the size of a smallish restaurant. It is not, however, perfectly oblong. Two long walls have been raked round in a slight parallel curve. All of the angles and corners of the cabin are contoured in excitingly chunky shapes. The truth of the matter is that it would have been a great deal simpler and more practical to build the cabin as an ordinary three-dimensional oblong room, but then the designers would have gotten miserable. The cabin looks excitingly purposeful. There are large video screens ranging over control and guidance system panels on the concave wall, and long banks of computers set into the convex wall.
The entire ship is outfitted with the latest GPP (Genuine People Personalities) utilizing technology. All the doors in the spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close with the knowledge of a job well done (though in the film, the doors sigh when they open and close). For better or for worse, Marvin the Paranoid Android, who came with the ship, has a very depressing GPP prototype.
The entire ship is outfitted with a tannoy system, which allows for announcements to be made across the entire ship at once.
Damogran design crew
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Ashley Rieger
Text
Novel
Babel fish
The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish."
The Babel fish has led to important profound consequences for the universe; apart from the philosophical implications, the Babel fish has started more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
Apart from the philosophical implications, the Babel fish has started more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
Unknown
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Ashley Rieger
Text
Novel
Kill-O-Zap Gun
The Kill-o-Zap is a weapon wielded by the police from Blagulon Kappa. It is a standard and widespread brand of raygun. It is a gun for going out and making people miserable with.
Unknown
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Ashley Rieger
Text
Novel
Towel
A Towel is the most important item a Hitchhiker can carry.
A Towel is the most important item a Hitchhiker can carry.
It's just about the most massively useful thing any interstellar Hitchhiker can carry. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so readily on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-mindbogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you— daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course you can dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
.More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost."
Unknown
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Ashley Rieger
Text
Novel