Good writing weekend!
Mar. 7th, 2006 09:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seawaspThis weekend was a good one for writing; Kathleen and company were able to avoid major kid disasters or blowups, so I ended up with both Saturday and Sunday clear. I was in a Jason Wood mood on Saturday and wrote nearly 5,000 words in the first new Morgantown story since I finished Digital Knight back in early 2003; title is "Shadow of Fear". On Sunday, I went over 15,000 words on Threshold, the sequel to Boundary. Effectively I think this is over 20,000, as there's quite a few additions I expect from Eric.
Threshold is probably going to be the hardest of the three Boundary-universe books to write; we're developing the political, social, and personal universe equally in Threshold, and it's COMPLICATED. I was able to sort of fake out all of the stuff in Boundary, even though Eric seriously modified things; I can't pull that off on some of these, though. Eric will have to write those sections and, for once, I'll have to edit/smooth out his stuff to make it fit with mine. There's also a LOT of new science-related stuff I'm having to do -- people on Baen's Bar are seeing some of that, with me asking questions about nuclear reactors and superconductors and orbital calculations -- which isn't easy, even though I can (as an SF writer) decide to occasionally handwave away practical difficulties. Once Threshold is done, I'll have a good enough grasp of the entire universe to just write the next one, at least as a rough first draft. But Threshold itself is going to "be a pure bitch", as Maddie would say.
Threshold is probably going to be the hardest of the three Boundary-universe books to write; we're developing the political, social, and personal universe equally in Threshold, and it's COMPLICATED. I was able to sort of fake out all of the stuff in Boundary, even though Eric seriously modified things; I can't pull that off on some of these, though. Eric will have to write those sections and, for once, I'll have to edit/smooth out his stuff to make it fit with mine. There's also a LOT of new science-related stuff I'm having to do -- people on Baen's Bar are seeing some of that, with me asking questions about nuclear reactors and superconductors and orbital calculations -- which isn't easy, even though I can (as an SF writer) decide to occasionally handwave away practical difficulties. Once Threshold is done, I'll have a good enough grasp of the entire universe to just write the next one, at least as a rough first draft. But Threshold itself is going to "be a pure bitch", as Maddie would say.
Re: Yeah...
Date: 2006-03-10 06:48 pm (UTC)Hmm. How much delta-V could you get out of that? I'm thinking of Fast Ship chasing Slower Ship, needing to match up with Slower Ship, and not having some other way of slowing down much. Either aerobraking or using the flyby are pretty much its main options here. No rocket fuel available to dump in an Oberth.
Say the Oh God Don't Let Us Smash into Io and Explode into a Million Superheated Fragments is falling past Jupiter at 50 km/s.[...] their final delta vee would be about 50 km/s, bringing them to a dead halt wrt to Jupiter.
Of course, having neglected to take into account the fact that they probably wanted to be in orbit around Jupiter, not hanging very briefly in its sky, the OGDLSiIaEiaMSF then plummets out of space and into the upper atmosphere, where a combination of air pressure and rentry heat destroys the ship. Their math was solid, though.
I always love your examples, James. Though you left out the part where you say something like, "... plummets out of space and into the upper atmosphere, something I have always found much more amusing to watch than to do; the one time I did this, it caused several scars..."
1: Or Robert Forward's attempt to find a force stronger than gravity to couple to passing bodies, which involved a long bungee cord and a harpoon.
To what Forward story are you referring? Or were you just being snarky about Forward because it sounded amusing (which it did)?
Re: Yeah...
Date: 2006-03-11 06:58 pm (UTC)The part I have a problem with is the impromtu connection at the surface of the moon. Otherwise, for low delta vees, the numbers aren't too bad:
Say the Queeqeg comes barreling by the TransSaturnian Station IMMOVABLE OBJECT at 10 km/s. A small ring on a cable is fired out to match veolcities with the ship's tow hook. Assuming that the ship can't take more than 10 gees, it will take about 100 seconds to stop the ship wrt to TST IO and about 500 km.
Depending on the design, you may have to deal with about half a megawatt of heat per kg of ship.