Storm from the Shadows, Chapter 2 comment

Once again David uses a ridiculous level of precision in his numbers:

the steadily accelerating units of Bogey Two overflew them at
a relative velocity of 19,838 KPS. At that closure rate, Bogey
Two had exactly 1.2 minutes to detect and react to them before
they found themselves half a million kilometers behind Bogey
Two . . . and launched.

The last two digits of that "19,838" change in the time it takes to read
it, and was that 19,838 KPS at the time the Havenites detected the pods,
a million kms ahead of them, or 19,838 KPS when they launched 1.2
minutes later or was that the average velocity over the the 1.2
minutes...

And then there's the fact that the pods weren't all dropped at the same
time, so they're all going to be travelling at different speeds
themselves, with a difference of hundreds of KPS between the first and
the last pods dropped...

Any number given to that level of precision is pretty much guaranteed to
be wrong. It may be right for about 1/5 of a second when comparing the
velocity of one pod against one ship at some time during that 1.2 minute
window, but that only covers about 0.3% of the time window given. (Or
if I was inclined to use similarly ludicrous precision, 0.27778% of the
time.)

That's almost as bad as the part in OBS when Rafe is verbally giving
"time to grav lance range" in hundredths of a second.

--
Quando omni flunkus moritati
Visit the Buffy Body Count at <http://homepage.mac.com/dsample/>

On Jul 14, 8:53 pm, Don Sample <dsam... DeleteThis @synapse.net> wrote:
> Once again David uses a ridiculous level of precision in his numbers:
>
> the steadily accelerating units of Bogey Two overflew them at
> a relative velocity of 19,838 KPS. At that closure rate, Bogey
> Two had exactly 1.2 minutes to detect and react to them before
> they found themselves half a million kilometers behind Bogey
> Two . . . and launched.
>
> The last two digits of that "19,838" change in the time it takes to read
> it, and was that 19,838 KPS at the time the Havenites detected the pods,
> a million kms ahead of them, or 19,838 KPS when they launched 1.2
> minutes later or was that the average velocity over the the 1.2
> minutes...
>
> And then there's the fact that the pods weren't all dropped at the same
> time, so they're all going to be travelling at different speeds
> themselves, with a difference of hundreds of KPS between the first and
> the last pods dropped...
>
> Any number given to that level of precision is pretty much guaranteed to
> be wrong. It may be right for about 1/5 of a second when comparing the
> velocity of one pod against one ship at some time during that 1.2 minute
> window, but that only covers about 0.3% of the time window given. (Or
> if I was inclined to use similarly ludicrous precision, 0.27778% of the
> time.)
>
> That's almost as bad as the part in OBS when Rafe is verbally giving
> "time to grav lance range" in hundredths of a second.
>
> --
> Quando omni flunkus moritati
> Visit the Buffy Body Count at <http://homepage.mac.com/dsample/>


Based on my experience bench testing line protection relays, 0.4
seconds can seem like a long time if you have to wait for it, but do
not have the luxury of doing something else in the mean time. He
could be accused of a significant digit problem. If he wrote 1.2
minutes, he should have written 20,000 kps, as then they would both be
accurate to 2 significant digits. I, personally, do not like to mix
time units, so I would have used 72 seconds in place of 1.2 minutes.

The stuff is written to be entertaining. If you expect him to plot
things out on a sheet of paper and integrate the vectors to help him
get all of the distances and times to work out, you are asking too
much. I should know, because I am sufficiently anally retentive to do
it, and it is part of the reason that I cannot get anything past the
rough draft stage (but my numbers do all come out right). As someone
has already written "The Cold Equations", my career as a science
fiction writer will probably not happen.

Rafe verbally giving a charge time to hundredths is a brain fart. If
someone had to coordinate with the charge time (or set a timer), he
should have said ' time to charge is xxx seconds, on my mark . . .
(watching the countdown) . . Mark!'