Oops, that is a long way


When reading and even when writing Science Fiction, we sometimes forget just how far apart things are.
The fringe of our solar system is beyond Neptune, whose orbit is thirty AUs, thirty times farther from the sun than Earth.  Jupiter is only five times farther.   When writing book five, Delphi Alliance, I carefully calculated the distances and times.  In Delphi Federation, I used those numbers, but I glossed over the extra distance from forty-fifty AUs to sixty.  And in book seven, I used the numbers from Delphi Alliance.  Oops.  My wife mentioned to me that the travel times seemed short.   After assuring her that I had run the numbers multiple times, I thought, hey, why not.  I ran them again, and Oh shit, I was off by weeks.  I panicked.  Necessity being the mother of invention, I spent the day and night trying to come up with a way out of my problem without having to rewrite books seven and eight.  Then when I was working on the timeline, I set up the calculations for travel to the fringe and realized I was off by 10X, I’d entered 10E3 for x10^3 instead of E3.  Excel formula.  So, the problem wasn’t so huge.  But I was still off.  My solution was to raise the accelerations, but I didn’t want to create a magical inertial dampener.  I had looked at the problem of high Gs for the human body and came up with this solution.  Given that the main issue was pumping blood to the brain, I set the acceleration direction perpendicular to the seated passengers and pilots, so it appeared that they were laying down, then I had the acceleration cut out for ½ second every 2 seconds.  That allows for an unrestrained heartrate of thirty per minute, which matches the heartrate of highly fit athletes.  So I raised my max acceleration to 15Gs, problem solved, I hope:)


reply to comment about gravity

It's one thing to say you can direct gravemetric waves through an engine to create thrust, it's another to say you can use gravity to move mass without thrust, or that you can manipulate it so completely that you can shield some mass from the effects of thrust.

The next book will be published on April 21st.  Soon, so soon.


Comments

  1. Hi, are you planning on returning to the Stone Series in the near future?

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  2. I do not understand the "Magical inertial dampener" comment, if you can manipulate gravity you can reverse the effects of G forces on the people inside the ship (aka inertial dampening) ofcourse that will probably be an extra power drain to keep up. But if you can accelerate at x amount of G force most of the trip would be coasting at x achieved speed.
    I have also read way to many books where ships accelerate for days on end at xxx G which would have had them achieve several times the speed of light which is impossible without bending/warping space. Even taking into account that the closer you get to light speed the "heavier" the ship will get and more power to the drives you will need.

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  3. Maybe a character can discover an alcubierre drive that theoretically, moves space around it rather than moving itself.

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  4. this little shutdown of the world would be a good time to get access to the other books in the series.... just saying

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    Replies
    1. I'd rather have a good, high quality finished book than a crappy, unfinished book.

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  5. I would also like a quality product but it would be nice to have at least an idea of when the next book will drop

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  6. Book six will be published on April 21st

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  7. It would be better to go ahead and create the inertial damper. Your current solution will kill a person in about 3 seconds as it hammers them to jelly or at least scrambles their organs and gives them brain hemorrhages from bouncing their brains around inside their skulls. :) Just saying!

    Love the story for the most part and I'm looking forward to book 8

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