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:)
Published on February 03, 2020 07:18
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Writing Delphi in Space
My thoughts and comments about writing this series.
This will allow my friends and readers to have a laugh at my trials and tribulations at writing the books, as well as my attempts at blogging
This will allow my friends and readers to have a laugh at my trials and tribulations at writing the books, as well as my attempts at blogging
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