Landing without landing gear
One of the coolest things about writing (and I'm sure this does not apply just to science fiction) is that half the time, I'm not telling the characters what to do, they tell me.
A lot of times I just throw stuff in there to flesh things out and a week, a month or sometimes several years will pass then the light bulb goes off. So that's why they did it!
The whole plot of The Ark Lords came out of random things I threw into Rome's Revolution to flesh the story out. The whole backstory behind MASAL being the ultimate bad guy was an accident. I had just tried to build a future history and these things just sprang out of that.
Anyway, the point to this was I never thought about how the Arks would actually land on a planet until yesterday's blog entry. I wrote in that article that they glided in and did a belly landing but that the bottom of Ark was made of a much stronger material. It sounded like I had thought this through.
I didn't!
I originally had the entire Ark made out of pig iron, top to bottom. I did that because I needed a magnetic material for a little short story, since removed, called Rei's Space Walk. When I first wrote VIRUS 5, the precursor to Rome's Revolution, I actually had the Ark made out of aluminum.
Changing it to pig iron then allowed me to say it was on purpose because that way colonists could easily melt it down, cannibalizing the ship for building materials.
Well, as I was writing The Ark Lords, when Rome came upon the rusting out hulk of the original Ark, if it ALL rusted out, there would be nothing left so I had to quick switch the lower third to martensite, a kind of stainless steel, which was much tougher but still magnetic.
So now I'm writing yesterday's blog entry and I realized, duh, that was yet another reason why the underbelly had to made out of a rugged material was because of the landing. No wheels, no struts, just belly-flopping.
Bottom line: these characters truly have a life of their own and they always amaze me by thinking things through, even if I did not. I get to be a reader too sometimes!
A lot of times I just throw stuff in there to flesh things out and a week, a month or sometimes several years will pass then the light bulb goes off. So that's why they did it!
The whole plot of The Ark Lords came out of random things I threw into Rome's Revolution to flesh the story out. The whole backstory behind MASAL being the ultimate bad guy was an accident. I had just tried to build a future history and these things just sprang out of that.
Anyway, the point to this was I never thought about how the Arks would actually land on a planet until yesterday's blog entry. I wrote in that article that they glided in and did a belly landing but that the bottom of Ark was made of a much stronger material. It sounded like I had thought this through.
I didn't!
I originally had the entire Ark made out of pig iron, top to bottom. I did that because I needed a magnetic material for a little short story, since removed, called Rei's Space Walk. When I first wrote VIRUS 5, the precursor to Rome's Revolution, I actually had the Ark made out of aluminum.
Changing it to pig iron then allowed me to say it was on purpose because that way colonists could easily melt it down, cannibalizing the ship for building materials.
Well, as I was writing The Ark Lords, when Rome came upon the rusting out hulk of the original Ark, if it ALL rusted out, there would be nothing left so I had to quick switch the lower third to martensite, a kind of stainless steel, which was much tougher but still magnetic.
So now I'm writing yesterday's blog entry and I realized, duh, that was yet another reason why the underbelly had to made out of a rugged material was because of the landing. No wheels, no struts, just belly-flopping.
Bottom line: these characters truly have a life of their own and they always amaze me by thinking things through, even if I did not. I get to be a reader too sometimes!
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Tales of the Vuduri
Tidbits and insights into the 35th century world of the Vuduri.
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