On Paths Unknown discussion
This topic is about
The Martian
BOOKS & FILMS: THE MARTIAN
>
The Martian thread 3 with spoilers from start of Chapter 7 to end of Chapter 16
date
newest »
newest »
The Solar panels: "If we broke the cells, or rendered them useless, the Hab wouldn't be able to make power, and the mission would end." Solar panels are made up of dozens-to-hundreds of "cells". Mark's a mechanical engineer, and there's probably at least a couple of other engineers on the team. Solar panels are really very simple structures. I can't imagine that they couldn't actually FIX a PV panel that was broken in half. I'm fairly sure I could, just from experience with the sixteen panels I own. "I'll admit I don't know why it's a 14-degree angle…" Really? An astronaut doesn't know how high in the sky the sun gets at his location on Mars? Getting Pathfinder to talk to the rover to give Mark text communication capability was brilliant. The rover listens to radio signals indiscriminately, but watches for specific sequences from the Hab and discards anything else, so you send the rover what it thinks is garbage but just make it log it first. Then execute the log file on the rover! Brilliant. It might have been just a little harder than it should have been: odds are good that such software would already have a debug mode, and rather than inserting 20 instructions, he should have been able to use 1, but then he'd probably have needed to massage the log file to get it into the right format, and Watney isn't Johanssen so maybe this is as simple as it could be.
Then afterwards, the little sysadmin joke. Actually, updating Linux servers isn't generally very complicated, but "He's not funny to computer guys, either." The funniest part was that Jack was as surprised as anybody when the rover actually established communication!
"Look! A pair of boobs! -> (Y)"
I didn't think that was funny: it was just cleaner than what he typed in the movie ("You can all just go f___ yourselves!"). And this time, I don't think he was trying to be funny. He was being deliberately offensive, because he was angry that they hadn't told his crew he was still alive.
Chapter 12, masquerading as a dream, annoyed me. It's too realistic for any dream I've ever had. I sort of understand not putting that sequence at the beginning of the book, as it was at the beginning of the movie, but I don't think it was well done, here.
When Mitch finally called Hermes to let them know that Mark was alive, I was sooo pleased to read that he didn't feel a need to tell them he was their flight director (as he did in the movie). He'd have been the management person they dealt with most. Sure, they'd been away from Earth for a year, but I think they'd still remember who he was.
We've discussed elsewhere whether they'd waste communications time on jokes: what was really a waste was telling Mark that the Cubs (baseball) finished at the bottom of their division. It didn't happen this year, but most years it's normal...
I actually found the movie's use of duct tape to temporarily fix the leak in his helmet way more believable than butchering his suit (and making an even bigger hole!) In the first place, one atmosphere is not a lot of pressure. Consider that you generally put more than two atmospheres pressure in a car tire. Four to five in a bicycle tire. Then, I think he can probably adjust the pressure in his suit to be the minimum required to sustain life (he seems to have pretty good control over that sort of thing, and he was able to dial it up to 1.2 atmospheres), making the pressure considerably less. I think he should be able to get by at 25% pressure (I've been at 1/3, and really not noticed it).
The loss of Iris due to liquefaction of the protein cubes was extremely clever. Don't know if it could really happen, but that's what happens to mud bricks in an earthquake, so I found it very believable.
I'm actually just starting chapter 16, so I'm not quite at the end of this section.
You're missing the nipples, Derek: (.Y.)I haven't seen the movie yet, so I can't compare, unfortunately. I too found the suit repair to be a bit baffling, but then I don't know what I'd do if I was stuck in an airlock with a broken faceplate and no duck tape, so what do I know?
Updating Linux systems is indeed pretty easy (one can even do live kernel patches; why can't Microsoft do that?), but if things go wrong and you have an unsatisfiable dependency, then it's somewhat less easy, I've found...
I'm not sure how realistic it is for protein cubes to liquefy (I'll assume it's not utter nonsense), but I have read of a rocket being lost because of fuel sloshing compounding a weakness in a strut; I just wish I could remember which one. I'll have to look into that, because now it's going to bug me all day. Thanks a lot, Derek! :P
Ah, here we go! It was quite recent, in fact:
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/21...
Mod
Ugh, those are two noses as seen in profile, Puddin'!
Puddin Pointy-Toes wrote: "You're missing the nipples, Derek: (.Y.)"I was quoting. There are no nipples in the e-book I'm reading!
"but if things go wrong and you have an unsatisfiable dependency, then it's somewhat less easy, I've found..."
Well, yeah, that's why my own system hasn't been updated for a couple of months, but the 9 systems I admin don't have bleeding edge sources, so that never happens.
Puddin Pointy-Toes wrote: "I'm not sure how realistic it is for protein cubes to liquefy"
Me neither. I just know it does happen, and that his explanation didn't conflict with anything I do know.
Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "Puddin Pointy-Toes wrote: "You're missing the nipples, Derek: (.Y.)"I was quoting. There are no nipples in the e-book I'm reading!
"but if things go wrong and you have an unsatisfiable dependenc..."
Your system admins comment,made me think of a short story in this Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse and suddenly I think of you in this story.
No, I'm not THAT geeky.
There will be one more spoiler thread, for the last section of the book, here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...