Guess where this comes from....

[daveon]

"I don’t have to mention that the SRA cruiser is now a cloud of debris vapor still traveling at one- quarter- g acceleration."

That would be from a novel nominated for Best Novel that I just read.

That was just before a scientist works out that kinetic energy weapons are all that they need to stop the aliens... Weirdly this is several years into the war and nobody thought of it.

Nothing, I got nothing. :(

Comments

[gummitch.livejournal.com]

Is there any reason why the debris cloud is still accelerating? Or does the author not even have a grasp of Newtonian mechanics?

[akicif.livejournal.com]

My first thought was ignorance on the part of the author, but I suppose it could be that the debris (okay, "debris vapour" is equally stupid) is being accelerated by an incredibly powerful laser....

Oh gods... I googled the sentence.... My eyes!

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Oh yuck.

Well, that's enough to confirm where this one goes in relation to NO AWARD. (i.e. nowhere -- it doesn't even rank below NA, as a lesser weevil.)

EXCEPT he's withdrawn from the ballot. Okay, that goes up in my estimation.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Well yes, he has. He still probably shouldn't have been there - at least not with this work. The probability I might give him another look have gone up, but he needs some friends with a MUCH better grasp of physics.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Well, I did run some numbers and he had enough of a grasp of Newtonian stuff to do some calculations, sorta - but mostly because he used the line that they'd been accelerating at 1 gee for 40 hours and needed to work out the distance - but there isn't much clarity on how that works in the context of the alien solar system, and he keeps using AU as a unit of distance which isn't all that easy to work with.

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

Is the debris in a 0.25g gravity field?

[daveon.livejournal.com]

No, the result of a high speed collision....

Yes, I said that.

They apparently also see the flash from the explosion almost immediately, from 2 AUs away....

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

I generally enjoyed the story, but I did get a "the 70s called and want their Solyent Green story back." The lack of kinetic energy weapons really stuck out. What also bothered me was the extreme handwaving regarding speed. Ships were zipping around at ~1 G, which in a solar system gets you from point A to B fairly quickly - a couple of days quick.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I did run the numbers on a throw away 1g for 40 hours remark and it works for the distance involved, but it rather ignores relative orbital velocities and the like. Likewise, he ignores the speed of light at one point so they so the explosion from 'almost 2AU away', which is fine, less fine that they apparently see it seconds after it happened and not about 15 minutes later.

I almost threw my iPad at the wall with the scene with the generic pipe smoking scientist explaining the physics... not least of which because Larry Niven used that one 40 years ago in the Man Kzin wars stuff...

I think I've mentioned elsewhere MilSF isn't really my thing, unless it's very dressed up, and this was all very TLAs and YES SIR and other throw away military lines that made it basically read to me like a piece of Aliens fanfic about the colonial marines.

I suppose they're not very into boring stuff like World Building and Internal Rationalization, which is what I actually like.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Not to mention they talk about rendering planets uninhabitable for anybody, if that was the case they could just throw rocks at them from orbit....

[resonant.livejournal.com]

I was going to buy that tomorrow, so thank you for protecting me.