On Monday, April 25, 2022 at 4:44:48 PM UTC-6, J. Clarke wrote:
> He's going to a planet with an atmosphere. Fuel is in short supply.
> But they'd rather waste this limited supply of fuel than provide a
> heat shield and parachutes that would cut the amount of fuel required
> significantly.

The story was written before aerobraking as a method of landing on
other planets was invented!

John Savard

On Monday, April 25, 2022 at 6:27:33 PM UTC-6, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> On Monday, 25 April 2022 at 21:38:58 UTC+1, Quadibloc wrote:
> > On Monday, April 25, 2022 at 7:57:00 AM UTC-6, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:

> > > That, too. If you can lay hand on a Bible, read chapter 20 of
> > > the Gospel of John, in which Mary Magdalene finds the tomb of
> > > Jesus open and empty. He appears to her, but she doesn't
> > > recognize him; she thinks he is the gardener and asks him, if he
> > > has taken away the body of Jesus, to tell her where it is so that
> > > she may take it away. He calls her by name, and she recognizes
> > > him.

> > > Now, you may believe that never happened. I don't know if
> > > Kipling did either. But every reader of the story at the time of
> > > publication would have heard it read out at least once a year.
> > > "She's looking for a grave, someone finds it for her, she thinks
> > > he's the gardener."

> > > I have just hit you over the head with who the gardener is.

> > Oh, the ghost of her nephew for whose grave she was looking.

> > All right.

> Are you thinking of John 19:26? No... realistically,
> it's more likely that this is a grounds keeper than that
> it is Jesus Christ or an angel on a pastoral visit to Earth
> for Helen's benefit.

Well, I didn't consider _that_ possibility either. I figured it was
the ghost of her nephew, because that's whose grave she
was looking for - Mary Magdelene sought the grave of Jesus,
and she met Jesus.

In the first edition of the Bible that I checked on this, it's
John 20:14-15, but that was a Catholic Bible.

No, the versification is the same in the KJV:

And when she had thus said, she turned herself back,
and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.
Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? Whom
seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith
unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where
thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.

John Savard

On Mon, 25 Apr 2022 18:33:42 -0500, Lynn McGuire
<lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:

>On 4/25/2022 5:44 PM, J. Clarke wrote:
>> On Mon, 25 Apr 2022 16:07:18 -0500, Lynn McGuire
>> <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On 4/25/2022 2:45 PM, Magewolf wrote:
>>>> On Mon, 25 Apr 2022 10:02:35 -0700, Robert Woodward wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> In article <4f7e90f4-216b-4f82-8166-f1855bd08900n@googlegroups.com>,
>>>>> Butch Malahide <fred.galvin@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 3:37:21 PM UTC-5, Robert Carnegie wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> <SNIP! re: "Cold Equations">
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I don't know about any "Weird Science" story. I thought the precedent
>>>>>> for "The Cold Equations" was the 1952 story "Precedent" by E. C. Tubb
>>>>>> (two years earlier), which you can read at the Internet Archive:
>>>>>> https://archive.org/details/New_Worlds_015v05_1952-05/page/n29/mode/2up
>>>>>>
>>>>>> It seems that every fool and his brother can tell us what's wrong with
>>>>>> Tom Godwin's attempt to write a stowaway-must-die story, but they never
>>>>>> bother to tell us how they would have done it better. Doesn't seem very
>>>>>> constructive to me.
>>>>>
>>>>> Well, I have thought over the matter and my suggested improvement is to
>>>>> delete all the previous stowaway attempts (and thus the orders to
>>>>> execute stowaways). Thus, the space liner had procedures to drop off the
>>>>> shuttles for unscheduled deliveries which had worked up perfectly. An
>>>>> author contrived interplanetary drive* for the shuttle plus complacency
>>>>> on the procedures to use the shuttles results in one stowaway doomed to
>>>>> die.
>>>>>
>>>>> *the narrow margin has to be an unescapable part of the design.
>>>>
>>>> Another way to look at it is that "fault" really does not matter in the
>>>> end. It is the designers' fault,it is the starline's fault,it is the
>>>> pilot's fault or it is the stowaway's it still ends up the same way. My
>>>> take away always was that emotions or fault or intentions had no effect
>>>> on physics.
>>>
>>> After rereading the story, I have suddenly realized that the EDS was a
>>> one shot. It would forever be a part of wherever it landed as it did
>>> not have the fuel for takeoff. They were throwaway ships just landing
>>> on the target planet and would be discarded once the pilot and the cargo
>>> left the EDS.
>>> https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-cold-
>>> equations/
>>>
>>> "Some method of delivering supplies or assistance when an emergency
>>> occurred on a world not scheduled for a visit had been needed, and the
>>> Emergency Dispatch Ships had been the answer. Small and collapsible,
>>> they occupied little room in the hold of the cruiser; made of light
>>> metal and plastics, they were driven by a small rocket drive that
>>> consumed relatively little fuel. Each cruiser carried four EDSs, and
>>> when a call for aid was received, the nearest cruiser would drop into
>>> normal space long enough to launch an EDS with the needed supplies or
>>> personnel, then vanish again as it continued on its course."
>>>
>>> If the EDS carried extra fuel then it could be too heavy to land properly.
>>
>> I'm sorry, but the numbers in that story just make no sense at all.
>> There's not enough information given to model it, but it's all
>> armwavium.
>>
>> He's going to a planet with an atmosphere. Fuel is in short supply.
>> But they'd rather waste this limited supply of fuel than provide a
>> heat shield and parachutes that would cut the amount of fuel required
>> significantly.
>>
>> Then there's that whole business of running at .1 g for two hours on
>> chemical rockets. That's a quite wide throttle range and it's
>> difficult to believe that they would be as efficient throttled back
>> that far as at their design thrust, so again he's wasting this
>> precious commodity of fuel.
>>
>> It's craptastic engineering at its finest.
>
>He is having to slow down with that 0.1 g. The space liner had a high
>delta V coming out of FTL.

His engines can throttle up to something in excess of 1 g or
propulsive landing is not an option. So he's better off using them at
their most efficient setting, which is likely full throttle, than
throttled way back.

>If the EDS is collapsible, then it probably does not weigh very much.
>Maybe only a couple of hundred lbs. Like I said, a one shot space ship,
>not much to it.

Doesn't alter the fact that a heat shield and enough structure to
support it is lighter than 7 miles/sec of chemical fuel.

On Mon, 25 Apr 2022 17:55:18 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc
<jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:

>On Monday, April 25, 2022 at 4:44:48 PM UTC-6, J. Clarke wrote:
>> He's going to a planet with an atmosphere. Fuel is in short supply.
>> But they'd rather waste this limited supply of fuel than provide a
>> heat shield and parachutes that would cut the amount of fuel required
>> significantly.
>
>The story was written before aerobraking as a method of landing on
>other planets was invented!

Heinlein used it in 1948. I doubt he originated the concept.

On Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 4:50:41 AM UTC+10, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>
> It was a cut down CDC 60 bit 6600. The memory was hand wound so they
> cut it down to the minimum precision needed. The ultimate weight was 47
> lbs if I remember correctly. Every pound was crucial on the Lunar
> Lander (see "Cold Equations" story for why).
>
> But there was a sensor fault and the computer kept on rebooting during
> the entire descent to the Moon's surface. Neil Armstrong was firing the
> retro ? rocket(s?) by hand during the entire descent. We know he did a
> good job since he and his fellow astronaut survived.
>
Not true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11#Lunar_descent

The computer was raising alerts and shedding lower priority tasks but it wasn't rebooting

"To blame the computer for the Apollo 11 problems is like blaming the person who spots a fire and calls the fire department. Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions. A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software. The software's action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones. The computer, rather than almost forcing an abort, prevented an abort. If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful Moon landing it was."
Margaret Hamilton - one of the greats

Armstrong wasn't firing retro-rockets by hand all through the descent, he did overrule the planned landing spot because it had boulders and he guided the lander to a different site but it was still semi-autonomous rather than full manual control

On Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 4:54:09 AM UTC+10, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> On 4/24/2022 3:24 PM, J. Clarke wrote:
> > On Sun, 24 Apr 2022 12:53:13 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc
> > <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
> >
> >> On Saturday, April 23, 2022 at 2:03:31 AM UTC-6, David Johnston wrote:
> >>
> >>> The Dead Past by Isaac Asimov: My reaction was "Ehn. We'll get used to
> >>> it.". Just as we got used to surveillance cameras and having our
> >>> internet activity monitored.
> >>
> >> Since what Asimov was talking about meant no privacy at all for anyone
> >> ever, I didn't see _this_ as the objection. That they would have found another
> >> way - like controlling the distribution of some critical substance or component,
> >> instead of radically altering how academe works so as to inhibit further
> >> technical progress, though is where I objected.
> >>
> >>> Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein: Nope. Can't buy that they
> >>> could keep the civilians as second class citizens without cultivating
> >>> contempt for them.
> >>
> >> I never really thought too much about that aspect of it. Apparently,
> >> democracy failed, and so they tried to preserve something as close
> >> to democracy as possible.
> >
> > It's a democracy. _Anybody_ can get the vote. They just have to (a)
> > want it badly enough, (b) be able to understand the rules, (c) show
> > that they are capable of following them, and (d) be lucky enough to
> > not die in the process.
> >
> >>> Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke: Nope. That's not humanity
> >>> ascending to the heavens. The discontinuity is too drastic. It's just
> >>> humanity dying out and leaving behind god food to be harvested.
> >>
> >> I didn't relate well to much of that book, unlike most Clarke, but
> >> that wasn't the flaw I percieved.
> >>
> >>> The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin: The margins can't be that tight.
> >>> They'd be dying all the time
> >>
> >> Others have already pointed out that it's really the juxtaposition of
> >> lax security and tight margins that's odd. But, yes, the margins were
> >> ridiculously tight in themselves.
> >> I think, though, that here and in "The Dead Past", the author set up a
> >> contrived situation in order to allow the plot he envisaged to happen.
> >> I can't blame authors for that, a lot of science fiction is that way.
> >
> > And the margins in spaceflight are generally on the acceleration end.
> > Aerobraking doesn't really require that much onboard resource.
> Areobraking only works if a) there is an atmosphere of substance and b)
> the last portion of the descent must have some sort of braking, retro
> rocket to land vertically or landing horizontally and the wheels have
> brakes and possibly a parachute.
>
They were taking medical supplies to a colony, the odds are pretty good that it had an atmosphere.

Butch Malahide wrote:
> On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 3:37:21 PM UTC-5, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> > > > ...
> > > > > The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin
> >
> > Wikipedia's article has a list of critics of the story
> > who I feel just didn't like the ending. I think that not
> > liking the ending was the point of the story. You don't
> > like the ending, but you can't stop it from happening.
> > David Drake alleges that it's swiped from a
> > "Weird Science" comic with a different outcome.
> > I may have heard that Tom Godwin originally pitched
> > the story with the stowaway saved, and John Campbell
> > said, no, don't (and gets accused in Wikipedia of misogyny):
> > Wikipedia cites from "Our Five Days With John W. Campbell",
> > "In the first two re-writes, Godwin kept coming up with
> > ingenious ways to save the girl", which, as I say, wasn't
> > the point.
> I don't know about any "Weird Science" story. I thought the
> precedent for "The Cold Equations" was the 1952 story
> "Precedent" by E. C. Tubb (two years earlier), which you
> can read at the Internet Archive:
> https://archive.org/details/New_Worlds_015v05_1952-05/page/n29/mode/2up

Is this razor margin different from a rocket using up its margin and having to lighten ship to take off?
That was an element of both "Destination Moon" (1950) and "Die Frau im Mond" (1929), also the STAR TREK episode "The Galileo Seven," although that was said to be more proximately inspired by the 1939 movie "Five Came Back" or its 1956 remake "Back from Eternity," which involved an airplane. But that takes us back to throwing jetsom from a sinking ship, or not overcrowding the lifeboats... I think Jonah was thrown from his passenger berth after being determined to be a jinx, but that may have just been the excuse afterwards.

(Having read the story in a science fiction course, I wish I could remember what the instructor said about a later suggestion that each could have contributed enough limbs to make up the mass.)
--
-Jack

Robert Woodward wrote:

"The Cold Equations"

> Well, I have thought over the matter and my suggested improvement is to
> delete all the previous stowaway attempts (and thus the orders to
> execute stowaways). Thus, the space liner had procedures to drop off the
> shuttles for unscheduled deliveries which had worked up perfectly. An
> author contrived interplanetary drive* for the shuttle plus complacency
> on the procedures to use the shuttles results in one stowaway doomed to
> die.
>
> *the narrow margin has to be an unescapable part of the design.

I've been reading other Tom Godwin stories. Not to relate everything back to his magnum opus, but a story "The Nothing Equation" does seem to do a bit better in its author-contrived need for a lone man in a minimum observation post far isolated. "Cry from a Far Planet" introduces and critiques the idea that a two-man exploration ship should be crewed by identical twins, but seems to have a problem in scale stating that a fleet of fifteen such ships was undertaking the mission to find all the worlds holding intelligent life.

--
-Jack

On 4/26/2022 9:44 AM, Jack Bohn wrote:
> Butch Malahide wrote:
>> On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 3:37:21 PM UTC-5, Robert Carnegie wrote:
>>>>> ...
>>>>>> The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin
>>>
>>> Wikipedia's article has a list of critics of the story
>>> who I feel just didn't like the ending. I think that not
>>> liking the ending was the point of the story. You don't
>>> like the ending, but you can't stop it from happening.
>>> David Drake alleges that it's swiped from a
>>> "Weird Science" comic with a different outcome.
>>> I may have heard that Tom Godwin originally pitched
>>> the story with the stowaway saved, and John Campbell
>>> said, no, don't (and gets accused in Wikipedia of misogyny):
>>> Wikipedia cites from "Our Five Days With John W. Campbell",
>>> "In the first two re-writes, Godwin kept coming up with
>>> ingenious ways to save the girl", which, as I say, wasn't
>>> the point.
>> I don't know about any "Weird Science" story. I thought the
>> precedent for "The Cold Equations" was the 1952 story
>> "Precedent" by E. C. Tubb (two years earlier), which you
>> can read at the Internet Archive:
>> https://archive.org/details/New_Worlds_015v05_1952-05/page/n29/mode/2up
>
> Is this razor margin different from a rocket using up its margin and having to lighten ship to take off?
> That was an element of both "Destination Moon" (1950) and "Die Frau im Mond" (1929), also the STAR TREK episode "The Galileo Seven," although that was said to be more proximately inspired by the 1939 movie "Five Came Back" or its 1956 remake "Back from Eternity," which involved an airplane. But that takes us back to throwing jetsom from a sinking ship, or not overcrowding the lifeboats... I think Jonah was thrown from his passenger berth after being determined to be a jinx, but that may have just been the excuse afterwards.
>
> (Having read the story in a science fiction course, I wish I could remember what the instructor said about a later suggestion that each could have contributed enough limbs to make up the mass.)

Apollo 13 had to jettison the LEM before landing back on Earth. They
forgot to leave it at the Moon "grin".

Lynn

Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
>
> Well, I didn't consider _that_ possibility either. I figured it was
> the ghost of her nephew, because that's whose grave she
> was looking for - Mary Magdelene sought the grave of Jesus,
> and she met Jesus.
>

I suppose the contextual clues doesn't land with the same "obviousness
in hindsight" for modern readers as they would have for the story's
original audience, but the story's rug-pull is that he had not been
her _nephew_.

--
Leif Roar Moldskred
Wet nurse conveniently exists stage left.

On Tuesday, 26 April 2022 at 02:06:44 UTC+1, Quadibloc wrote:
> On Monday, April 25, 2022 at 6:27:33 PM UTC-6, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> > On Monday, 25 April 2022 at 21:38:58 UTC+1, Quadibloc wrote:
> > > On Monday, April 25, 2022 at 7:57:00 AM UTC-6, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>
> > > > That, too. If you can lay hand on a Bible, read chapter 20 of
> > > > the Gospel of John, in which Mary Magdalene finds the tomb of
> > > > Jesus open and empty. He appears to her, but she doesn't
> > > > recognize him; she thinks he is the gardener and asks him, if he
> > > > has taken away the body of Jesus, to tell her where it is so that
> > > > she may take it away. He calls her by name, and she recognizes
> > > > him.
>
> > > > Now, you may believe that never happened. I don't know if
> > > > Kipling did either. But every reader of the story at the time of
> > > > publication would have heard it read out at least once a year.
> > > > "She's looking for a grave, someone finds it for her, she thinks
> > > > he's the gardener."
>
> > > > I have just hit you over the head with who the gardener is.
>
> > > Oh, the ghost of her nephew for whose grave she was looking.
>
> > > All right.
>
> > Are you thinking of John 19:26? No... realistically,
> > it's more likely that this is a grounds keeper than that
> > it is Jesus Christ or an angel on a pastoral visit to Earth
> > for Helen's benefit.
>
> Well, I didn't consider _that_ possibility either. I figured it was
> the ghost of her nephew, because that's whose grave she
> was looking for - Mary Magdelene sought the grave of Jesus,
> and she met Jesus.

Yes, but _Hamlet_ establishes that you can have
s reasonably civil conversation with a ghost
without being anywhere near their grave.
So he wouldn't need to show it to her. He would
keep it nice, though.

In article <sbKdnaua4o5qy_X_nZ2dnZeNn_rNnZ2d@giganews.com>,
Leif Roar Moldskred <leifm@huldreheim.Home> wrote:
>Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
>>
>> Well, I didn't consider _that_ possibility either. I figured it was
>> the ghost of her nephew, because that's whose grave she
>> was looking for - Mary Magdelene sought the grave of Jesus,
>> and she met Jesus.
>
>I suppose the contextual clues doesn't land with the same "obviousness
>in hindsight" for modern readers as they would have for the story's
>original audience,

Quite true. What's the date of the story? Between the World
Wars, anyway; a great many more English people were Church of
England in fact as well as in name. And were very much likelier
to have "She thought he was the gardener" go off like Big Ben in
their heads.

but the story's rug-pull is that he had not been
>her _nephew_.

No more than John was Mary's son _strictu sensu_. But Jesus
said, "There is your son; there is your mother," and they took
him at his word and adopted each other.

--
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at gmail dot com
Www.kithrup.com/~djheydt/

On Mon, 25 Apr 2022 08:43:47 -0500, "Michael F. Stemper"
<michael.stemper@gmail.com> wrote:

>On 25/04/2022 08.40, Scott Lurndal wrote:
>> "Michael F. Stemper" <michael.stemper@gmail.com> writes:
>>> On 24/04/2022 12.31, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>>
>>> 2. Nobody used signed-magnitude arithmetic because it's too
>>> bloody complicated.
>>
>> Except Burroughs Medium Systems. First four bits was the
>> sign, and each successive four bits were the magnitude (up
>> to 100 digits worth).
>
>Four bits for sign? Well, my saying "Nobody used [it]" was
>obviously wrong, but this only supports "too bloody complicated."

Could explain why their 'Medium Systems' were their least popular
line.

(signed 4 year employee of Burroughs in the mid-1980s)

On Mon, 25 Apr 2022 13:47:49 GMT, djheydt@kithrup.com (Dorothy J
Heydt) wrote:

>Now, you may believe that never happened. I don't know if
>Kipling did either. But every reader of the story at the time of
>publication would have heard it read out at least once a year.
>"She's looking for a grave, someone finds it for her, she thinks
>he's the gardener."
>
>I have just hit you over the head with who the gardener is.

And you would have hit them over the head even harder had you
continued to read a couple more verses where the gardener calls her by
name and she responds "rabbi"

But while I'm not so familiar with the readings of the Church of
England (which is presumably what most of Kipling's readers at the
time would be most familiar with) so as to be able to tell you where
in their cycle of readings it may have been there's no question
British writers and other figures referenced the C of E prayerbook
quite a bit the most famous being Neville Chamberlain waving his paper
after debarking from the plane returning him from Munich in 1938
saying he had secured "Peace for our Time" which is a common request
to God in the Anglican prayer cycle.

Which ahem he hadn't.

On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 4:33:30 PM UTC-4, Thomas Koenig wrote:
> J Clarke <jclarke...@gmail.com> schrieb:
> > On Sun, 24 Apr 2022 12:53:13 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc
> >>I never really thought too much about that aspect of it. Apparently,
> >>democracy failed, and so they tried to preserve something as close
> >>to democracy as possible.
> >
> > It's a democracy. _Anybody_ can get the vote. They just have to (a)
> > want it badly enough, (b) be able to understand the rules, (c) show
> > that they are capable of following them, and (d) be lucky enough to
> > not die in the process.
> and (e) be lucky enough not to be cashiered. There is a bit of an
> inconsistency in the novel - on the one hand, it is stated that
> everybody who cares can join the service and vote, and there's
> at least one member thrown out of the MI with a remark "another
> civilian who will hate us for the rest of his life".

Not all citizens are those who performed *military* service.

From the text of Starship Troopers:

> "... And you have forgotten that in peacetime most veterans come from
> non-combatant auxiliary services and have not been subjected to the
> full rigors of military discipline; they have merely been harried,
> overworked, and endangered—yet their votes count."

From the text of Expanded Universe:

> In STARSHIP TROOPERS it is stated flatly and more than once that
> nineteen out of twenty veterans are not military veterans. Instead,
> 95% of voters are what we call today "former members of federal civil
> service."
>
> Addendum: The volunteer is not given a choice. He/she can’t win a
> franchise by volunteering for what we call civil service. He
> volunteers. . . then for two years plus-or-minus he goes where he is
> sent and does what he is told to do. If he is young, male, and
> healthy, he may wind up as cannon fodder. But there are long chances
> against it.

Certainly the story of Starship Troopers is almost entirely about military
service. But that's because that's what the protagonist did, and where
he goes in the story.

On Wed, 27 Apr 2022 14:22:40 -0700 (PDT), Ross Presser
<rpresser@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 4:33:30 PM UTC-4, Thomas Koenig wrote:
>> J Clarke <jclarke...@gmail.com> schrieb:
>> > On Sun, 24 Apr 2022 12:53:13 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc
>> >>I never really thought too much about that aspect of it. Apparently,
>> >>democracy failed, and so they tried to preserve something as close
>> >>to democracy as possible.
>> >
>> > It's a democracy. _Anybody_ can get the vote. They just have to (a)
>> > want it badly enough, (b) be able to understand the rules, (c) show
>> > that they are capable of following them, and (d) be lucky enough to
>> > not die in the process.
>> and (e) be lucky enough not to be cashiered.

There's no luck involved. If you understand the rules and follow
them, they can't cashier you. Everyone who left the service in the
book did it either voluntarily or as the result of a major violation
of the regulations.

>> There is a bit of an
>> inconsistency in the novel - on the one hand, it is stated that
>> everybody who cares can join the service and vote, and there's
>> at least one member thrown out of the MI with a remark "another
>> civilian who will hate us for the rest of his life".

I have searched the entire text of the novel using the keyword "hate"
and separately the keyword "civilian" and can't find a statement to
that effect.

>Not all citizens are those who performed *military* service.
>
>From the text of Starship Troopers:
>
>> "... And you have forgotten that in peacetime most veterans come from
>> non-combatant auxiliary services and have not been subjected to the
>> full rigors of military discipline; they have merely been harried,
>> overworked, and endangered—yet their votes count."
>
>From the text of Expanded Universe:
>
>> In STARSHIP TROOPERS it is stated flatly and more than once that
>> nineteen out of twenty veterans are not military veterans. Instead,
>> 95% of voters are what we call today "former members of federal civil
>> service."
>>
>> Addendum: The volunteer is not given a choice. He/she can’t win a
>> franchise by volunteering for what we call civil service. He
>> volunteers. . . then for two years plus-or-minus he goes where he is
>> sent and does what he is told to do. If he is young, male, and
>> healthy, he may wind up as cannon fodder. But there are long chances
>> against it.
>
>Certainly the story of Starship Troopers is almost entirely about military
>service. But that's because that's what the protagonist did, and where
>he goes in the story.

On 4/26/2022 8:08 AM, J. Clarke wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Apr 2022 18:33:42 -0500, Lynn McGuire
> <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 4/25/2022 5:44 PM, J. Clarke wrote:
>>> On Mon, 25 Apr 2022 16:07:18 -0500, Lynn McGuire
>>> <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 4/25/2022 2:45 PM, Magewolf wrote:
>>>>> On Mon, 25 Apr 2022 10:02:35 -0700, Robert Woodward wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> In article <4f7e90f4-216b-4f82-8166-f1855bd08900n@googlegroups.com>,
>>>>>> Butch Malahide <fred.galvin@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 3:37:21 PM UTC-5, Robert Carnegie wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> <SNIP! re: "Cold Equations">
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I don't know about any "Weird Science" story. I thought the precedent
>>>>>>> for "The Cold Equations" was the 1952 story "Precedent" by E. C. Tubb
>>>>>>> (two years earlier), which you can read at the Internet Archive:
>>>>>>> https://archive.org/details/New_Worlds_015v05_1952-05/page/n29/mode/2up
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> It seems that every fool and his brother can tell us what's wrong with
>>>>>>> Tom Godwin's attempt to write a stowaway-must-die story, but they never
>>>>>>> bother to tell us how they would have done it better. Doesn't seem very
>>>>>>> constructive to me.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Well, I have thought over the matter and my suggested improvement is to
>>>>>> delete all the previous stowaway attempts (and thus the orders to
>>>>>> execute stowaways). Thus, the space liner had procedures to drop off the
>>>>>> shuttles for unscheduled deliveries which had worked up perfectly. An
>>>>>> author contrived interplanetary drive* for the shuttle plus complacency
>>>>>> on the procedures to use the shuttles results in one stowaway doomed to
>>>>>> die.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> *the narrow margin has to be an unescapable part of the design.
>>>>>
>>>>> Another way to look at it is that "fault" really does not matter in the
>>>>> end. It is the designers' fault,it is the starline's fault,it is the
>>>>> pilot's fault or it is the stowaway's it still ends up the same way. My
>>>>> take away always was that emotions or fault or intentions had no effect
>>>>> on physics.
>>>>
>>>> After rereading the story, I have suddenly realized that the EDS was a
>>>> one shot. It would forever be a part of wherever it landed as it did
>>>> not have the fuel for takeoff. They were throwaway ships just landing
>>>> on the target planet and would be discarded once the pilot and the cargo
>>>> left the EDS.
>>>> https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-cold-
>>>> equations/
>>>>
>>>> "Some method of delivering supplies or assistance when an emergency
>>>> occurred on a world not scheduled for a visit had been needed, and the
>>>> Emergency Dispatch Ships had been the answer. Small and collapsible,
>>>> they occupied little room in the hold of the cruiser; made of light
>>>> metal and plastics, they were driven by a small rocket drive that
>>>> consumed relatively little fuel. Each cruiser carried four EDSs, and
>>>> when a call for aid was received, the nearest cruiser would drop into
>>>> normal space long enough to launch an EDS with the needed supplies or
>>>> personnel, then vanish again as it continued on its course."
>>>>
>>>> If the EDS carried extra fuel then it could be too heavy to land properly.
>>>
>>> I'm sorry, but the numbers in that story just make no sense at all.
>>> There's not enough information given to model it, but it's all
>>> armwavium.
>>>
>>> He's going to a planet with an atmosphere. Fuel is in short supply.
>>> But they'd rather waste this limited supply of fuel than provide a
>>> heat shield and parachutes that would cut the amount of fuel required
>>> significantly.
>>>
>>> Then there's that whole business of running at .1 g for two hours on
>>> chemical rockets. That's a quite wide throttle range and it's
>>> difficult to believe that they would be as efficient throttled back
>>> that far as at their design thrust, so again he's wasting this
>>> precious commodity of fuel.
>>>
>>> It's craptastic engineering at its finest.
>>
>> He is having to slow down with that 0.1 g. The space liner had a high
>> delta V coming out of FTL.
>
> His engines can throttle up to something in excess of 1 g or
> propulsive landing is not an option. So he's better off using them at
> their most efficient setting, which is likely full throttle, than
> throttled way back.
>
>> If the EDS is collapsible, then it probably does not weigh very much.
>> Maybe only a couple of hundred lbs. Like I said, a one shot space ship,
>> not much to it.
>
> Doesn't alter the fact that a heat shield and enough structure to
> support it is lighter than 7 miles/sec of chemical fuel.

Again, that means that you can only land on planets with a significant
atmosphere. So, Mars and Europa would be out.

Lynn

On 27/04/2022 16.22, Ross Presser wrote:

> From the text of Expanded Universe:
>
>> In STARSHIP TROOPERS it is stated flatly and more than once that
>> nineteen out of twenty veterans are not military veterans. Instead,
>> 95% of voters are what we call today "former members of federal civil
>> service."

The problem with what RAH wrote about _Starship Troopers_ in
_Expanded Universe_ is that nobody has ever been able to point to
one of those flat statements.

--
Michael F. Stemper
Exodus 22:21

On 4/28/2022 6:46 AM, Michael F. Stemper wrote:
> On 27/04/2022 16.22, Ross Presser wrote:
>
>>  From the text of Expanded Universe:
>>
>>> In STARSHIP TROOPERS it is stated flatly and more than once that
>>> nineteen out of twenty veterans are not military veterans. Instead,
>>> 95% of voters are what we call today "former members of federal civil
>>> service."
>
> The problem with what RAH wrote about _Starship Troopers_ in
> _Expanded Universe_ is that nobody has ever been able to point to
> one of those flat statements.
>
I believe the recruiter said something about if you were blind and had
only one arm they'd find a job for you counting the hairs on a
caterpillar by touch if you joined. I don't remember ever reading
'Expanded Universe' but I do remember from reading 'Starship Troopers'
that military service was not the only civil service option. The book
just "happened" to start with an alien attack on Earth and a bunch of
healthy high school graduates signing up as a result. In that
situation, yes, a lot of them are going to end up in the military but at
least one of them ended up in R&D.

--
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
dirty old man.

On 28/04/2022 10.21, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
> On 4/28/2022 6:46 AM, Michael F. Stemper wrote:
>> On 27/04/2022 16.22, Ross Presser wrote:
>>
>>>  From the text of Expanded Universe:
>>>
>>>> In STARSHIP TROOPERS it is stated flatly and more than once that
>>>> nineteen out of twenty veterans are not military veterans. Instead,
>>>> 95% of voters are what we call today "former members of federal civil
>>>> service."
>>
>> The problem with what RAH wrote about _Starship Troopers_ in
>> _Expanded Universe_ is that nobody has ever been able to point to
>> one of those flat statements.
>>
> I believe the recruiter said something about if you were blind and had only one arm they'd find a job for you counting the hairs on a caterpillar by touch if you joined.

Yeah, that statement's there. But no statement about "95%" or
"nineteen out of twenty".

--
Michael F. Stemper
Why doesn't anybody care about apathy?

On Thursday, April 28, 2022 at 10:15:53 AM UTC-6, Michael F. Stemper wrote:

> Yeah, that statement's there. But no statement about "95%" or
> "nineteen out of twenty".

Well, if Heinlein remembered it, but it's not in the book we've seen,
clearly it's the editor's fault, and someday - as I think has happened for
Stranger in a Strange Land - in Heinlein's papers someone will dig up
the "director's cut" of the novel.

John Savard

On 28/04/2022 11.32, Quadibloc wrote:
> On Thursday, April 28, 2022 at 10:15:53 AM UTC-6, Michael F. Stemper wrote:
>
>> Yeah, that statement's there. But no statement about "95%" or
>> "nineteen out of twenty".
>
> Well, if Heinlein remembered it, but it's not in the book we've seen,
> clearly it's the editor's fault,

It's also possible that RAH mis-remembered.

--
Michael F. Stemper
Why doesn't anybody care about apathy?

On Thursday, April 28, 2022 at 12:35:32 PM UTC-4, Michael F. Stemper wrote:
> On 28/04/2022 11.32, Quadibloc wrote:
> > On Thursday, April 28, 2022 at 10:15:53 AM UTC-6, Michael F. Stemper wrote:
> >
> >> Yeah, that statement's there. But no statement about "95%" or
> >> "nineteen out of twenty".
> >
> > Well, if Heinlein remembered it, but it's not in the book we've seen,
> > clearly it's the editor's fault,
> It's also possible that RAH mis-remembered.

_Starship Troopers_ had -- for a "mature Heinlein" story -- a long and
twisted history. The original version written in November 1958 was
much shorter than the final product. It's possible that Heinlein was
thinking of a line that didn't appear in the published book.

On Thursday, April 28, 2022 at 1:05:37 PM UTC-4, Ahasuerus wrote:
> On Thursday, April 28, 2022 at 12:35:32 PM UTC-4, Michael F. Stemper wrote:
> > On 28/04/2022 11.32, Quadibloc wrote:
> > > On Thursday, April 28, 2022 at 10:15:53 AM UTC-6, Michael F. Stemper wrote:
> > >
> > >> Yeah, that statement's there. But no statement about "95%" or
> > >> "nineteen out of twenty".
> > >
> > > Well, if Heinlein remembered it, but it's not in the book we've seen,
> > > clearly it's the editor's fault,
> > It's also possible that RAH mis-remembered.
> _Starship Troopers_ had -- for a "mature Heinlein" story -- a long and
> twisted history. The original version written in November 1958 was
> much shorter than the final product. It's possible that Heinlein was
> thinking of a line that didn't appear in the published book.

There's this thing called 'the internet'. You can look things up on it.

The entire text is available on archive.org, and is searchable. I'm not sure
of which version it is.

https://archive.org/details/StarshipTroopersRobertHeinlein
Warning: The cover shown is NSFW and inappropriate.

The word 'percent' does not occur. The only use of 'twenty' in reference
to service options is this:

-------
"Carl said, "I thought we could state our preferences?"

"Certainly. And that’s the last choice you’ll make until the end of your term.
The placement officer pays attention to your choice, too. First thing he does
is to check whether there’s any demand for left-handed glass blowers this
week — that being what you think would make you happy. Having reluctantly
conceded that there is a need for your choice — probably at the bottom of
the Pacific — he then tests you for innate ability and preparation. About once
in twenty times he is forced to admit that everything matches and you get
the job... until some practical joker gives you dispatch orders to do
something very different. But the other nineteen times he turns you down
and decides that you are just what they have been needing to field-test
survival equipment on Titan." He added meditatively, "It’s chilly on Titan.
And it’s amazing how often experimental equipment fails to work. Have
to have real field tests, though — laboratories just never get all the answers."
--------

A few paragraphs earlier, we find:

"You can’t all be real military men; we don’t need that many and most of
the volunteers aren’t number-one soldier material anyhow."

So, there's an oversupply of volunteers. Many wind up in non-military duty. But:

"A term of service isn’t a kiddie camp; it’s either real military service, rough
and dangerous even in peacetime ... or a most unreasonable facsimile thereof.
Not a vacation. Not a romantic adventure."

pt

On Thu, 28 Apr 2022 00:14:37 -0500, Lynn McGuire
<lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:

>On 4/26/2022 8:08 AM, J. Clarke wrote:
>> On Mon, 25 Apr 2022 18:33:42 -0500, Lynn McGuire
>> <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On 4/25/2022 5:44 PM, J. Clarke wrote:
>>>> On Mon, 25 Apr 2022 16:07:18 -0500, Lynn McGuire
>>>> <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 4/25/2022 2:45 PM, Magewolf wrote:
>>>>>> On Mon, 25 Apr 2022 10:02:35 -0700, Robert Woodward wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> In article <4f7e90f4-216b-4f82-8166-f1855bd08900n@googlegroups.com>,
>>>>>>> Butch Malahide <fred.galvin@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 3:37:21 PM UTC-5, Robert Carnegie wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> <SNIP! re: "Cold Equations">
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> I don't know about any "Weird Science" story. I thought the precedent
>>>>>>>> for "The Cold Equations" was the 1952 story "Precedent" by E. C. Tubb
>>>>>>>> (two years earlier), which you can read at the Internet Archive:
>>>>>>>> https://archive.org/details/New_Worlds_015v05_1952-05/page/n29/mode/2up
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> It seems that every fool and his brother can tell us what's wrong with
>>>>>>>> Tom Godwin's attempt to write a stowaway-must-die story, but they never
>>>>>>>> bother to tell us how they would have done it better. Doesn't seem very
>>>>>>>> constructive to me.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Well, I have thought over the matter and my suggested improvement is to
>>>>>>> delete all the previous stowaway attempts (and thus the orders to
>>>>>>> execute stowaways). Thus, the space liner had procedures to drop off the
>>>>>>> shuttles for unscheduled deliveries which had worked up perfectly. An
>>>>>>> author contrived interplanetary drive* for the shuttle plus complacency
>>>>>>> on the procedures to use the shuttles results in one stowaway doomed to
>>>>>>> die.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> *the narrow margin has to be an unescapable part of the design.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Another way to look at it is that "fault" really does not matter in the
>>>>>> end. It is the designers' fault,it is the starline's fault,it is the
>>>>>> pilot's fault or it is the stowaway's it still ends up the same way. My
>>>>>> take away always was that emotions or fault or intentions had no effect
>>>>>> on physics.
>>>>>
>>>>> After rereading the story, I have suddenly realized that the EDS was a
>>>>> one shot. It would forever be a part of wherever it landed as it did
>>>>> not have the fuel for takeoff. They were throwaway ships just landing
>>>>> on the target planet and would be discarded once the pilot and the cargo
>>>>> left the EDS.
>>>>> https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-cold-
>>>>> equations/
>>>>>
>>>>> "Some method of delivering supplies or assistance when an emergency
>>>>> occurred on a world not scheduled for a visit had been needed, and the
>>>>> Emergency Dispatch Ships had been the answer. Small and collapsible,
>>>>> they occupied little room in the hold of the cruiser; made of light
>>>>> metal and plastics, they were driven by a small rocket drive that
>>>>> consumed relatively little fuel. Each cruiser carried four EDSs, and
>>>>> when a call for aid was received, the nearest cruiser would drop into
>>>>> normal space long enough to launch an EDS with the needed supplies or
>>>>> personnel, then vanish again as it continued on its course."
>>>>>
>>>>> If the EDS carried extra fuel then it could be too heavy to land properly.
>>>>
>>>> I'm sorry, but the numbers in that story just make no sense at all.
>>>> There's not enough information given to model it, but it's all
>>>> armwavium.
>>>>
>>>> He's going to a planet with an atmosphere. Fuel is in short supply.
>>>> But they'd rather waste this limited supply of fuel than provide a
>>>> heat shield and parachutes that would cut the amount of fuel required
>>>> significantly.
>>>>
>>>> Then there's that whole business of running at .1 g for two hours on
>>>> chemical rockets. That's a quite wide throttle range and it's
>>>> difficult to believe that they would be as efficient throttled back
>>>> that far as at their design thrust, so again he's wasting this
>>>> precious commodity of fuel.
>>>>
>>>> It's craptastic engineering at its finest.
>>>
>>> He is having to slow down with that 0.1 g. The space liner had a high
>>> delta V coming out of FTL.
>>
>> His engines can throttle up to something in excess of 1 g or
>> propulsive landing is not an option. So he's better off using them at
>> their most efficient setting, which is likely full throttle, than
>> throttled way back.
>>
>>> If the EDS is collapsible, then it probably does not weigh very much.
>>> Maybe only a couple of hundred lbs. Like I said, a one shot space ship,
>>> not much to it.
>>
>> Doesn't alter the fact that a heat shield and enough structure to
>> support it is lighter than 7 miles/sec of chemical fuel.
>
>Again, that means that you can only land on planets with a significant
>atmosphere. So, Mars and Europa would be out.

So leave the heat shield on the starship for Mars and Europa.
>
>Lynn