Storm from the Shadows, Chapter 2 comment

Once again David uses a ridiculous level of precision in his numbers:

the steadily accelerating units of Bogey Two overflew them at
a relative velocity of 19,838 KPS. At that closure rate, Bogey
Two had exactly 1.2 minutes to detect and react to them before
they found themselves half a million kilometers behind Bogey
Two . . . and launched.

The last two digits of that "19,838" change in the time it takes to read
it, and was that 19,838 KPS at the time the Havenites detected the pods,
a million kms ahead of them, or 19,838 KPS when they launched 1.2
minutes later or was that the average velocity over the the 1.2
minutes...

And then there's the fact that the pods weren't all dropped at the same
time, so they're all going to be travelling at different speeds
themselves, with a difference of hundreds of KPS between the first and
the last pods dropped...

Any number given to that level of precision is pretty much guaranteed to
be wrong.  It may be right for about 1/5 of a second when comparing the
velocity of one pod against one ship at some time during that 1.2 minute
window, but that only covers about 0.3% of the time window given.  (Or
if I was inclined to use similarly ludicrous precision, 0.27778% of the
time.)

That's almost as bad as the part in OBS when Rafe is verbally giving
"time to grav lance range" in hundredths of a second.

--
Quando omni flunkus moritati
Visit the Buffy Body Count at <http://homepage.mac.com/dsample/>
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rlbell (16.07.2008 17:58)
Don Sample (16.07.2008 21:32)