On 28 Feb 2026 18:56:23 GMT, ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram)
wrote:

Michael Ikeda <mmikeda@erols.com> wrote or quoted:
:Yes, but one could argue the science in science fiction is supposed
:to be somewhat plausible.

I've been annoyed for a while that "Science Fiction" is basical-
ly never scientifically accurate. But I gotta say you can read the
word "Science" in Science Fiction a few different ways. It could
mean, like I used to think, "based on scientific findings," or it
could just mean "pulling in ideas from science." Often words like
"wormhole" get used as a motif, but then a wormhole is what the au-
thor imagines, not what science actually says about it. By the way,
I recently watched a talk (as a video) where Professor Susskind
talks about how two black holes, formed from entangled particles far
apart, make a wormhole. If Jack and Jill each jump into one of those
holes, they'd meet inside. So science isn't always boring, I think.
The video was "The Quantum Origins of Gravity" (Oscar Klein Memorial
Lecture 2018) by Leonard Susskind.

It varies.

In its early years, it was justified by teaching science (utterly
sexless science, of course) to 13-year-old boys. That science was
expected to be mostly accurate.

An early Tom Swift book, referred to a while back, featuring a
motorcycle, for example, was probably most educational. And perhaps
even practical. Especially if it advocated wearing a helmet.

Heinlein's /The Rolling Stones/ has a lot about trajectories for
traveling from the Moon to Mars with a fly-by of the Earth to get a
push. I suspect it is accurate in the sense that it was what was
thought to be correct at the time. It may also be accurate in an
absolute sense, who can say?

Incidentally, I found these Heinlein books, previously unavailable on
Kindle, now available:
Between Planets
Farnham's Freehold
Puppet Masters, The
Rolling Stones, The
all have no ISBN or publisher, but do have a link to a certain
location selling leather-bound hardcover complete works for an
astounding price.

Apparently, they are releasing some works to eBook that never made it originally for those of us who don't think a cow should have go around
without its skin just to make a nice looking set of books.

But this changed, and Science Fiction began expanding to clearly not
currently scientific topics. Ironically, the tradition of explaining
this continued, leading to long explanations of just how whatever FTL
process (actual FTL or something that gave the same effect) was used
in the book. All of it bogus, of course.

And now, with the pace of science, it's getting hard to tell the
difference. I'm reading the Robin Cook books about a pair of Medical
Examiners, and some of the items mentioned may well be so advanced --
how advanced may they be? -- so advanced that they don't actually
exist yet.

Which kinda-sorta makes them SF, I suppose.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.12
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Paul S Person <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:

Heinlein's /The Rolling Stones/ has a lot about trajectories for
traveling from the Moon to Mars with a fly-by of the Earth to get a
push. I suspect it is accurate in the sense that it was what was
thought to be correct at the time. It may also be accurate in an
absolute sense, who can say?

It's pretty close in an absolute sense, although I am not sure that you
can get sufficient precision from mechanical cams. And of course you
can't control your course once you have it set in, without getting new
cams machined by the big computer on Earth. That's a problem if something
goes wrong halfway there and you have to change your thrust level.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.12
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Sun, 1 Mar 2026 12:31:55 -0500 (EST), Scott Dorsey wrote:

Paul S Person <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:

Heinlein's /The Rolling Stones/ has a lot about trajectories for
traveling from the Moon to Mars with a fly-by of the Earth to get a
push. I suspect it is accurate in the sense that it was what was
thought to be correct at the time. It may also be accurate in an
absolute sense, who can say?

It's pretty close in an absolute sense, although I am not sure that
you can get sufficient precision from mechanical cams. And of course
you can't control your course once you have it set in, without
getting new cams machined by the big computer on Earth. That's a
problem if something goes wrong halfway there and you have to change
your thrust level.

Imagine trying to calculate a slingshot orbit, getting gravity assists
from various planets along the way, sometimes multiple times, as so
many space probes are routinely doing these days. No analog computer
could achieve enough accuracy for that, I don?t think.

By the way, Babbage?s old steam-powered ?Difference Engine? did
calculations with a precision of 30 decimal digits. Even with today?s
advanced digital computers, that?s still pretty unusual.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.12
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

In article <1ds8qkdt9f82vdmad3g5nobpuiidrqlj3s@4ax.com>,
Paul S Person <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:

Heinlein's /The Rolling Stones/ has a lot about trajectories for
traveling from the Moon to Mars with a fly-by of the Earth to get a
push. I suspect it is accurate in the sense that it was what was
thought to be correct at the time. It may also be accurate in an
absolute sense, who can say?

Rolling Stones has one of the few examples in SF of the Oberth
manuever, which is a handy way to exploit massive worlds for
free extra delta vee. Mostly sf uses rockets that are so over-
powered, they don't bother with the Oberth thingie.

As I recall, Baxter's Mayflower II did... to gain a few extra 10s of
km/s for a ship able to reach a significant fraction of C, using
drives visible from Tau Ceti, as a bid to sneak away from enemies
with FTL drives.
--
My reviews can be found at http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/
My tor pieces at https://www.tor.com/author/james-davis-nicoll/
My Dreamwidth at https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/
My patreon is at https://www.patreon.com/jamesdnicoll

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.12
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Sun, 1 Mar 2026 21:49:07 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D?Oliveiro
<ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Sun, 1 Mar 2026 12:31:55 -0500 (EST), Scott Dorsey wrote:

Paul S Person <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:

Heinlein's /The Rolling Stones/ has a lot about trajectories for
traveling from the Moon to Mars with a fly-by of the Earth to get a
push. I suspect it is accurate in the sense that it was what was
thought to be correct at the time. It may also be accurate in an
absolute sense, who can say?

It's pretty close in an absolute sense, although I am not sure that
you can get sufficient precision from mechanical cams. And of course
you can't control your course once you have it set in, without
getting new cams machined by the big computer on Earth. That's a
problem if something goes wrong halfway there and you have to change
your thrust level.

Imagine trying to calculate a slingshot orbit, getting gravity assists
from various planets along the way, sometimes multiple times, as so
many space probes are routinely doing these days. No analog computer
could achieve enough accuracy for that, I don?t think.

By the way, Babbage?s old steam-powered ?Difference Engine? did
calculations with a precision of 30 decimal digits. Even with today?s >advanced digital computers, that?s still pretty unusual.

It's not entirely clear whether, when they all try to compute
solutions for a given maneuver (the trip to Mars turns out to be more
exciting than planned), they are using anything more than
pencil-and-paper (or perhaps stylus-and-erasable pad).

But I didn't claim that /how they computed it/ was necessarily
correct. It is the description of how such maneuvers work (burn here,
coast there, relative velocity with neighboring ships -- Newtonian
mechanics at its finest).
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.12
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Mon, 02 Mar 2026 09:35:46 -0800, Paul S Person
<psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:

On Sun, 1 Mar 2026 21:49:07 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D?Oliveiro
<ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Sun, 1 Mar 2026 12:31:55 -0500 (EST), Scott Dorsey wrote:

Paul S Person <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:

Heinlein's /The Rolling Stones/ has a lot about trajectories for
traveling from the Moon to Mars with a fly-by of the Earth to get a
push. I suspect it is accurate in the sense that it was what was
thought to be correct at the time. It may also be accurate in an
absolute sense, who can say?

It's pretty close in an absolute sense, although I am not sure that
you can get sufficient precision from mechanical cams. And of course
you can't control your course once you have it set in, without
getting new cams machined by the big computer on Earth. That's a
problem if something goes wrong halfway there and you have to change
your thrust level.

Imagine trying to calculate a slingshot orbit, getting gravity assists
from various planets along the way, sometimes multiple times, as so
many space probes are routinely doing these days. No analog computer
could achieve enough accuracy for that, I don?t think.

By the way, Babbage?s old steam-powered ?Difference Engine? did >>calculations with a precision of 30 decimal digits. Even with today?s >>advanced digital computers, that?s still pretty unusual.

It's not entirely clear whether, when they all try to compute
solutions for a given maneuver (the trip to Mars turns out to be more >exciting than planned), they are using anything more than
pencil-and-paper (or perhaps stylus-and-erasable pad).

But I didn't claim that /how they computed it/ was necessarily
correct. It is the description of how such maneuvers work (burn here,
coast there, relative velocity with neighboring ships -- Newtonian
mechanics at its finest).

The last chapter I read introduced a "flat cat", and the title of the
next chapter suggested something ... which this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rolling_Stones_(novel)#Flat_cat>
confirms and this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rolling_Stones_(novel)#Flat_cats_v._tr ibbles>
explores in detail the obvious question.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.12
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)