james_nicoll

Bah. That's not bait, just fannish triumphalism taken to the point of a mental breakdown (or the other way around).

If I were the head of a scientific organization and I wanted to honor scientific accuracy in literature, I’d start with books that had already been published. Something by Robert J. Sawyer, perhaps

That's Robert J. "dolphins are such great spaceship pilots they can dodge lasers" Sawyer, right?

If you let me rig it exactly right I think I can come up with a scenario for an atmospheric vehicle dodging orbital lasers.

Factors I need to rig: tracking rate and error of the laser system, power of the laser system, armor on the vehicle, multivector jerk capability of the vehicle, and acceleration and jerk tolerance of the pilot or piloting system. Also, I'm pretty sure the dodging has to be set off by a system with a reaction time much better than a human or cetacean.

Well no, you'd just need good enough sights to be able to make an educated guess where the laser optics are pointing and just juke relative to that.

I doubt this is how thingiemabob had the dolphins do it though.

Dean Ing did a nice essay about this in "Firefight 2000". When it comes to dodging orbital lasers (or at least getting out of their path before your armour ablates), the speed of light is your friend.

Oh, no. Those are as undefeatable as they are undetectable.

And powered by Helium-3!

But they had to get the fuel delivery tube from the Lunar refinery painted black.

No, don't be silly. Everyone knows you can't deliver Helium-3 that way. The black tube would absorb sunlight and the Helium-3 would turn to gas so they couldn't use the superflow capacity of liquid helium, eliminating the need for pumps. So that's the mirrored tube. The black tube is used to suck up the air from Earth for the crews to breathe. They only deploy it at night.

The only Seal of Approval I trust, though it has its own conflicts of interest is the Atomic Rockets Seal of Approval:

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sealofapproval.php

Freefall *nods*
Schlock Mercenary *eyebrow raise at ultra-science, overall nod*
Outrim *huh, must re-read*
Unicorn Jelly *...*
SF-Consim *this seems incestuous*

And I forgot to add the Atomic Novels:

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/atomicnovel.php

Unicorn Jelly is quite amazing - at least the hardcover version, with the extra exposition.

Before I clicked on the link, I thought this was going to turn out to be "twenty or thirty novels, no female authors".

That was my guess too. It's a much more common problem then simple nepotism. (Is nepotism the right word for their problem? Maybe "back-scratching" or something like that.)