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"Conspiracy theories are big because they're comforting. Any conspiracy is infinitely less multiplex than the real deal, which is multiplex to the point of being unknowable."
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Heinlein is the first one to describe it as a "skew-flip", but he's not the first one to describe the maneuver.
The novel was published in pieces in F & SF; here's a bit more from the second installment:
Was Pluto in opposition? Or quadrature? Or conjunction? Nobody looks at Pluto so why remember where it is on the ecliptic? Oh, well, the average distance was 30 A.U.s that would give a close-enough answer.
Half that distance, in feet, is: 1/2 ื 30 ื 93,000,000 ื 5280. Eight gravities is: 8 ื 32.2 ft./sec./sec. speed increases by 258 feet per second every second up to skew-flip and decreases just as fast thereafter.
So 1/2 ื 30 ื 93,000,000 ื 5280 = 1/2 ื 8 ื 32.2 x t2 and you wind up with the time for half the trip, in seconds. Double that for full trip. Divide by 3600 to get hours; divide by 24 and you have days. On a slide rule such a problem takes forty seconds, most of it to get your decimal point correct. It's as easy as computing sales tax.
Compare to negative acceleration from Skylark of Space (1928) by E.E. 'Doc' Smith and turnover from Off the Beam (1944) by George O. Smith. Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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