The Martian
Atmospheres make landing easier and require less fuel! A big problem with landing is losing your speed which is going to be extremely high to begin with. On the Moon you can only do this by basically turning around in the opposite direction of your velocity and thrusting an equal but opposite amount. It's not only quite complex but also substantially complicates landing. This is made even true on the Moon because its low gravity means that even a hair of velocity is going to make you 'bounce' after landing. This is why things like probes and rovers landing (or at least ending up) on their…
Tangent: I think it's safe to say that HN -- on this thread in particular -- is populated by many people who are deeply interested in space travel. I'd like to recommend everyone select as their next book for pleasure reading Andy Weir's "The Martian". Here's my GoodReads review: It's not high-brow literature by any stretch. But it's not about the writing per se, it's about the story. I challenge anyone to read it without caring what happens to the protagonist. I recognize that he (and perhaps by extension the author?) may be borderline juvenile on a few occasions... but for me it hardly…
Hard sci-fi can definitely be popular, The Martian and The Three-Body Problem are two examples I can immediately think of. I think the Arrival and Contact movies would also count (not sure if the books were considered popular before their film adaptations came out). There is usually a way to avoid most of the "opaque wall of gibberish" so that there is just enough for a technical-minded reader to tell that the author has put some thought into it and the science makes sense, but still little enough that a non-technical reader can enjoy the story without having to care about the scientific…
Many many years ago a friend did a stint at a major publishing house. Whenever she'd show up to parties she would bring in a small stack of unpublished manuscripts, we'd all get into the wine or beer or whatever and start reading particularly terrible passages to each other. Had she sought out especially bad manuscripts? No! She just grabbed whatever was on the "will read, maybe, someday" shelf in the editor's work area. I learned about Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) during these events. Most people think what they've written is interesting, or unique, or worth publishing.…
Hard call: I'd have to say it all depends on the author's intent. Let's see ... at the time he wrote "Neuromancer" William Gibson had never used a computer -- he wrote it on a manual typewriter (and used the royalties to buy an Apple IIc). His creative vision was more one of social atomization and a particular aesthetic in a multi-national dominated future than it was informed by actual technology. Despite which, his creative vision of "cyberspace" got taken seriously enough as a visual metaphor that I remember sitting in on a debate at the W3C conference in 1996 between folks proposing that…
Do they really? At the risk of letting my inner hipster movie snob out in force, I've found modern sci fi movies to be bottom of the barrel as far as any sort of plausibility/immersion goes. (As an example, I was screaming at the screen for the better part of The Martian, if only for the behavior and attitudes of the acting "astronauts" when compared to actual astronauts in critical situations) Moon stands out to me as one of the few beacons of recent "hard sci fi", whereas many of the movies that got a lot of acclaim for having staff-scientists (gravity, the martian, interstellar to a…
Strange. The examples you say "made you grumpy" are exactly the three movies I think are the beacon of hope for sci-fi, and the trio of hardest sci-fi of the last, I don't know, five decades? Gravity is the least hard of those tree, but still is orders of magnitude more accurate than anything I know that came after "2001: A Space Odyssey". There are some issues with orbits and distances and maybe with the tangled-in-parachutes scene (though I believe it was correct, critics miss the frame of reference of the camera). Interstellar has only few implausible things - the biggest offenders were…
Haven't watched Interstellar. But Gravity is a (bad) joke of a movie, both from a scientific standpoint and as a movie in general. It's just a bad space action movie with very cool CGI. You say "there are some issues with" - no, the whole thing is a mess. They're using spacesuit rockets or a fire extinguisher to move between orbits that are extremely far apart, this is a physical impossibility that is central to the plot. But it managed to make me furious from the very first scene, with three people outside the spaceship during an EVA, and Clooney floating playfully around the spaceship,…
I've been reading a bunch of 60s/70s sci fi recently - the odd book by the likes of Pohl, Bester, Haldeman, Heinlein, Lem etc... as well as biggies like Arther C Clarke and Philip K Dick (yet to touch Asimov!). I've been blown away by how enjoyable and fascinating it all is, given how long ago these stories were written. My hunch was that sci fi would date a lot faster than most other genres (and sure, some of the social/cultural/gender aspects seem laughably wrong today), but in the best of these books the human element is so gripping that the sci fi aspect simply becomes a perfectly…
I've read the Martian. It's kind of fun to think that electric vehicles could at least theoretically operate on Mars. (The batteries would have trouble at low temperatures and I definitely have the wrong tires. The motor is sealed, but not well enough for Mars, and sand would eventually get into and destroy a lot of the moving parts.) It's also fun to modify machines to be used in ways they were never intended by the original designers. Fortunately a lot of the DIY electric car components are pretty flexible in terms of how you use them. For instance, you can get your motor controller,…