Novel Excerpt

[stickmaker]

Excerpt from a hard SF novel in progress:

"All I've heard from you and the others about how this drive works are vague analogies," said Waide. "What's the math like?"

"Difficult," said Bailey, with a grimace. "To get a straight plot of a particular function, we had to use a base-e logarithmic scale on one leg and a base two-point-eight logarithmic scale on the other."

"That's... more than I want to take on," said Waide, looking stunned.

"It gets worse," said Bailey, with a slight tic in his left eye. "The field strength is measured in cubic Watts."

Comments

[kengr]

That's bizarre. And I can't see how "cubic Watts" makes any sense as a unit of field strength, the dimensions (units) don't match up.

[filkermanque.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking that Bailey is perhaps tugging on Waide's leg.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Drat. Caught. :-)

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

It's hyperspatial. :-^)

[kengr]

Sorry, won't wash. Dimensional anablysis is a very handy skill. Helps you make sure the units on both sides of an equation match up.

And "field strength" has to have units of "field" (force? Energy?) per area/volume/hypervolume.

Watts are kg m^2/s^2
"cubic watts" would be kg^3 m^6/s^6
You say it's hyperspatial? Ok, divide by m^4. Which leaves us with kg^3 m^2/s^6... peculiar sort of "field" doesn't *begin* to describe it.

(ie, if you are gonna make shit up, make sure it passes a first glance analysis :-)

Now, if you can figure out doubletalk that makes "sense" (Star Trek fails almost immediately) you can string along the mark a lot longer.