I finished page 116 of the edits so far. Only about 50 more pages to go.
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They definitely want to get slowed down – I would expect Ish to have a flashback to “We’re on a ballistic trajectory” from Full Share, with the planet looming out of the port.
The actual problem I had with that segment – and I did pick up that you had the deceleration issue flipped – my issue was in the gravity well maneuver. From what I was reading of their closest approach, they didn’t sound like they were coming nearly close enough for the Roche Limit to be an issue. As they’re in free-fall, it didn’t seem likely that break-up stresses would be an issue, though I justified it in my mind as being the locks between the ship and the cans – except that’s pretty weak, I think, with normal ship accelerations being what they are. As far as I can tell, for the accelerations in the Solar Clipper universe, you really don’t need inertial dampeners. Even the fast packets would seldom be accelerating more than 2-3 G, I think. You’d need artificial G and counter-G fields, automatically adjusting to give effective 1G on the deck plates, since you never have them in free-fall except when power goes completely out. My substitution would have been potential debris field around the planetoid from a recent impact, or maybe a moon breaking up, since a moon would have much lower structural integrity than a ship.
Over all, it seems like you got stuck with the idea that they were late, and applied ground-side logic to it that they had to go faster to make it up, and that kind of threw all of the science along there into a messed up segment of the mind.
Thanks for the example, though – it’s making me be much much more careful in my plotting of issues with my own science fiction idea.
Yeah. There’s STILL a lot of handwavium in my science on this whole series but having made such a big deal out of it earlier in the story, I felt kinda dumb for having overlooked it in that one critical point.
Well, it’s not like you’re Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, with theoretical quantum physicists on hand to invent the Alderson Drive and the Lambert Field for you. We have to do the best we can with Dr. Brian Greene’s and Dr. Michio Kaku’s simplified explanations.