Friday, February 15, 2013

Error! Error! Ster . . i . . . lize!!

I am not NOMAD.  I am not perfect.

Of course, neither was NOMAD.  That's why it blew itself up and got some of its parts recycled into the Romulan Cloaking Device from "The Enterprise Incident."  

A reader just pointed out a rather embarrassing time/distance error in For Honor We Came.  At the Cumberland's stated speed of 10 c, the distance between Radhid IV and Rashid V B, approximately 4 AU, would take just over 3 minutes to cross, not "just over half an hour" as I the book originally said (this is just before the Battle of Rashid V B).  I can see what I did.  I went through the steps to compute the time to cross at the speed of light (1 AU = about 8.1 light minutes, then multiply 8.1 minutes times 4 AU) meaning then to divide the result by 10 because the ship is traveling at 10 c, and then forgot to divide by 10.  Duh.

Well, one of the great things about e-publishing is that we have already corrected the error and uploaded it to Amazon and B & N.  Anyone who buys the book from a few hours from now on will get the corrected version.  If you have already purchased, you should be able to delete the book from your reader (but not, please, from your account!) and then download it again, which should give you the corrected version.

No telling yet whether we will be able able get it fixed in the print version, which is in process but not yet final.

This stuff just makes me buggy.  Time/distance errors are one of the things that annoys me the most in science fiction, especially in movies.  Remember in Star Trek V when the Enterprise goes to "the center of the Galaxy," in about one and a half reels? Well, given that it is about 27,000 light years to the center of the galaxy, and even if we assume that the ship can go 1000 times the speed of light (Warp 8 in the Original Series was 512 c) that's a 27 year trip.  I practically banged my head on the seat in front of me about that one (that and the business about a Klingon ship being picked up on sensors but going unnoticed because no one happened to be looking at the right screen at the right time--as though Spock didn't have something like the "Back Room" on my ships where other people are looking at the sensor data to back him up).

So, anyway, it's fixed.  Thanks to reader RxScram for pointing out the error.

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