James Blish’s Cities in Flight series. Most of the cities of Earth left for space, with these huge FTL engines called spindizzies attached. All calculations were done with slide rule.
There is a cover story from Astounding from about 1953, with a slide rule over a starship as the cover art. The story itself concerns the starship engineers efforts to create a perfect square wave for some reason. I think the title is Starship Engineers or something. I will post full details tonight when I get home, I have this one. It is the epitome of the engineering based Astounding story.
How pathetically nerdy would it be if I remembered off the top of my head that that was for the negasphere, not the sunbeam? Not, of course, that I actually do remember, just hypothetically.
It was kinda cool, though, that the Kinnison men had a ten-centicredit bet riding on it.
Would anybody be interested to know that this is true for navigation IRL?
The U.S. Navy supplements its linked navigational systems and radars with sailors working contact and wind problems on maneuvering boards with dividers. Contacts also are manually plotted on a dead reckoning trace, which is a comparatively low-tech piece of gear that has been in use since at least the 1960’s.
Obtaining certain solutions the old fashioned way is much more accurate, amazingly enough.
The Navy also has access to electronic charts, but prefers to use paper charts for shipboard navigation because they are easier to update.
Wasn’t that the one where Kinnison was embarassed to find that he, Worsel and Tregonsee were all off the charts in IQ, “with no corresponding emotional instablity” - unclassifiable, so the steno used an abbreviation like “HPT” - “High Powered Thinkers”?
(And if I’ve got this right, I’m really starting to worry what important stuff I’ve forgotten to keep this in the ol’memory bank… :rolleyes: )
From Foundation and Empire, c. 21, “Interlude in Space”:
So it’s not a slide rule, but it does indicate that the machine would only be used for the “routine calculations”. It wasn’t a computer as we understand it, which suggests to me that the real hard number crunching was done by the pilot, Toran.
You can remove yourself from the “pathetically nerdy” list, since–while you are correct about the negasphere (Gray Lensman, Chapter 8: “Cateagles”)–you’re wrong about the bet. The dime bet was about the search for Kalonia (Children of the Lens, Chapter 14: “Kinnison-Thyron, Drug Runner”).
I was, however, unable to find any reference to using a slide rule during navigation, which I expected in the “Dei Ex Machina” chapter of Gray Lensman.
And Piper, it was only Kinnison and Worsel who were H.T.T.'s (High Tension Thinkers).
Of course, Qadgop should be along shortly to set us all straight.
If anyone cares, here is the story I mentioned.
It is called “Galactic Gadgeteers,” by Harry Stine, and it is in Astounding, May 1951. The cover, on a black background, has half a head, a bunch of vacuum tubes, a spaceship, and a slide rule.
Looking through the story I can’t find any slide rules, but I think this counts.
There was an Arthur C. Clarke story in which the computers of a spacecraft went down and they basically used slide rules and an abacus to calculate when they needed to apply thrust, etc.