Another one: If you can’t measure the ship’s mass to plus or minus one person’s mass before getting underway, the safety margin has to be bigger than that or else half of your ships are going to crash by the sheer luck of being on the wrong end of the error bar.
Think about it - if you need a pilot, that means that something unpredictable may happen, which means you need margins of error.
The “why didn’t they just throw some furniture out” thing was what bothered me. And yes, it did reduce the emotional impact of the story. I got what the author was trying for, but it just didn’t make sense that they wouldn’t have tossed out a couple of chairs or something, instead of jettisoning the stowaway.
A pilot was needed for one reason only: drama.
You don’t HAVE to measure it (though in this case it would have obviously been a good idea).
If you’ve built it and fueled it you know how much it weighs to fairly high precision. The only variable is the cargo + pilot. You measure just those, run it through the computer and you are good to go.
Keep in mind there is margin of error and there is margin of error. In the Sci Fi movie adaptation, the variable mass is the pilot and some important meds for a disease outbreak on the colony (which looks to be about the same mass as the pilot).
The stowaway girl has probably increased their variable payload unexpectedly by about 25 percent. In a future/place where space travel is very hard and expensive, but their technology is a bit better than ours, they probably would cut their calculations close enough that the extra 25 percent would throw out of the allowable limits.
Your are going to have margins of error for sure. But in the future when you can build and measure things to a high precision, IMO its not likely they would allow for a 25 percent error in the payload mass.
In the Twilight Zone episode adaptation, they do tear out the seats and things, but can’t manage to make up for the effects of her stowing away. I seem to remember the set as being very barebones, and they were limited by lack of tools.
Anyway, I agree with those who say it’s not the point. I think the TZ episode helped close up the “he could have ditched something” loophole, but the story is about an unforgiving wilderness, and also, I think, about the problems when you cut so many corners and don’t build in redundancies. Many of the issues he ran into were from the computers and people when he tried to do things against the usual method. There are the cold equations of physics, certainly, but also those of cost-cutting, bureaucracy, and following the rules.
there were many (dozens) of old time radio science fiction episodes in the 50’s on that type of theme. i also recall anthology tv episodes from the era had similar. stuff like a crew member brings along their lucky baseball and now they don’t have the fuel for the return trip and so someone has to get left behind; and it can’t be the baseball guy because he is the engineer (similar to steam ships where you needed a skilled human controller to handle the propulsion systems). or not unusual events happen which causes disaster because a successful outcome could only happen if everything was perfect and optimal at every point.
this can be caused due to writers who don’t develop a good background or take time to write well (science fiction spew). they do make it seem like engineers and project managers needed people to tie their shoes.
Considering how many thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people would make up the ground crew of such a launch (for comparison, consider how many ground crew are involved in a shuttle launch, which only involves taking 7 or so people into orbit), then somebody would have noticed. To me, it’s akin to a story in which some eager young reporter abruptly discovers the President-Elect has a criminal record.
Let me recap how I remember the Sci Fi channel version of this.
The colony ship is cramped, bare bones, and rather dirty/crappy. They give the impression (or even show it) the passengers are literally in the the hold of the ship like cargo. More like a slave ship or Battlestar Galactica on a bad day rather than 10 Forward. The professional crew/pilots seem to have a disdain for those passengers. I think the implication here is that they resent risking their lives for these people. I also got the vibe that colonies werent some great “lets explore the universe” thing so much as “the Earth is going to shit, lets get started somewhere else before the whole thing collapses”.
When they drop out of warp/hyperdrive/ludicrous speed they say/imply several things. That it is dangerous for the colony ship to do so (maybe you blow up about every 100 jumps or something). That it is dangerous for the little ship as well. That there are actual engineering reasons why the ship can only drop outa warp/slow down for a short time, not just because they have a schedule to keep.
All this gives the impression there in nothing particularly safe about the whole enterprise.
Small ship gets dropped, wham bam thank you mam the colony ship jumps away. Shortly after that, the stowaway is discovered. I can’t recall whether she pops out, the pilot just finds her by accident, or he quickly figures out something is amiss payload/spacecraft performance wise). Well, its too damn late now, moma ship is long gone.
They quickly figure out they aint going to make it. Well, lets dump the payload. Oh wait, its medicine that colony desperately needs NOW (like many, many people will die if it doesnt get there before yesterday). Also, her brother is there, so there is also a her death versus her brothers death aspect thrown in.
At some point, the pilot notes that these are extremely bare bones ships. Disposable/one use even. And he probably mentions a few things about how close they cut it blah blah blah. He sure as hell doesnt want to throw her out, and she aint too willing either for that matter. He knows he won’t make it with her on board. But with his and her desperation they do eventually figure if they can get X pounds off the ship, they can crash land close enough to be likely rescued by the colony. They work hard to gather up everything they can. Maybe even throw out some, but not all of the medicine.
Oh, at some point they figure this out. The colony needs the medicine because mining something causes it. The miners don’t know that, and I guess the big evil corporation/goverment was hoping it just wouldnt happen. So now they need the meds to fix the miners and to keep allowing mining.
Okay, they finally get X pounds together (so there was some margin of error allowed). Then, things get worse. The pilot now figures out it was X pounds back at the start. Now its X pounds plus significantly more since some time has gone by. Now its not enough. Big bummer time for sure. I think this a twist most folks wouldn’t see coming.
IIRC the pilot is feeling guilty enough that he is going to let her pilot the ship and he will be the one to bail out. At this point she realizes she doesn’t have the right stuff and if he doesnt pilot it there, it won’t make it, she’ll die anyway, so will her brother (who works in the mines) and all those other people to boot (cause the evil corp will just keep on mining anyway).
So out she goes (and the extra stuff?). I think it ends with the pilot doing a crash landing anyway because it had gotten so bad now he can’t even make it all the way. I don’t recall whether he made it with all the meds or just enough meds to save the already infected miners. I seem to recall part of the plot towards the ends was that he had to make it to warn the miners about what was really going on.
I cant be sure, but it might have even been so bad because of the passage of time, that ALL the meds AND X pounds had to go and they knew that if they (and eventually only) him made it to just get the word out that everyone would be safe (though mining would have to cease till the next drop could be made).
Given my shady memory, there could still be some plot holes in the Sci Fi channel version. But I don’t think they were glaring and could probaby be fixed without too much trouble.
Frankly, the engineering errors never even occurred to me. They’re not the point. The point is that sometimes you come up against a situation for which there is no good outcome, only less bad outcomes. No human engineering is ever going to overcome that unless we overcome the concept of scarcity altogether. There’s always going to be a non-zero probability of something happening that was not allowed for.
We always want stuff that’s good quality, delivered quickly, at low cost. Most people in my field say that you can get two out of three, but in my opinion you’re often pushing it to get one out of three. My point is, engineering quality is usually not the only factor in what you build. In our space program, it mostly has been, and even so we’ve had deadly accidents. But we could have gone more like the route Heinlein envisioned in his earlier works, where space exploration was handled privately, and much of it done on the cheap. It might have gone faster (depending on what the money people believed they could exploit as motivation for investment), but the death/injury toll would have been comparatively enormous.
nm… it was funnier in my head…
The template for many, many science fiction stories, especially from the “golden age,” is coming up against a situation for which there seems to be no good outcome, and finding a solution to the problem.
You’re right that sometimes, such a solution is impossible, and it’s legitimate to depict such situations in fiction. I, however, prefer stories in which the characters do solve their problems, through cleverness or courage or resourcefulness. I’m not a fan of Tragedy. I recognize its emotional power, but I worry that part of that power is the power to induce fatalism or hopelessness.
So do we all, I think. What make TCE memorable was that sometimes there aren’t solutions, despite the fact that people would “give the person a pass”. And the notion has a considerable power since, as I note, the idea has been used many times even before Godwin got his hands on it.
Ferret Herder used this phrase - “an unforgiving wilderness”. That reminded me of the Jack London story “To Build a Fire”. The laws of physics are unforgiving, indeed, & in a strange way the two stories seem related to me.
Not sure I’d consider the communicator and the drive control units expendable.
The point of the story is supposed to be, what if there isn’t a solution where everybody gets to live? The details are supposed to help us confront that question, and if they don’t, it’s either a mistake or a nitpick.
That’s a good comparison in terms of the environment each faced. In the London story, the protagonist made a number of cumulative errors through ignorance that led to disastrous results. In the OP’s story, the stowaway was ignorant of the “environment” of the little ship. It looks so big, so sturdy, what’s one person extra going to do?
Her bewildered response is reminiscent of many readers’ responses too, I think. Can’t something, anything, be done?
In the Sci Fi channel version the ship doesn’t look particularly big or sturdy even. The set designers and budget people were probably thrilled for a change.
I wasn’t thrown off by the lack of redundancy in the ship’s design, because that whole ship was the redundant, backup safety option. In this universe, you don’t normally supply colonies via EDS - presumably, you have regular supply runs via more capable spacecraft. The name give it away: the EDS is an emergency option, a quick-and-dirty way to airdrop (spacedrop?) supplies when delay can be countenanced. Sure, you could build safety margins into it - and you could back parachutes with arbitrarily large numbers of reserves.
But pretty soon, you end up with an EDS too bulky and massive to be carried routinely by motherships - and now you’ve defeated the point of the thing altogether, which is to have an emergency option light and cheap enough to be ubiquitous.
Didn’t bother me in the least. I was a young kid when I first read it sometime around the late 50s/early 60s so that may have helped. But even now I’m always ready to suspend disbelief for the sake of a good yarn.
BTW there’s an excellent 90s(?) story called Think Like A Dinosaur with a similar dilemma at its heart.
By James Patrick Kelly - not just a similar dilemma; the story was a response of sorts to “The Cold Equations”; the description of the moment after the airlock door is closed is either word-for-word the same or nearly so. (Been a while since I read either of them).