I agree also. But I respect Godwin’s story because it defied this theme.
If anything, his ending strengthened the more common type of ending. Acknowledging that failure is a real possibility makes success more of a triumph. If heroes always succeeded, it would diminish their accomplishments.
I always thought that the only furniture were the two chairs, and I don’t think just one of them wld mass enough. And I don’t think tossing both would be an option; I can easily buy that the pilot’s chair is essential for a safe landing.
It totally ruined it for me… both the engineering side of it, and the more social side of it. If you have an enormous spaceship with families and teenagers on it, and sometimes it launches shuttles that for whatever insane reason have absolutely zero margin for error, then for God’s sake you sure as heck make abso-f***ing-lutely sure that every single person on the ship knows that if they try to sneak onto one of those ships they will DIE.
And you also lock the doors and put lots of really frightening big signs, etc.
And while it’s true that there’s a tendency for people to cut corners, there’s cutting corners and then there’s cutting corners. When real world corporations launch real world boats or airplanes from one place to another do they launch them with exactly zero excess maneuvering fuel? They sure as heck do not. Why would the future be any different? In fact, it would be LESS likely that would happen in space, because if a boat runs out of fuel it can still float, and if a plane runs out of fuel it maybe can make an emergency landing, but if a spaceship runs out of fuel it’s just flying off in a Newtonian line forever.
The shame is that I can see from the discussion in this thread that there’s a very interesting idea there, but it’s ruined by the implausibility of the setup. If instead the girl had smuggled herself on board, and then she would have been fine except that one of the two primary fuel storage tanks got destroyed in an unrelated accident, and then they did everything they could with tossing out furniture etc, and THEN they did the math, etc., it would have been a great story. But as it was it just pissed me off.
MaxTheVool - you have some good points. - except for this part: "When real world corporations launch real world boats or airplanes from one place to another do they launch them with exactly zero excess maneuvering fuel? " - I remember real world corporations who launched the Titanic with little margin for error. and NASA launching a space shuttle when it was too cold for the O rings. and a nuclear reactor in Russia which exploded without a containment building. Engineers have been overconfident in the past. What makes anyone think they won’t be over confident in the future?
In sci-fi, you crank some scientific/social/etc. variable to 11 and break off the knob. In my head, this story comes under the heading of “pulp sci-fi”, which is going to be pretty short, and a bit old.
Suspension of disbelief is different depending on a lot of things, but given the above, this stands up for me. The point of the story was the requirement to space the stowaway, and the rest was only fleshed out enough to be a framework for the main story.
The future was a different place in the 50’s than it is these days. 
Except that the big difference is that they THOUGHT they had plenty of margin for error. Big corporations want to make money and aren’t stupid. So if they spend huge amounts of money on Titanic they want to be very very very sure it won’t sink. So they’re not going to calculate some amount of foo that Titanic needs to make it exactly across the ocean and give it exactly that much and not a dime more. Instead, they screwed up their calculations in the first place and made incorrect assumptions.
That’s very very different from having complete and totally accurate knowledge of all the physics and variables of a situation (minus stowaways of course) and then allocating an amount of fuel with exactly zero wiggle room.
Commercial air flights are only required to carry a five percent or thirty minute excess fuel reserve. Planes have run out of fuel in mid-air and crashed.
Having a second passenger on a one passenger flight would not be an insignificant extra fuel requirement. And while a spaceship that runs out of fuel might technically never crash, I think the ship has to land on a planet in order to be considered a success.
Now, I’m with you here. Plus her even finding out they were making a drop to her brothers world. Those each respresent bigger plot holes to me than an emergency craft which is both expensive enough and reliable enough to set-up the story. Plus, IIRC, it had never happened to a kid before. Always in the past it was a desperate criminal fleeing something serious enough that it was worth being dumped on some hard scrabble outpost, and who cared about them.
I still don’t find it that hard to believe, you could have 2 people on a damaged aircraft with 1 parachute today, ‘both of us can die or one of us can die, and you shouldn’t even be here.’
The main problem with the Titanic — given that it was in fact sinkable after all — was the insufficient number of lifeboats for the number of passengers it was going to carry.
Oddly enough, regulations at the time required a ship to have so-and-so number of lifeboats as a function of its tonnage, not the number of people expected to be on board, as you might hope and assume. Titanic satisfied the regulations on this point, even though that meant the lifeboat arithmetic simply didn’t work out. They really, really, didn’t think that mother was going to sink.
If the Titanic (and her sister ships) had never been built, and the sinking had never happened, but someone had come along with a short story having that for a plot, I wonder how many of us would dismiss the story as too implausible. Too many weird and convenient mistakes, just to drive a story. Needs more work.
For these two reasons, the story bugged me immensely. I mean, the idea that the exact mass of the mission makes a huge difference is not lost on me, and it makes a truly intriguing premise, but this story faltered in it’s exploration of it.
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:eek:
Really? How do they even calculate the fuel needed accurately? Do they weigh the plane somehow? Although the luggage is preweighted, the carry on and passengers are never weighed. Not to mention, I imagine the weather/crosswinds would play a huge role in fuel expenditure. It’s hard to imagine the fuel actually needed being within a five percent tolerance of the fuel theoretically needed, even ignoring emergency rerouting and other sorts of situations.
I appreciate the point the story was trying to make but for me, at least it failed in that, I agree with outliern, if you can’t be bothered to make it clear that stowing away is lethal, well, then your society is built wrong. Yes, it’s very tragic and all, she even has a fatal flaw but it did not leave me with a feeling of damn, physics you cold but rather what a silly and contrived scenario.
They don’t weigh each individual flight. The weight of the plane and its normal equipment presumably stay constant. The individual weight of the passengers must average out and they know the total number of passengers. They weigh all luggage as it’s checked in and presumably carry-on luggage is factored into average passenger weight.
So they’ll figure something like, “We have a 1200 mile flight with 163 passengers on board so we’ll need 48250 gallons of fuel.” But if they took off with 150 extra people on board, it wouldn’t be noticeable from the way the plane was flying but it would have an effect on the amount of fuel being used.
That’s the equivalent of what the story said. The fuel was determined for a one passenger flight but there was a second passenger on board. That’s not something you’re going to notice when you launch. And it’s not like you’re going to need a reserve for bad weather during a space flight.
I first read this as a kid when I was getting into SF. It was part of a collection of SF short stories, and I found it… “traumatic”, I think would be the right word. To me it’s a horror story… an SF horror story perhaps, but horror nonetheless.
Not to say that Cold Equation was pivotal at all, just that was around the same time and reading this thread has reminded me: When I first read this story it would be around the time I was realising that I had no belief in religion. My folks were lackluster Presbyterians – though I think they really sent me and my brother to Sunday school so as to get a morning alone – and there came a point where I realised that this religion meant no more to me than the Greek mythology I was reading about; the message of the story that the universe doesn’t care wasn’t lost on this young reader.
It is precisely that. And not only that… There have been airplane crashes due to miscalculations in the weight of the passengers and luggage that took the airplane’s center of balance too far away from its proper position (mostly in small aircraft, like Cessnas and such).
There even was a crash (no survivors) of a commercial airplane (one of those smaller airplanes that “feed” passengers to a hub) because, although the pilots had done their math well, the data used to calculate the center of balance were obsolete (!!) With time, people had steadily become fatter and carried more weight in their luggage.
The accident in question took place on January 8, 2003 (Air Midwest Flight 5481).
This incident, among others, ended up forcing an update of the tables used to calculate passenger weight in aircraft. Copied from this link:
Standard Average Passenger Weights
Summer
======
New, in lb.* Previous, in lb.
Average adult passenger weight 190 160
Adult male 200 175
Adult female 179 135
Child 2-13 82 80
Winter
======
New, in lb.* Previous, in lb.
Average adult passenger weight 195 165
Adult male 205 180
Adult female 184 140
Child 2-13 87 80
*Includes 16 lb. for personal items and carry-on bags
New averages for passengers are based on actual weighing of 9,000 individuals
under a National Centers for Disease Control program. A 5-lb. spread between
summer and winter weights reflects heavier winter clothing. Given the magnitude
of change, the FAA plans to routinely update figures. The latest advisory
circular assumes a 50-50 split between male and female passengers. The
previous circular assumed a 60-40 ratio.
So, indeed, passenger weight estimation can be a life-or-death issue!
I’ve been on flights (in small planes connecting to a hub) where the flight attendants had to ask some passengers to move to different seats to get the balance right.
[QUOTE=Chronos]
I’ve been on flights (in small planes connecting to a hub) where the flight attendants had to ask some passengers to move to different seats to get the balance right.
[/QUOTE]
Smart cookies, those flight attendants.
In computer science, the partition problem is an NP-complete problem. The problem is to decide whether a given multiset of integers can be partitioned into two “halves” that have the same sum. …
*
I’ve never read the story, but it’s already bugging me just from your description. Come on, they couldn’t find something of equal mass to the girl to jettison?
A better moral would be “Gravity doesn’t care if a mass is a girl or a hunk of metal, so don’t go killing girls for dumb reasons and then trying to blame it on physics.”
I can’t empathize very well with a dumb young teenager to start with, but beyond that, I just have a problem with not throwing stuff out, instead of a girl.
This was an emergency craft for short one-way trips. Presumably it was designed so that there wasn’t a hundred pounds of extraneous mass on board.
I once read a poem about this story and the author had, in my opinion, a very off-base idea about the point of the story. This poet thought that the story was misogynistic - that Godwin was claiming that space was for men and women didn’t belong there.