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I'm a novelist and have an interest in space science and physics. I've been a programmer for more than 40 years and I like reviewing new and up-and-coming authors.
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Adjustment to Mars Clocks
The Martian clocks (keeping Martian time) on the Mars Weather page also display the Ls (pron. ell sub ess) - a way of describing where the planet is in its orbit1), and the displacement of the sun in the sky at midday. I noticed the value for this was out by some distance, and after pondering the problem (and the code) for a while, the penny dropped.
Unfortunately, the code was still generating a value that was out by 1/100th of a degree, which isn't much but it bothered me. It turned out to be due to a rounding issue, so I fixed that. Ls is now displayed to five decimal places. This value matches that generated by Mar24, a program available from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a branch of NASA.
Orbital Calculator v2.0.6 Released
Four major new functions for acceleration and gravity and a few tweaks under the hood. New functions include: Constant Velocity, Free-Fall, N-Body Centre of Gravity (in 3D space) and Distance/Speed/Time.
These powerful functions allow you to calculate speed as a constant, as constant acceleration or as increasing acceleration, as well as determine the common centre of gravity of any number of astronomical or artificial space-born objects. Any number? Well, within limits, but they are large limits. A couple of potential bugs have been squished and I consumed vast amounts of coffee. Anything else you need to know? Oh yes, the details. Read on…
Oh, The Facts!
There was a litany that writers used to be told, but is rarely heard these days. If you've been a writer for more than ten years you will probably recall it: “Stick to the facts!”. Does that mean your story ends up a dry, soulless, sequential list of equally dry, soulless facts? Of course not.
Sure, we want to know that Jack went up the hill. We want to know he did so to fetch a pail of water. We also want to hear that he fell, and that Jill patched him up with (of all things) vinegar and brown paper. Those are the bare bones facts, and they about as full of life as a sterile Petri dish.
We also want to know why Jack went up the hill - to fetch the purest snow to make tea for his dying grandmother. We want to know that he put a telescope by her deathbed so she could monitor his progress. We want to know that the 'hill' was the Eiger, and that by dint of the location of the grandmother's bed, he has to climb the north face, else she won't be able to watch him. Knowing as we do that he falls, there are stakes, challenges, excitement and drama.
Colony Three Mars
The third instalment in the saga is even messier (for the protagonists) than the previous two, ramping up the tension and the action, and making the solution even harder for the reader to predict. The cast of protagonists has grown a little, but that's fair because the cast of antagonists has too.
Colony Two Mars
Colony Two Mars picks up the story a few years after the preceding story, Colony One Mars left off. I really enjoyed the first instalment in this trilogy, but this is a much better, much stronger story. As the overarching story of the trilogy begins to emerge, Kilby's eye for a good story starts to pay dividends.
The story revolves around the second colony alluded to in the first part of the trilogy. Jann needs to find a cure for herself before she can return to Earth, and the second colony - where all the geneticists fled - might be the place to find it. The singular act of going to it is enough to trigger a series of events that nobody controls, even when they think they do.
The fluidity of the action sequences is nicely controlled, and little time is wasted introducing characters that are not important players, so the various characters are arrayed quite quickly. Knowing who is a 'good guy' and who isn't is not so straightforward though, as befits a thriller that knows how to deliver.
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