all sorts of things....

hiya,

>Date: Sun, 11 Nov 90 21:39:24 -0900
>From: George William Herbert [email removed]
>Subject: (1749) Fixing Maneuver Drives...
>
>W. Dow Reider says:

>Re: newtonian violations...
>	There's a neat explanation for how to get reactionless drives...
>some work by one Robert L. Forward into negative matter shows that with
>some negative-mass nearby you can move by interaction with the negative mass
>but not using exhaust.  If you want to extrapolate those results into playing
>with gravity i just bet that you can get away with reactionless drives.

>	Robert Dean thought that a straight thrust-based system would work
>better... I agree, but pose a question: is it worth introducing incompatability
>if we have means to remain compatable ?

How about the following idea (would one of the physics types verify if this
is possible):
	You generate a LOT of energy,
	convert the energy into mass (E=MC^2, thus matter and energy
				are really the same) and
	then throw the mass out the back.

	You'd have a reaction-based drive that didn't consume matter
	(except that the energy generation would use up heaps of matter).

Would it be better to use your power plant fuel as propellent?


Now onto a more serious issue (sorry if this sounds a bit flamish, it isn't
really ment to be):

>Date: Mon, 12 Nov 90 13:40:13 EST
>From: Robert P Poole [email removed]
>Subject: (1756) TDR, TeX, character generation

>I don't recall who voted "no" on TeX, but I have to say this guy doesn't know
>what he's talking about.  TeX is not cumbersome.  Sending proprietary files
>formatted for one word processor or another and trying to convert them is
>cumbersome.  With TeX, you send the source file as plain text, and the other
>person can make instant use of it.  I assume that the people on this list are
>intelligent enough to see the advantage of using the net to write this thing
>up.

I would vote very strongly NO for TeX.
My vote would be for plain text (maybe include a postscript version that looks
nicer).

My major objection to TeX is that I'd have to learn something which I have
no desire to know anything about.  Even with the macros suggested,
I'd still have to learn something new.  I'd also have to know how to access
TeX on whatever system I was using (if it even HAD TeX, not everybody has).

What happens if I would like to boldface titles?  Creation of tables (rather
than formatted text)?  Subscripts?  Superscrips?

The point is I would have to learn how to do these things.  I have no desire
to learn a user-alien text formating system.  I also realise that the nice
word processors that I do own are not going to be any good to most of the
people since they use their own internal formats.

Everybody can use text (ASCII) files, everybody should be able to read them
and print them.  So what if they don't come out quite so nicely?  If we
seriously want to PUBLISH the results of the re-design then we can format
the manuscript after it has been written.  If it is as easy as was made out,
this reformat should pose no problems whatsoever.


>Look, let's be fair and realistic.  Fair in that everyone who wants to should
>be able to work on part of the project and have input.  Realistic in that if we
>only let a few select people do the actual work, it will never get done.

Letting everybody be able to provide input is exactly the reason that we should
use a format that everybody has.  I say again that not everybody has access
to TeX.

[
 I should note here, that I personally don't own TeX in any form.  I do have
 access to TeX and would be willing to learn enough about it if TDR was going
 to be distributed in that format.  However, I do not desire to learn it.
]


>About automating the generation rules:  Good.  I am glad someone suggested
>this.  We should make executables available to PC and Mac users for character
>generation, star system generation, starship design, and world map generation.
>We should also make the sourcecode available for people to port to other
>systems.

I think that I was the one who suggested it (which I didn't really do).  I
do think that this is a really good idea.  There may be difficulties modifying
existing programs to work with any new stuff we create.  The ship design
program (coming soon, it is being beta tested ---- sort of) should be able
to take most modifications without too many problems.  I haven't looked into
the other programs available to see how hard they are to modify.  Hopefully,
the changes will not be too sever and they can be modified.  Rewriting from
scratch will be a major headache.  Even modifications can be unpleasent.
(Does anybody realise the quantity of data present in the MT books?  As an
example the ship design program uses a data table that is quite big wc gives
the following figures (the table is human readable text with comments included):

    2138   21011  117516 dat.tbl

I realise that this table contains a lot of redundant stuff because I tried
to capture the special cases in the data table and not in the program (which
is why I believe it will be easy enough to modify).

This task we are undertaking is looking to be a VERY large one.



							Pauli
seeya

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