#Barring an extra km/s that Verne probably is using to account for the extra drag of the cannon approach vs the rocketry approach | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

maeamian · 5 months ago

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Been trying to read Jules Verne's Journey to the Moon because it was one of my grandfather's favorite books, but it's also just fuckin chalk full of technical details about the orbit of the moon that I have already memorized for class ages ago and I am wondering if it is maybe the compilation of technical details that he loved more than the story.

#The story is good tbf it's just also told to some degree around the technical stuff #Which is definitely given a pretty central role in the story #IDK maybe it's less like that after chapter 6 #I am just having trouble maintaining steam through the third chapter of stuff I memorized for one of the two astronomy classes I took #One in high school and one at a college level #Anyhow I will get to and through this book it's just tough mentally #Cause of how much some of it feels like school #lol tbf some of these details I memorized by playing a bunch of Kerbal Space Program #I've been playing a real solar system mod pack and that not class is where I learned the delta v budget you need to get to the moon #Which they spend all at once but also which matches my understanding of the number pretty well #Barring an extra km/s that Verne probably is using to account for the extra drag of the cannon approach vs the rocketry approach #And also tbf I do not know the technical details about cannon manufacture at all beyond some of the basic materials physics stuff #They compel me less than the space details I do know tho #I also do very much love that the premise of the whole thing is 'Americans sure do fuckin love their guns'#Like the character stuff is genuinely fun and well done #It's just against every other chapter being a technical manual on some aspect of the thing #And a technical manual whose details I either know or know are outdated by better newer understandings #Like the creation of the planet section is kinda right but mostly wrong by modern understandings #But also does reflect the best understanding of the time but also I know the history of these ideas anyhow

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