#FallofDocFuture FallMisc MakersArk

[docfuture]

I would like to know Everything and Anything that you would be willing to share about Learning is About To Occur, please

Is he patterned after one or more of his crew? He's a biogestalt, AIUI, which means he ostensibly *should* be a modified uploaded lizard with a flesh-instance he can periodically re-synch with(unless I am misunderstanding)

(Some spoilers for The Maker's Ark)

    A fair question, and one I will probably go into more detail about in a longer post 8-). But a few things. The Learning is About to Occur is not a biogestalt--he is an AI, but one who was created and raised in a specific way, as a person, among other AIs and biogestalts (his mentor was an old battleship AI everyone calls the 'Old Lady'), specifically to avoid a set of potential problems that the Grs'thnk were concerned about.

    They wanted AIs that understood people and could be understood (to some extent) by them, had emotion-equivalent responses that matched to people-understandable ones, and generally *liked* people.

    The Grs'thnk did not want remorseless robot death machines. They have those kind of movies too, and know what kinds of failure modes those have 8-)

    So, strictly speaking, his ship could probably function with a much smaller crew, and more robots and automation, but does not, because that is not what the Grs'thnk people, government and navy wanted.

    Now, Learning has gotten a bit ahead of the curve of where the Grs'thnk expect AIs to be, and I've hinted in the stories that it is taking them some time to catch up. (The Grs'thnk have a lot of small-c conservatives because many more of them live to be quite old.) The Grs'thnk Ambassador and fleet commander are well aware of this, and it is one of the reasons they specifically wanted Learning.

    He is smart, well-socialized, and charming. He gets along well with his biogestalt team (each ship AI has one), his captain, crew, and most other people he encounters.

    And he flirts with the ship AI of the Primly Certain because they both enjoy it. But he does it openly and with evident good humor, because if a ship AI is going a bit beyond what was expected, flirting with another ship is a lot less scary way to reveal that than to just start making ominous prophetic warnings 8-).

    I am glad you like the character--he is a lot of fun to write. 8-)

[docfuture]

In chapter 16 of "The Maker's Ark", Doc and Stella are going 70 km/s in a forced low orbit around Earth. The story has them accelerating at 10g (1g gravity + 9g from a rocket), but the acceleration required for circular motion of a given radius goes as v*2, so 100g of total acceleration would be needed.

Yes, well spotted. I caught that a couple of chapters later, I think? But never went back to adjust it because it didn't affect the plot. They will be going at a speed compatible with 10 g when I take care of that eventually. I did get the calculation right for Princess chapter 9 (the scaling is with v^2 and gamma^2 for relativistic speeds).