C James

I have to admit that I was beginning to think that nothing would come from that tip. It sure is good that he's out of there! However, and I hate to tbe downer here, I wonder just what things are like at that group home? Going by Vance's other stories, let's just say that foster homes and such aren't the nicest of places.

I think I liked the advice for story promotions and the interviews the best. Though, it's hard to decide. One thing for sure, it's GREAT for future reference material due to the story promotion section, the Editing tips section, and a few others too.

I loved the battle, tactics, and "real feel". I really loved the "there goes the swimming pool" line! (uhoh, Emoe, we agree on something! ) I wonder how badly the Adamant is damaged? It's still toe-to-toe with cruisers. Hmmm, they have (I think) the velocity, so I wonder if they will escape by jumping? Though, they are damaged... Vic, I know exactly what you mean about that scroll bar! I hate that thing when reading one of DK's chapters! I've often said that the one thing I hate about DK's chapters is that they end. Thank you DK and EMoe for an absolutely awesome chapter, complete with a diabolical cliffie!

What? Me??? That can't be!! That's slanderous!! How could you say such a thing?? I made my 1000th post in this very thread on... August 15th!! And it's now October 6th!! Oh. Ummm, The Post Counter is broken!! Yeah, that's it! You know how much I value my precious reputation as a shy and quiet lurker...

A heads up for anyone who hasn't seen it yet: there are a few paragraphs from Dom's With Trust, chapter 12, in the GAzette newsletter. It's on page 2. Please don't copy the materiel here as it was only for the newsletter. And THANK YOU to Dom Luka for letting us have this sneak peek!! Y'all might want to take a look around the rest of the newsletter too. There is a lot of info there, including news on what quite a few of the other Authors are up to.

Congratulations EMoe!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :great: Does this mean I can tease you about being a postaholic?

Happy Birthday Jared!!!

One thing I think everyone can agree on: BOTH parties have their bad actors. BOTH parties have at times been reluctant to deal with them. Thanks for posting the list, Nick. It's always good to see both sides of every issue. My own personal opinion: I think both parties have massive flaws, and need to fix them, and learn to speak out against malfeasance in office regardless of whether the problem is on the other side of the political aisle or their own. I'm against corruption, period.

Wow, this was a good one! I was wondering how that approaching fleet would be delayed, and that method made perfect sense! Clever!!! Well, my predictions of a dangerous and eventful trip to the Adamant proved quite false. Brilliant tactics! Eh, one of the best chapters yet!!!!!!

Sorry to hear it went to "car heaven" (I love that term BTW!). But, if there is a lot wrong, that's probably for the best. Once a car gets to a certain point, it becomes unreliable and a maintenance nightmare (and enormously expensive).

Jack, get writing, because we don't want Conner to have an anxiety attack. Have you ever seen a Goat with an anxiety attack? Not something you want to see, trust me! <shudder>

Psssst, Emoe, I just spotted an i that's missing it's dot! EDITOR ERROR!! MUAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! (hmm, how odd that it's now dotted, right after I cleaned my computer screen.). I usually re-read the chapter a couple of days before a new one is expected, so that last one is fresh in my mind. I almost always find things that I missed in my first read. I've often said that the thing I hate about DK's chapters is that they end. BTW, there is a rumor (actually, based on DK's blog) that we might get two chapters of DoH this week! I'm still betting that Garret has a very eventful journey to the Adamant. I'm also betting that the other side has a few nasty surprises in their arsenal, too.

I have no idea what a positively rabid poster would look like but definitely, high-posting people can be useful in a forum. Author involvement is the single biggest factor in keeping a forum moving. Certainly there are some who don't need to do this, but if forum activity slows down, nothing helps as much as Author involvement. There are other methods that help a great deal, such as enlisting frequent posters to help keep the conversations on topic (if that's what the Author prefers). This is easy for a poster to do; they just reply to the last off-topic post and have the latter part of their post address the actual topic, preferably in a way that will spur conversation. Many posters would enjoy doing this as a way to help, as a way of saying "thank you" to the Authors who give us all these wonderful stories. There is also something brand new that I can suggest: GA now has a Writer Support Team, and one of its functions is helping with things like this. The Writer Support Team even has an Author Forum development section (which I lead). So, for any Author having problems of any kind with their forums, please PM me (or any WST member), and you will get help. CJ

They are saying now that it's an electronics failure, and will likely result, worse case, in the loss of half the main channel's field of view, which could be compensated for by longer exposure times. As a wild guess, due to the age of the electronics, I suspect a "tin whiskers" problem. The Hubble has been superb, and I hope it will continue to function. Frankly, I'm deeply disturbed by the fact that NASA has chosen to abandon satellite servicing capability, which the proposed "replacement" for the shuttle system won't have. I've been a fan of NASA all my life, but the planned CRV/Ares system (supposedly to replace the Shuttles) is in my view a horrendous boondoggle. It's "shuttle based" technology in that it uses (for the manned launcher) a single SRB with one extra segment as the first stage, then an Apollo style "capsule" for the manned vehicle. For the cargo launcher, it's basically Shuttle-C, the concept (regrettably never implemented) of replacing an orbiter with a cargo container and engine pod, which would give an enormous LEO cargo capacity. The concept is insane in my view. It maintains the very labor-intensive aspects (and thus costs) of the current program, keeps the worst and most dangerous parts of the design, while throwing away many of the capabilities of the present system. I darkly suspect that the prime motive was political pork: they didn't want to terminate any of the current program. IMHO, they should have gone for an improved shuttle, built with efficiency and ease of maintenance in mind. As things stand now, the Shuttles will be retired in 2010, while the CRV system is still in early development. There will be at least a five year gap between the last shuttle flight and the first manned CRV flight. What really galls me is the supposed mission: This infrastructure is supposed to be used for new Lunar missions. However, it will require multiple launches for each mission, as well as massive changes to the earth-orbital CRV system. What galls me the most: The announced the "lunar mission goal" BEFORE they had come up with sound reasons for doing it! They also still don't have them. The moon can be explored and prospected very well by unmanned vehicles (similar to the current mars rovers) with the advantage that they can be directly remote-controlled in real time. They could operate for years, dozens of them, for the cost of one CRV-based manned mission to the moon. For the idea of a lunar colony the CRV/Ares concept is near useless anyway: insufficient cargo capacity. For Mars? Utterly useless, cheaper and better to design a totally new vehicle with the possible exception of the cargo launcher (which i suspect will be cancelled long before it's built, the same way Shuttle-C was). Finally, there is the promised "family" of shuttle-derived cargo launchers for heavier and heavier cargo. It looks great on paper: just add a beefed up ET and SRB, just move the liquid engines to under the tank, just stretch the tank, etc, etc. The problem is that in the real world, you can't just make changes like that. The engineering challenges are immense and time-consuming. For an example, look at the p;an to add one segment (to the current four) of the SRB in order to use it as the main stage of the CRV: It will take four years, at the earliest, to test launch an SRB with a DUMMY 5th segment, and only a ballast payload. Time to launch of a real 5-segment SRB? 2012, at the earliest. And this, engineering wise, is far easier then their other proposed changes. We are being sold a bill of goods.

Not right at the moment, but more times than I can count! VERY irritating when you live an hour from the store, too! The person below me loves DIY projects, the more extreme the better: Build an extension on their house themselves, major automotive repairs, etc.

The part about Ian defending Tony, and Tony's abuse prompting him to finally act, rings absolutely true. I remember, years ago, reading about a case of a kidnapped kid who had mostly grown in the possession of his kidnapper, suffering years of abuse, and was finally motivated by the arrival of a new victim, a young kid, to flee with him and get help. A movie was made of this, called "I know my first name is Steven" or something similar, and he was re-united with his family. Straggly, his older brother became a particularly nasty serial killer. I sure hope that hotline call works this time!!!

Good points. Even in a regular war IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) is tricky at best, but in a civil war darn near impossible. Also, in a civil war, people are more likly to change sides. Our own (US) civil war has many examples of pretended loyalty (such as how the Federal arsenels in the South came to be stocked with so much artillery (the South's main source during the war) prior to the war. Or, in the case of the American Revolution (which by some definitions was a civil war, and certainly had many aspects thereof) we have most notably Bennedict Arnold, who did serve the revolution (including losing a leg in combat) before switching sides.

James, thank you again for another great article! I wonder, though, if they are missing something here? My first objection is to the notion of the star pulling matter into a planar disk that rotates around the star. The laws of orbital mechanics argue strongly against that. Gravitational attraction would tend to pull in matter from all directions equally, and in order to enter orbit in a rotating belt as indicated, the debris would need to approach the star at an angle, AND be imparted some very significant delta/v at perihelion. My personal take on all this is that there is indeed a belt of orbiting matter (a proto solar system) but that the matter influx can overcome the star's radiation pressure by mass: They are assuming for their model that the matter is at the near-molecular level (otherwise it would not be repelled by radiation pressure for a star of that size) but what basis is there for assuming that mass distribution? None. On the other hand, we have the example of our own kuyper belt and Oort cloud. Much of the matter there is in larger structures (proto comets, etc) that very easily could overcome the star's radiation pressure. So, I think, in my not-so-humble opinion, that they got it partially right: there is indeed a ring of particulate matter in orbit of the star, and that explains their observed data (including the ejectile matter at the stellar poles). However, matter beginning to fall further inwards from that ring still has the delta/v issue: it's in orbit around the star, and would be even more susceptible (due to it's relative delta/v and the resulting greater time of exposure to the radiation pressure) to the radiation pressure once between the star and the belt (and thus no longer shielded by the belt). The matter influx would thus primarily be by objects having sufficient mass for the gravity of the star to have a greater effect that radiation pressure (even masses smaller than a grain of sand would be sufficient.) For objects consisting of mainly hydrogen and helium, they would need to be larger, so that the heat from the star would not turn the mass into monomolecular gas prior to a close enough approach for gravitational capture of said gas. One effect of this mechanism would be to significantly increase the percentage of heavier elements in the later-stage mass infalls. One other item overlooked in the article: radiation pressure is not sufficient at extremely short ranges to overcome the star's gravity even on gas, otherwise large stars could not exist (they would drive off their own coronas and quickly lose their mass).

DK, you just never know when pirates are going to pop up and take control... It's always when you least expect it. As for a Jack Sparrow fetish... Does thinking that Johnny Depp is kinda hot in that role count? Hmmmm, yes, Empire of religious zealots with a suddenly weakened neighbor that they have been trying to conquer for decades, yep, nothing to worry about... BTW, I particularly liked the approaching armored column and it turning out to be not what they initially thought. That was great!

Thanks Glomph!! It looks like that is a definite problem. Thank you Trebs!!! Those are good ideas, thanks for the insight. Thanks!! But I have to ask, what would lure you into participating in something like this? :-) ROFL! Well, yes, there is that! No, I didn't post the progress. Once it was zero on the first day of all the questions being online, I knew it was a flop. At that point, all encouraging one or two participants would have done would have been to cause the participating Authors to have to produce the prize for a failed effort, and I didn't want to do that to them. Thanks everyone, all the responses have been very helpful, and every opinion is and will be looked into.

I loved that attention to procedure too, and it sure "fit" given the command and control procedures in our day and age. It was also smart politically: It emphasized normality, always a good idea in a crisis. I'm wondering when the pirates will make their appearance. I'm also very curious to see how the arrival of that fleet is delayed. I'm also wondering what Sol's role in all this is. Even if uninvolved, surely they will seize the opportunity and strike? GREAT chapter!! Thank you DK and Emoe!!

I've said it before and I'll say it again; What an Author chooses to work on is their own business. There is no excuse, none, for harassing an author via e-mail! Well, ok, there is one way: Cash Bribery (any objections?). Other than trying that, all whining accomplishes is discouraging a writer from writing. Just my opinion. DK, thank you for the many chapters of DoT (and all the other stories) that you have given us. CJ

*Adam* isn't just interested in a pretty face, he wants someone who will actually speak...words. Nah, blind as a bat! A serious thought though: Joe's "Hypothetical friend" <cough> assumes the object of his interest knows he is gay, because he "basically told him". Now, we all know that assumptions are bad, so perhaps the real issue is that the person of interest does not know that the, errrr, hypothetical friend is either gay or interested? Perhaps the Hypothetical friend could ask the object d'interest's opinion on which photo to pick?

Thanks Kurt! I think it's near unanimous that the difficulty was too high. I'm learning a great deal from all the feedback (thank you everyone!!) Thanks Juss!! I think that what you mention was the biggest problem. Thanks Nick! That's an itreguing idea!!! That way everyone would be on an even footing, and they are short stories! I don't know the release date for the fall anthology, but I seem to recall it being around the very end of October. I very much doubt that we could get everything approved and ready in time for this anthology, but I'll ask about if for future anthologies. Thanks Jack, and everyone. Any and all feedback is VERY much appreciated!!!! CJ