A forewarning, I will be posting about this book in this thread, if you have not read it, be warned of spoilers.

I bought this book, used, from a bookstore, not knowing what it was about or anything of the sort. I have already read it once (when I bought it over a year ago) and am rereading it to absorb more of the details.

To start I will type out the first few pages of it which describes the way they actually get to the planetoid. Sorry for the spelling errors but I am not rereading it to check it. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] My comments will be in bold.
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Prologue
Out past the planets lie the comets. Some of them are so large that although they are ice-covered on the surface like a comet, they have a rocky core like an asteroid. They can be considered cometoids--half comet and half asteroid.
Some think that Pluto is the outermost planet. But Pluto is not a planet. Pluto is a double cometoid consisting of Pluto itself, only two-thirds as big across as the moon, and Charon, half as large as Pluto. The orbit of Pluto-Charon is highly elliptical and tilted 17 degrees out of the ecliptic plane where all real planets orbit. Pluto's density is only 2.4 times that of ice, indicating a small rocky core with a thick covering of ice, but Charon, with its density of only 1.4, is almost all ice(I don't think this is correct, anyones thoughts on this appreciated). Certainly these are cometoids, not planets.
The true outer planet of the Solar system (Must capitalize "Solar" [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]) is Neptune. Its major moon, Triton, is also a cometoid. Triton is made mostly of ice, boasts liquid-nitrogen-driven geysers, and has a tenuous atmosphere. Its average surface temperature is a frigid 38K, or 38 degrees above absolute zero ( K stands for Kelvin, the Kelvin scale. Water melts at about 273K, just for reference). Triton's inclined, retrograde orbit indicates that it was originally a giant cometoid that was formed elsewhere. When it wandered too close to Neptune, it collided with one of Neptune's original moons or its upper atmosphere and was captured, the heat generated by its capture evaporatng much of its original ice.
It is thought that these giant cometoids originated in the Kupier Belt, a wide band of icy bodies of varying size postulated to surround the Sun. (skipping about a paragraph here, just talks about the Oort cloud)...A few years later, shorty before the beginning of the new millenium, the European Infrafred Space Observatory was launched. One of its major finds was 1999ZX. It was the size of Pluto and Triton combined, and orbited at 35AU. (another paragraph talking about how they had not noticed it before) ...Fortunatly, there had been a breakthrough in high-speed interplanetary transport. It was called the cable catapult ( one of the things I like about this book is it uses this idea). Once a payload had been lifted into Earth orbit using large, slow, and costly chemical rockets, the cable catapult could shoot it out through the Solar system at high speed. The catapult consisted of a power supply connected to a long cable that stretched for thousands of kilometers, and a launching motor that rode on the cable. The payload capsule was connected to the launching motor at one end of the cable. The heavy nuclear-thermal-electric power supply then generated a sustained burst of radio-frequency energy, which traveled down the conductive cable where it was absorbed by the launching motor. The launching motor then used magnetic coupling to pull on the conducting cable like a monkey climbing a rope, (bad analogy if you ask me, an acclerating train is better, or at least I think so) and acclerated toward the power supply and the distant planet. Just before the motor reached the power supply it released the payload capsule, which would travel on to the planet, while the launching motor decelerated to a stop on a short stretch of cable on the other side of the power supply, in a position to accelerate again in order to catch an incoming payload.
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I mainly wanted to know your guy's thoughts on this book and the ideas that it proposes. That is about it for now, if I do come across another interesting part I will type it out also. Oh yeah, it is a good book, read it. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] -Colt

__________________
Be not afraid of any man no matter what his size; when danger threatens, call on me, and I will equalize.

Hi Colt,

A couple of quick suggestions to start with:

1.
Author?
Title?
Publisher?

2.
You don't need to copy long sections of the book. To save yourself writing time it might be better just to ask some questions based on what the author says, i.e. "the author states that Pluto is a cometoid. Is that based on real research?" (Or words to that effect.)

3.
You also have to be careful about having too much copyright material. Its OK to quote or paraphrase what somebody says, and refer to the book's title. (Sorry for sounding like an English teacher!) [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

4. Finally....
I'd be interested to know what the planetary astronomers think of Pluto these days too. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

Camelot 30K is by Rober Forward (I've got it also)

I've read a few of his books, and he is good at getting any of the science he uses right. Any errors I've found in his books are based on research the has occured AFTER his work was published--that just one of the dangers of writing stories based on cutting edge research and taking the next logical step [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img] .

There is no 1999ZX, and no object near the mass of Pluto has been found. Here is a nice rendering of the city on 1999ZX, you can view the image in a larger format.

And of course we've talked about Pluto's status before.

I agree - new discoveries can change the whole picture and the story technically gets off track -- but it can sure be imaginative to build fiction off of new theories. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

^ That rendering shows the central tower (can't remember the name of it) kind of out of proportion to how it is described.

Sorry about not putting author, pages, title, etc. but I was in a hurry to do something else. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img] Don't worry though, I won't be typing out that much again; I felt that the author best described the processes and discoveries in the book. -Colt

__________________
Be not afraid of any man no matter what his size; when danger threatens, call on me, and I will equalize.

or, read what Pluto it(him?)self has to say on that issue:

http://www.brunching.com/conversationpluto.html
http://www.brunching.com/morepluto.html

(warning: explicit language.)

[img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

_________________
There are two things that are infinite: The Universe and Stupidity, although I'm not so sure about the Universe. -A. Einstein

Trying to weigh up plot device and BA...

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: jokergirl on 2002-11-21 15:50 ]</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: jokergirl on 2002-11-21 15:52 ]</font>