StarFleet Carl: Blog

To Chapter 27, anyway. I did give quite a bit of serious consideration to actually having this be the ending chapter for Book Two. In the end, sanity prevailed.

That, and I was actually concerned that not only would those people who are readers here that live near me - and you know who you are - but readers from other states and other countries would come here, seek me down, and chain me to the keyboard. Or worse.

Those of you who are waiting for Saturday are going, huh? Those of you who've read the whole book are going, yeah, that's for damned sure!

Oh, and Chapter 6 for Book Four is starting the rounds with the editors. I made a comment last week about spending hours in research. It hasn't gotten much better, if simply because the world (well, Cal's world, anyway) has gotten a LOT more complicated now that ... well, you'll have to wait for Book Four to find THAT out. (Hey, I've got to put SOME kind of cliffhanger out, right?)

Chapter 26 is in the queue for Saturday morning. I just did a quick re-read of it, to make sure that we'd missed nothing obvious. I'm sitting here going, what is this, Jason Bourne or something? Who wrote this stuff? Oh, yeah, I did.

I was writing a scene last night, and I got to wondering about something. So, I started doing some digging. First question was incredibly quick and easy - simple Duck Duck Go search. What's the exhaust temperature of the main engines on the space shuttle? It's 3300 C. Quick, painless, and easy. Okay, what's the exhaust temperature of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motors (aka the SRBs)?

Three HOURS later, I finally found the answer. It's not on any NASA site that I could find, it's not on Wikipedia, it's just not out there. I FINALLY found it on a site that was comparing the SRB to the Ariane-5 rocket. Mind you, I only needed it for one simple line in the scene I'm writing, but ... dammit, if I write it, it's going to be right!

Oh, and it's 3,600 C, in case anyone wonders. There were multiple websites out there discussing the brightness of the flame, due to the aluminum perchlorate burning, versus standard LOX-LH flames, but only ONE that I could find with an ACTUAL temperature. (I even found a couple complaining that the temperature wasn't out there.) I also now know more about the channels they used to deflect the flames during launch as well and how they were degraded after each launch, and the RS-25 engines of the shuttle were hotter than the F-1 engines of the Saturn V. And now, so do you!

Pretty self-explanatory. All of the chapters of Book Two on SOL are updated. All three file types on Bookapy have been updated. Again, just VERY minor things - spelling errors and such.

I had intended to simply go through and recompile the chapters for Book Two, and then post an updated copy on Bookapy for everyone. Then I started READING my edited files and realized that, while some of them were still fine and needed nothing, most of them needed a few tweaks. So, I've got the first 12 done and uploaded to SOL, and I'll finish the rest this week, so that NEXT weekend, there will be a better copy on Bookapy.

It didn't help matters that I got four leads and had to go show three houses yesterday, either. :)

I appreciate the notes and letters. I've about got the cleaned up version of Book Two done, and I hope to get it recompiled and up on Bookapy this weekend. It may have to hold off a week, we'll see.

Book Four is ... complex as hell, in trying to keep things straight, especially with this being all first person. Until Cal knows about it, he's not aware of what's going on behind the scenes. And there's a LOT going on behind the scenes.