Why Revolution 60 is Offensive in Every Way
Deborah Crocker said:
Wu’s reasoning is that men “want to attack as fast as possible” and subsequently “hammer the iPad so hard that they’ll break the screen.” Apparently, women don’t do this, so Wu decided to make the combat and gameplay as simplistic as possible, even if it makes things horrendously boring and unchallenging. Thanks, Wu. My delicate womanly digits will forever be safe from the tyranny of those dangerous action games.
Also:
“In the future, an American orbital weapons platform has gone adrift over China, causing an international incident. Holiday is a member of Chessboard, a special operations team led by a probability-computing AI. Her team’s mission is to rendezvous with N313 and re-establish satellite control between the station and Chessboard – but not all is as it seems.”
<puts on shirt with scantily clad cartoon girls on it>
A spacecraft cannot "go adrift". At least not in the way a maritime ship will do when the motor fails. When the rocket motors are not lit, any spaceship will follow the laws of celestial mechanics, which is a branch of theoretical physics that describes the motion of free-falling objects under the influence of gravity - that is stars, planets, asteroids etc. - and has nothing, repeat: NOTHING to do with pastel colored horses. Under many circumestances - e.g. a satellite or space station orbiting earth (a much more massive object!) - these laws can be approximated by the Kepler Laws, which state that the motion will have the shape of an ellipse with earth's center in one focal point. The space station will stay on this elliptical orbit, in theory forever - practically, over longer timespans the orbit will change shape due to small forces acting on it, such as radiation pressure from the sun, gravitational influences from the moon, and, most of all, drag from the extremely diluted gases of the outer layers of earth's atmosphere which causes orbits that come sufficiently close to earth to decay - e.g. the ISS has to get occasional small boosts from rocket motors to keep it from succumbing to atmospheric drag and plummeting to a fiery end. The Soviet/Russian space station MIR was intentionally disposed of in that way.
TL;DR: When a spacecraft's engine fails, it does not "go adrift" but stays on its Keplerian orbit theoretically indefinitely, and practically still for a very long time (years).
Now, the Revolution 60 backstory tells us that the space station is "adrift over China". "Over China" seems to mean that it is in geosynchronous orbit so that it's orbital period matches earth's rotation period (24 h) and thus it remains always over the same spot of earth's surface. But geosynchronous orbits are quite far away (36000 km = about 100 times ISS distance) and thus a weapons platform on such an orbit would not pose much danger: in order to lob a warhead at a surface target, said warhead would need about as much rocket power as a spaceship meant to travel up to geosynchronous orbit, and it would take many hours to reach its destination. Also geosynchronous orbits are in the same plane as earth's equator, and so a "weapons platform in geosynchronous orbit over China" is an impossibility from the standpoint of celestial mechanics.
Sure, there is a possible solution: The station could be equipped with a rocket motor of high specific impulse, such as a nuclear-powered ion engine, which can operate continously over long times, and maintains its position actively. That way, remaining over China would be possible, even if the station is much closer than geosynchronous orbit. But in that case it is not "adrift" at all, but, like I said, maintains it's position actively, using rocket thrust.
<changes back to ordinary wardrobe>
ratings, I deserve them.
