[LMB] authors goofs that bug me

[David McMillan]

Ed Burkhead wrote:
> Adventure novelist Dale Brown writes techno-thrillers about advanced Air
> Force projects and technologies.
> 
> But, he habitually got everything to do with satellite orbits wrong (up
> until I stopped reading his stuff in frustration).
> 
> In particular, I was irritated by a Dale Brown novel that revolved around
> Soviets killing low orbit satellites - which somehow were stationary above
> them (rather than whirling around the world every 90+ minutes).

	Really?  I remember DB made some gaffes in "Silver Tower," but I don't
recall him ever getting anything *that* bad.
	Then again, I pretty much stopped reading his novels after the one
where the long-dead character from the first book turns up alive -- the
retconning just got to be too much.
	Still, "Flight of the Old Dog" is still one of my favorite
slightly-guilty pleasures (I still have the PC game based on it floating
around here somewhere).

	I forget book and author, but I vividly remember reading through a
gripping crisis-in-SPAAACE scene and coming to a screeching halt as one
of the characters "switched over from the maneuvering rockets to the
higher-thrust ion thrusters."
	Okay... Ion drives?  High thrust?  Two phrases that don't belong on the
same *page,* much less the same sentence.

	A naval technothriller, "Choosers of the Slain," IIRC, was pretty good
(me not being a naval person, I'm sure some real boners slid right past
me), except for one plot event that just Stopped.  Me.  COLD.
	The high-tech ship that's the core of the story is under attack by
one-generation-older attack planes using laser guided bombs.  The
attackers are smart, using good tactics to overcome their tech
disadvantage, and the ship is forced to use its 5-inch gun in addition
to the whiz-bang high-tech anti-air weapons.  And one of the gunners has
a sudden brilliant idea, re-loads the 5-inch with laser-guided shells
(normally used for bombarding surface targets being lased by friendly
assets), and the shell "rides up the beam" and blows an attacking jet
right out of the air.
	The problems with this should be intuitively obvious.  Fortunately,
while a definite Plot Event, it wasn't critical, so I was able to
whimper my way past that and keep on going, since I liked the rest of
the book pretty well.