Hi all,

How many types of slide rules need to be "greased"? Could it be that
a Pickett was first to the moon in this alternate history as well????

Roger Huffmaster


--- In sliderule@yahoogroups.com, Fred Kiesche
<godel2escher2bach@y...> wrote:

> Greetings:
>
> Found a couple of references to slide rules in one of
> Stephen Baxter's "alternate history" SF stories.
>
> The complete text of the story ("First to the Moon!"),
> written by Baxter and Simon Bradshaw can be found
> here:
>
> <http://www.cix.co.uk/~sjbradshaw/baxterium/firstmoon.html>
>
> (...and hopefully Yahoo will not screw up that link!)
>
> Here's some of the relevant text. I recommend the full
> story, it was pretty good, I thought.
>
> FPK3
>
> ==CLIPPINGS BELOW==
>
> Marsh could feel the reassuring mass of his slide rule
> at his belt. That battered old instrument, the slider
> carefully greased at least once a week, had been with
> him since his first day in the shipyards of his native
> North-East as a technical apprentice and every step of
> his long journey, all the way to the threshold of the
> moon. In his mid-20s he had been lured down to London
> to take an engineering degree at Imperial College.
> Despite his sour relations with the other students -
> mostly southern-based, fashionably quoting German - he
> had had little trouble graduating with distinction,
> and had moved on to the Royal Aircraft Establishment
> in Farnborough, where he had become an expert in the
> new field of space engineering.
>
> As the great lunar programme had been assembled, Marsh
> had battled to become one of the King's 'new Brunels'.
> He had survived a long and fraught selection process,
> where his obvious technical superiority had overcome
> the handicap of his background, his accent and his
> 'sullen attitude'. And now here he was, on his way to
> the moon.
>
> He did wonder, though, if Von Braun's mighty rockets
> required slide rules to guide themselves into space
> and back.
>
> ...
>
> Marsh's key role during the four-day lunar flight was
> navigation: to figure out where the ship was and where
> it was headed. With his small telescopes and sextants
> he took fixes on stars and on features on the earth -
> notably flares sent up from the planet's night side,
> with pinpoint timing and placement, by a small fleet
> of Royal Navy vessels scattered around the globe.
>
> The observations made, he got on with his analysis,
> using log tables and a hand-cranked calculator. His
> calculations were basically data reduction to convert
> his sightings into a form compact enough for easy
> Morse transmission. The big computers at Manchester
> and Bletchley would do the real number-crunching,
> factoring his data in with that from the
> micrometer-measured photographic plates that charted
> their celestial progress.
>
> It took an hour's intense labour. Marsh finished by
> cross-checking the result against his rough slide-rule
> estimate, then summarized it on a message form. In
> little over two hours, back would come any required
> course correction. It was satisfying, stretching,
> absorbing work.
>
> ...
>
> Without a cable of the kind Forbes had carried, they
> couldn't communicate. Marsh went back to the wreck. It
> turned out to be easy to push aside huge sections of
> the crumpled life-container. Marsh was clumsy in his
> suit, but he was strong as a giant on this little
> world. The life-container's lower compartment held
> equipment for the exploration of the lunar surface:
> seismographs, magnetometers, spring balances for
> measuring the moon's gravity, geology hammers and
> sample cases, even a couple of cine cameras. None of
> it a blind bit of use now, of course. He did find his
> slide rule. But the lubricant had evaporated, and the
> slider was jammed.
>
> ....
>
> Good story!
>
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