And this is how you know you are a truly colossal geek:

[camwyn]

You're doing Follow-Up Week for one of your RPG characters and going back to revisit plot threads, characters, and situations that haven't been touched in a while. The one you're going to today involves a space probe sending back images of Pluto. You have a look at the current probe heading for Pluto and decide it's not quite on the schedule you want, but since your character is from an alternate universe where the US political situation was different starting from the 1996 presidential election onward, you look for an earlier alternative.

You find a mission that was scheduled to be launched about two years earlier than the real-world one, which got scrapped for budgetary reasons. Fine. You'll use that. You note, however, that it was supposed to be faster than the real-world one, and you find its proposed launch month and arrival year.

And then, because you want to know if you're hitting any milestones along the way, you come up with a spreadsheet giving the launch dates and Pluto arrival dates for both crafts. You fill in the dates on which the real-world craft hit certain milestones, such as passing the orbit of Mars, getting a Jovian gravity assist, etc. You convert the amount of time spent getting to each milestone into days from start of mission... and you divide them by percentage of mission time... and you determine the length in days that the scrapped mission would have taken, and fill in its reaching those milestones by multiplying the percentage numbers from the real-world mission by the number of days the faster mission would've taken, so that you don't have to necessarily know the speed of varying phases of travel, just that certain phases would've been faster or slower than others.

... and then you go back to check something and notice that you got the end-of-mission date wrong for the real world one and that's okay because it's all a chain of spreadsheet cell dependencies and you only have to change one number to get the other dates right.

ETA: Also, you feel a little bit guilty about giving the instruments from the real world probe to the canceled one and fudging the UV imaging spectrometer so that its capability extends down into the gamma ranges. That doesn't really help your geekery get any better, except maybe in the sense of Invader ZIM and the fires.

Comments

[vivian-shaw.livejournal.com]

You beat me sideways.

My best moment is still the realization that in order to create a believable cybernetic analogue of human retroviruses I would necessarily need to design a believable cybernetic immune system for it to act upon. And I did so.

I need to go back and write more chapters of my textbook.

[camwyn]

I have a disturbing tendency to use spreadsheets for RPG stuff and they almost never have anything to do with character stat generation. They just make a GM's life so much easier. (Example: I had a game set in an alternate Asia where the animals of the zodiac were a different set and in a different order. I had a spreadsheet giving the animal and elemental cycles extending all the way back to 3500 BCE and forward to 2200 CE, just in case someone asked for a date- because Auto Fill and Serial Fill meant I didn't have to come up with the numbers myself.)

[vivian-shaw.livejournal.com]

If I knew Excel well enough to use it without poking at it suspiciously like a protohuman prodding at a 2001 monolith, I'd probably do the same. I did crossreference a kind of concordance once using spreadsheets which contained dates, times, and linked pages for information regarding characters, but I never got anywhere near as in-depth as you.

[camwyn]

Oh, what my old instructors at Kelly Temps would say if they could see what I was doing with their knowledge now.

They would probably have to have their palms surgically removed from their faces first.

[mephron]

I forget - did I ever tell you about the spreadsheet I had for my Star Wars game to keep track of all the different NPCs and where they were when?

I had to include 'Darth Vader' and 'The Emperor' and some other Dark Jedi bits after a bunch of people did things with the Force that logically would have attracted a whole lot of attention in ways they'd prefer that I, a GM, would not have given that attention.

I ended up having to keep track of 17 different NPC issues - the Canon Movie Heroes, a few NPCs of my own designing, and, frighteningly, my old college Star Wars RPG sessions, just in case there was a chance they might run across those people.

It got... interesting.

[camwyn]

Hm. you know, now that you've mentioned this, that might not be a bad idea for all the background stuff for Ray- considering that I've been digging back into his past references this week already.

And it warms my black and shriveled little secondary heart (the one I only use for GMing) to realize that I have a character who actually has an NPC category accurately described as 'Screaming Foodstuffs', and it includes more than one such item.

[mephron]

Mine has 'Guy whose limbs are sentient goo', 'supposedly dead for many years sith lord', and 'sentient Listerine'.

The last one is a bit odd.

[camwyn]

Machine Lifeforms

- Category A: Artificial Intelligence

-- Subcategory I: Living With Ray: 1 representative
-- Subcategory II: Not Living With Ray
---- Division a: Friendly: 1 representative
---- Division b: Hostile: 1 representative

- Category B: Artificial Life: 1 representative

There's also going to have to be a Freaky Mutant Creatures category that'll include at least one fish and possibly some sentient bread dough, although that may have wound up going to another character.

[mephron]

...I have this horrible mental image of the sentient bread dough getting caught and cooked as one does cook bread...

...and spending the rest of its existance as if it had smoked some high-quality marijuana.

Because another term for that is, in fact, 'baked'.

[camwyn]

Given that the other candidate for 'person the sentient bread dough would live with' was going to be Annie, and that we had been speculating that the dough would occasionally wander off and drag home interesting samples from other bakeries, I now have this image of a small shapeless roundish loaf bobbling up to a bakery window and going "Oh, wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww, dude."

[agoodshinkickin.livejournal.com]

There aren't enough words in my personal lexicon for me to express just how much I love your brain.

[camwyn]

Add in the fact that I'm now jiggering the faster probe's arrival time at its final major milestone just to see what it does to the other dates... it might turn up something interesting, you know?

[drharper.livejournal.com]

*Places the HIGH GEEK crown on your head, hands you the HIGH GEEK scepter and orb and bows to the ground*

[camwyn]

Alas, choosing either a fictionally or astronomically significant date for the final arrival of the faster probe does not provide any interesting milestones any time in 2007. *grumps* I shall just have to have the visitors from Jodrell Bank showing up at NASA for some non-significant reason.

[batyatoon]

"...And as usual, when I say you, I mean me."

I adore your brain.

[camwyn]

I opted to go with the earlier mission because it was faster, and it was scheduled to get to Pluto in time to study the planet's atmosphere, and because it was supposed to arrive in 2012 and I thought something entertaining could be done with the Mayan calendar if I was careful.

Lord help me, Batya, I didn't even notice until I'd already started drawing up the spreadsheet that the first probe dispatched specifically to Pluto in Ray's universe was called the Pluto Kuiper Express.

[firestrike.livejournal.com]

Did you adjust for the different planetary orbital positions and the effect they would have on the route and length of the earlier voyage?

[camwyn]

Nah, I just used NASA's approximate start date (December of 2004) and year of reaching Pluto (2012). The only one of the milestones that really required the immediate location of a planet was the Jovian slingshot run; I figured passing the orbits of various planets could be handwaved without too much trouble.

[firestrike.livejournal.com]

Given that you're probably going into much more detail than necessary for your plot, that's probably a reasonable assumption.

I just wondered how far beyond the necessary level of detail you'd gone.

[camwyn]

I only would've adjusted for locations of planets on the Pluto Kuiper Express run vs. on the New Horizons run if I had thought there was even the slightest chance of turning up something interesting during a fly-by on or near a specific date. Alas and woe, given the dates for passing the orbits of the various worlds, nothing spoke out as being particularly evident.

For lack of a specific day, or even time of year, that the Pluto Kuiper Express would've made its fly-by, I arbitrarily said it would pass Pluto on my mother's birthday in 2012 and left it at that. The alternative was August 4th, but I didn't feel any particular urge to do anything with Judgment Day, so eh, whatever.

... and yes, I also went with a possible arrival time of the end of the Long Count of the Mayan calendar but I still didn't find anything compelling when I tried.

[sdelmonte]

I too love your brain.

What's more, I love the OOM and think that Kirk needs to be involved with this in some way since it starts with deep space. (And when he does come back to the bar, it's from a very dull and frustrating mission to Bajor.)

[camwyn]

I think something can be arranged. Kirk was there when Campbell and Bishop first made their mark on space exploration, too, after all. We'll work something up.

[derien.livejournal.com]

It's that sort of impulse which has caused me to take two years to get as far on the story I'm writing, now ("Swept Away"). But, because I suck at proper research I end up having long conversations with eor about it and then fudging what he doesn't already know. :) Right now I'm being silly about "How long does fever take to set in after a wound? And how bad can it get without having to cut the arm off to save the patient?"