this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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I am a huge fan of hard sci-fi, but always hated Cold Equations.
The FTL ships can drop out of Hyperspace close enough to a planet for a rocket propelled ship to reach it, but the big ship can’t just drop the cargo off or have a purpose built cargo shuttle drop it off?
How do they unload the big cruisers anyway? Land the whole big ship?
The big ships run on such a tight schedule and rocket fuel is so precious due to weight that the computer calculates the fuel requirements to the milligram, but doesn’t allow for alternate landing sites? These supplies are supposed to be critical, but if your pilot can’t find a perfect spot instantly, or gets blown off course by a gust of wind, he’s going to crash and die on the way down? The fuck kind of emergency response is that. Like sending a food truck with no brakes.
The weight of a human when compared to cargo and vehicle dry mass is negligible. A margin of error for landing would easily account for the deltaV required to decelerate 100kilos.
The tightest moon landing, fuel wise, was Apollo 11, and even they probably had about 45 seconds of fuel left when they finally touched down. At the time it was thought to be 15 seconds, but later analysis found a fault with the fuel level sensor that’s caused it to read lower than it should.
Even in the 60s, NASA made sure there was enough fuel to allow the astronauts to pilot to a good landing site. And in Apollo, every ounce counted, the margins were extremely tight.
It would be a better story concept as a long haul trip where food, water, and oxygen would be used at twice the intended rate and that’s why the stowaway had to go. But fuel should not have been the primary reason.
I was 12 or 13 when I first encountered this story and my takeaway from it was that engineers are kind of shit at their jobs.
Let's assume for a moment that the constraints are plausible (they're not, as Zron pointed out): given this overwhelming lean toward unforgiving harsh reality ... why were there no security checks, etc. in place to deal with the inevitable occurrences when someone would be in a place they're not supposed to be upon launch? Good engineers plan for failures of systems, not just their presence. If those rockets are such utter and complete death traps, why was the security around them so lackadaisical? The engineers who set up that system probably also set up a 15cm wide stairway up 150m to get to the rocket without providing guide rails.
If i remember right there's a dystopian bend to it, like it's not about the scarcity of the fuel and more about maximizing profit at the cost of outrageous risk for those who can't afford it
See, my contemporary high-school complaint was “if the weight constraints are really so precise, then a successful liftoff would have already burned too much fuel because there’s too much weight, and this ship is doomed no matter what.”
To be fair, I learned a lot from that story. Just not quite what the teacher intended.