Writing.Com General Discussion

Research is kind of a default mode for me. I see a TV series set in Korea during the Joseon or other period, and want to know when that was, so look it up. This is how I learnt that 'Korea' comes from and is in reference to the earlier Gogoryo period. Literally anything that sparks my interest, I'll look it up - who was Tsun Tsu, and when did he/they write The Art of War (Tsun Tsu may have been more than one person, although Tsun Bin, purported to have been his son and author of the second volume of The Art of War was a real person), or what is the chemical formula for hydrazine (H4N2) - and why it shouldn't be confused with tetrazadiene (H2N4).

When it comes to my writing, I don't shy away from stuff I don't know - as long as I can look it up and check my facts so I can be relatively sure I'm getting it right. To this end I wrote some software so Sci-Fi writers could perform calculations for all things orbital or gravitational - what the period of an orbit is, whether a mountain top can be seen from x distance on a planet with y radius, what the surface gravity of a planet with radius y and density d is, what the time-dilation is when gravity is g or speed is s, what the center of gravity is of a field of asteroids of given masses at specific vectors from each other, how much of a planet can a satellite see from orbit o, whether a satellite can be seen from the surface and for how long based on the geolocation of the observer and the orbital radius etc. There are dozens of such calculations and you can add and store planets/stars/asteroids in the database for later recall - and databases can be swapped out for use in different projects.