Reading a simple sci-fi space opera, humans against space spiders, mindless fun, and then ...
The protagonist's spaceship has to rendezvous with a space station orbiting Mercury. Fair enough. The narrator talks about how the station has to stay in the planet's shadow. OK, that makes sense. Summer's a bitch that close to good old Sol.
They then go on to say that Mercury is tidally-locked to the Sun. ARGH!
It's not. It's rotation period is ⅔ of it's orbit period (88 days), meaning the planet slowly turns to toast it's whole surface. That's been known since the 1960's. Frown.
Then, more egregiously, states that the station orbits at around 1,000 km from the planet's surface. WTAF?
A geostationary orbit for Mercury (needed to stay in shadow) given it's mass and rotation period, would be 240,420 km from the surface. Angry grimace.
Finally watching #ThreeBody. This is really great so far. I'm surprised. It feels like watching X-Files for the very first time back in the day. The writing is pretty good too, following the books fairly faithfully as far as I can tell. I was afraid they would leave out too much of the hard science/philosophy/politics of the original book. It looks really good too, cinematography-wise. CGI, less so. Very dramatic too, not bad acting. I hope it stays good.
It seems there a thing going on here on Mastodon: folk are sharing hashtags of what makes 'em tick in order find like-minded weirdos. Here I go. Stand back...