Pioneer - Get Ready for Launch!

Neal Stephenson's Seveneves is another one to read for this genre...
I liked that for the first 50 to 60% of the book then he went in a very.... non-scientific 'change things to make a story' sort of way.
Fully agree that the first part of the book seems to fit the Pioneer theme well.
 
It's a book of two halves, but the second part happens a fair bit later and is probably in more traditional Traveller territory. Although it remains pretty hard science. The whole using whip dynamics for orbital transfer was apparently worked out properly.
 
What I disliked about the ending is the planet has all the water boiled away, oh wait there is water deep enough to keep a submarine working for hundreds of years, oh we can live in caves for hundreds of years as the atmosphere burns, etc. We have tens of thousands of people living in space stations all looking down on the planet but no one ever noticed .... they are nice story lines but extremely hard to believe.
 
I'm not sure that's exactly how it went, but it's been a while since I read it.
Regarding the oceans... they may have lowered but I don't think they went anywhere near totally evaporating, Battleship Yamato style.
Edit: Nope, he went there. However that process took a long while, and the Pingers INITIALLY sheltered in underwater caves, only later emerging after things had cooled down and gotten wet again. I doubt the spacers would have had to do more than top up the oceans with cometary water too... even if it escapes as steam it rapidly cools off and forms water and ice. Essentially you'll get some loss to space, but most of it is coming back down eventually.
 
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