The Cold Equations/Headscratchers

"The powerful impact of the story—and it is powerful, no question about it—is based entirely on a premise which I find completely implausible: to wit, that a spacecraft delivering critical supplies would be designed with no safety margin at all. Oh, pfui. They don't make tricycles without a hefty safety margin. And I'm quite sure that if you traveled back in time and interviewed Ugh the Neanderthal, he'd explain to you that his wooden club is plenty thick enough to survive any impact he can foresee. He made damn sure of that before he ventured out of his cave. He may have a sloping forehead, but he's not an idiot."
 * The story has a lot of Fridge Logic problems
 * Doesn't the EDS have a locked door?
 * It's plausible that the EDS itself (if properly designed) wouldn't spare any mass for a door lock, but not at all plausible that there's no real attempt to keep unauthorized personnel off the flight deck -- there's no reason not to install a locked door there.
 * Not really that plausible. The mass of a lock would be insignificant compared to the mass of the airlock door themselves, and even if they had zero concerns about security there is still a reason to install some kind of locking mechanism; you don't want your airlock door accidentally opening in mid-flight, which means some kind of latch would be a necessity.
 * For that matter, some kind of fastening mechanism is an inherent necessity in the design of an airtight door; those things don't stay airtight unless you close them under tension. Look at watertight hatches onboard ship; they all have those dogs and handwheels for a reason.
 * Why don't they post a sign that describes the policy toward stowaways and the reasons behind it?
 * Everybody except the stowaway herself understands the implications of the situation without having it spelled out, which suggests that the problem is supposed to be common knowledge. That raises another question: why does anybody try stowing away on an EDS? Presumably the "brutal and dangerous men" who would try such a thing plan to solve the excess-mass problem by tossing the pilot out the airlock -- but if they expect to fly and land the thing themselves why not just steal an empty one (especially given the nonexistent security they seem to have) rather than wait for one to fly out on a mission?
 * "Everybody except the stowaway herself understands the implications of the situation without having it spelled out" That's exactly the one person the sign would be directed towards! Or, in general, people stowing away. That all said, with the logic this story runs on, you can easily argue that the sign would be extra weight.
 * The sign would be on the flight deck door, not the EDS itself. In fact there was a warning sign on the way in -- a generic warning against unauthorized entry that for some reason didn't actually explain that stowing away would get you killed. I hate to be Captain Obvious, but a properly designed warning sign tells you the consequences of ignoring the warning.
 * This ship of clowns clearly wouldn't pass a US Coast Guard seaworthiness inspection today, given that one of the occupational safety requirements is that warning signs must be clear, legible, and explicit about the expected hazard.
 * As regards 'extra weight' -- one, the weight limits apply to the EDS, not the mothership. Two, the weight of a sheet of paper or a few ounces of paint is negligible compared to the masses involved. And three, even if the weight limits were so absolutely psychotic you could just engrave the damn warning message, which would actually reduce weight because you'd be removing mass from the door.
 * Why isn't the EDS inspected before it gets sent on a critical mission with no margin for error.
 * Why is the security around the EDS so lousy that a random college girl can sneak onto it when it is sent on life-or-death missions with no back-up? The whole scenario could have been made impossible by making it standard procedure for the pilot to take five seconds to check the closet before each mission. They bothered to give the pilot a pistol just so he can shoot stowaways, but they don't bother to do that?
 * In mitigation, it is repeatedly stated that such an event would be a probably less-than-once in the career of a pilot type incident, but in the event that it happened the pilot was trained to expect a complete lunatic. And he may have carried a sidearm simply because he was a military officer. Also, idiot teenagers die on railway lines all the time.
 * Mitigation? As noted below, if the pilot expects any stowaway who might have slipped on board to be "a complete lunatic", he really ought to check while he's still on the main ship and can get help dealing with said complete lunatic.
 * For that matter, where the hell is the flight deck crew? No one noticed a civilian passenger strolling down from passenger country into the working spaces, then onto the flight deck, then onto a ship being prepared for a critical life-saving mission? Next time you're on a cruise ship in real life, try walking down to the engine room and see how far you get before someone asks you to turn around.
 * For that matter, you'd think that the last item on a preflight checklist for a launch being done under extreme weight limits is to, oh, actually check the weight. So unless we're supposed to believe our pilot does his preflight exam with the airlock still open and his back turned (ridiculous), or completely failed to notice the airlock opening and closing again after having finished his preflight and strapping himself in for launch (even more ludicrous), or took off without a preflight check at all (No. Just... Dear God, no.), this story is impossible.
 * Why does the EDS have such a tiny safety margin anyway? They can build "huge hyperspace cruisers", so why can't they make the EDS a little bigger and give it a decent safety margin? The things sound like total death traps, especially as they're used for missions where there is no possible help if anything goes wrong.
 * In the words of Eric Flint:

"He shoved the red lever back to close the door on the empty air lock and turned away, to walk to the pilot's chair with the slow steps of a man old and weary."
 * Spacecraft, all spacecraft, operate on a zero safety margin, because the energy cost of dragging additional fuel around with you is so mind-bogglingly huge that it is cheaper to lose a multi-billion dollar deep space mission than it is to add redundant systems.
 * That's a limit of current technology, not a fundamental law of the universe. The incongruity comes in when this situation is juxtaposed a universe of "huge hyperspace cruisers" luxurious enough to carry janitorial staff (the girl found out about the EDS launch because she was "practicing my Gelanese on the native girl who does the cleaning in the Ship's Supply office" when the order arrived at said office).
 * Moreover, its an inaccurate statement. Even contemporary spacecraft do not operate on 'zero safety margin'. Ever heard of Apollo 13? The only reason those guys are still alive is because they not only had enough excess oxygen and hydrogen still aboard despite the loss of their main fuel cell, but also had contingency plans for how to most efficiently use it. The Space Shuttle is even more capable than that, having enough margin that it has at least once successfully reached orbit despite the failure of an entire main engine during launch. From the very beginning of spaceflight every spacecraft known has been designed with as much safety margin as the engineers could fit inside the weight limitations, and the further technology has advanced the more and more they've been able to fit in. In a future setting where interstellar spaceflight is a mature technology, the idea of a manned courier ship with lower safety margins than 1970s NASA technology is ludicrous.
 * The statement "it is cheaper to lose a multi-billion dollar deep space mission than it is to add redundant systems" is also wildly inaccurate, because spacecraft that crash before completing their assigned tasks are total wastes of money. If the damn ship costs you several billion dollars to build at all, then that's several billion dollars you lose for nothing if so much as one widget fails. This is the reason behind the above entry and NASA cramming in as many redundant systems as they could fit within the weight limits, every time and all the time.
 * While the 'it's disposable' logic has been applied to unmanned probes, that's precisely because of the "unmanned" part. Spacecraft intended to be occupied by people had as much Crazy Prepared as they possibly could.
 * It is explicitly stated within the story that the EDS consists of a life bubble and a drive system. There is no convenient "extra mass" to be jettisoned because the ship is stripped to the bare bones in the first place.
 * The problem here is that this explicit statement is contradicted by the described layout of the ship's interior. If it were truly built as small as possible and "stripped to the bare bones" then there wouldn't have been any room for a stowaway to even fit inside, let alone successfully conceal herself from the ship's other occupant. Why is there even a closet with a closable door in the first place, if they never intended to put anything in it? Plot Hole.
 * It is going to decelerate at 5 gees for an extended period of time in order to hit the atmosphere slowly enough that it won't BURN UP on entry. The pilot is making a mercy dash to a research outpost where he will be stranded for at least a year until a mothership can retrieve him. No 'emergency rations', no spare change of clothes, the crash couch is NOT an optional extra at 5 gee, and the door to the closet plus his sidearm (the only other named ship components) cannot possibly mass to greater than two kilograms.
 * You just spotted another plot hole. This thing makes 5-gee accelerations and decelerations, to the point where the pilot needs all the additional mass of a reinforced acceleration couch to endure it... but the stowaway took that same acceleration sitting on a closet floor without so much as mussing her hair? The author officially fails physics forever.
 * He's going to be sitting somewhere with only one set of clothes for a year? The ship that finally picks him up had better have a good air-filtration system....
 * Finally, imagine the converse situation, a space LAUNCH where an extra 50 kilograms causes the ship to fail to reach it's correct orbit. Would everyone be crying foul then?
 * Yes, because it would mean somebody was idiotic enough to design and build an orbital launch vehicle that could be destroyed by accidentally being given two coats of paint at the factory instead of one. When you're talking about something that will cost you millions of dollars and kill people if it breaks, sane people design it so that it doesn't break that easily.
 * Why didn't the EDS have an automatic system that instantly notified the pilot when it detected that it was over-heavy?
 * For that matter, why did this ultra-minimalistic ship have a pilot anyway? It doesn't have a complex mission, so why don't they just make it a computer-controlled drone? I bet a computerized system built with centuries more advanced than present technology would weigh a lot less than pilot + life support + cockpit.
 * Granted these last ones are understandable out-of-universe because the story was written in 1954, when computers were still very primitive.
 * And it's odd how the characters never even seem to consider trying things like finding mass on the EDS that can be disposed of or if necessary lightening the girl by removing her limbs. It's not really implausible that this wouldn't have worked but you'd think the girl would have suggested things like that anyway even if the pilot knew better and since the whole point of the story seems to be about how sometimes there really is no third option. It would have helped to see alternatives actually get shot down instead of the reader being left with the impression that possibly the girl could have been saved if the characters used their brains a little bit.
 * Removing her limbs? Are you serious? What, you think he has a full hospital staff and equipment on board? Yes, there are people who have survived removing their own arm with a pocket knife, but they are exceptional. There was one case of a young man who survived having both arms ripped off by a farm machine and managed to call for help on the phone. But the odds of surviving that are beyond calculation. Exactly how are they going to remove her limbs? Hospitals use circular saws, you think there is one on board? Just removing one arm without proper medical care is enough to kill many people.
 * Part of the problem is that the ship isn't properly portrayed as "ultra-minimalistic". At the tragic climax of the story where the pilot ejects the stowaway:

- Emphasis added, to highlight the point that a real "ultra-minimalist" emergency ship would be like the astronauts' description of a Project Mercury capsule: "You don't ride in it, you wear it."

The story would have worked better, honestly, as an investigation of the Utter Cheap Bastards in the company hierarchy who were so cheap and shortsighted that they wouldn't even fork over the cost of emergency backups, reliable security, or at least enough fuel to insure a safe landing,or even the cost of a stupid lock on the door. The story should have been called "the Bottom Line."
 * The story seems to be aiming for an Aesop about how sometimes there are nothing but bad choices or you can't always save people from the consequences of their own actions, but that's sort of undermined by the fact that the scenario in the story could only happen because the whole EDS system was basically set up to allow it to happen.
 * Yeah, and that's a major flaw in "The Cold Equations": it's an Anvilicious morality play, and the dilemma's so obviously set up by the author that it falls apart the moment the reader starts asking questions like why they couldn't just lock the frickin' door. The story's sole purpose is to hit the reader with a gut-punch of an Aesop: once that impact wears off, the house of cards falls down.
 * It was apparently written as a Take That to the stories of the time, which always had happy endings, even if a Deus Ex Machina was required to make it so. But though "The Cold Equations" is implausible, unsubtle, and exists solely to drop an anvil, the same can be said of many of its contemporaries.
 * Two wrongs don't make a right.
 * The pilot also comes off as having a rather unhealthy attitude toward women. His initial reaction to finding the stowaway is to think that if she were a man, he could probably have killed him secure in the knowledge that he was probably some criminal or con man, but now he can't do that. With the unspoken implication that he can tell she can't be one of those things because she's young, female, and wholesome-looking. It might have something to do with when the story was written.
 * In all fairness, the girl did appear to be completely harmless. Harmless-looking people can be terrorists or murderers just as easily as anyone else, but they tend to catch people in Real Life off guard when they are.
 * All true, but the story does have some Unfortunate Implications in the way it treats her gender as a mitigating factor. All the pilot has to do to convince his superiors that a real tragedy is unfolding is say "the stowaway is a girl". Even before he goes on to relay her motives, they're taken aback - and just a few seconds before, they were callously asking why he hadn't killed the stowaway yet!
 * Though, since the whole story's trying to subvert the usual plot where the man performs a Heroic Sacrifice to save the girl, perhaps it was written that way deliberately, to call out the reader's own innate prejudice. Had it been a man, most readers probably would have been more comfortable with the situation. The girl's innocence and beauty don't do her any good: the story's practically beating the audience over the head with the idea that the universe doesn't play favorites or show mercy, so the first step of that lesson is to lampshade our expectations about who's supposed to live and die in these kinds of stories, by having the pilot and mission control share them.
 * That 'usual plot' was usual because that's the actual law of the sea. In a 'lifeboat' type situation with limited occupancy, passengers get priority of place in the lifeboats before crew members. The only exception is one crewman to serve as lifeboat officer, as necessary for safe navigation.
 * Woah, wait a second. How is the attitude that any random man is obviously a criminal deserving of death even remotely healthy?
 * The attitude also worsens one of the other plot holes. If the pilot's default assumption is that EDS stowaways are "warped men, mean and selfish men, brutal and dangerous men", that is all the more reason he should have searched the ship before taking off, so he could call for backup in case he encountered such a dangerous intruder.
 * Also, if such men were really that dangerous, they could well have carried their own sidearms and killed the pilot with the advantage of surprise, then jettisoned the extra weight. But well, that would have required someone in that universe to be actually intelligent.
 * Oh, get real. A strong and and hardened man who lived through dangerous life and death situations, is living on the edge of civilization, where most of the people he encounters are either brave explorers or dangerous criminals and irresponsible adventurers. He encounters a young girl. Of course he feels pity for her, and yes, because she's a young and frail girl. And that feeling is not an "unhealthy attitude toward woman", it's a natural human reaction which will hopefully never vanish. What is really an "unhealthy attitude" is to present it as a proof on some kind of oppression of women, and gender inequality and political incorrectness and other craziness. There's absolutely nothing wrong to feel pity about someone who is weaker than you, and is in mortal danger because of a sad misunderstanding. And if 99% of criminals in a border world happen to be strong and brutal males (because of the harsh conditions), then assuming a stowaway being one of them, and feeling differently when finding a young girl is not any form of evil and outdated and unhealthy prejudice. Given the demographics of the border worlds, being a young and frail girl is and should be a mitigating factor.
 * It's less to do with his attitude, perhaps, than with the way it's articulated: The constant, almost fawning dwelling on her youth, her grace, her sweet perfume, her blue eyes, her soft brown hair, contrasts sharply with 'If she were a guy, he'd be dead by now.' It's implied that a male stowaway wouldn't have to be a crude opportunist; being male would be enough for the pilot to space said male stowaway with far less hestitation, which may imply that females are worth more, in their vulnerable, innocent fragility, than their male equivalent. That's just a guess, though.
 * What this troper found bothersome was the focus on her youth and "innocence": She calls her parents "Mama" and "Daddy" at eighteen, she's a "lonely little child" ignorant of laws which are unaffected by her 'innocence and youth and beauty,' and if she had stayed on Earth, it would have been well-mannered parties and gaiety in the moonlight, because that's what a woman does in the future, even if she picked up a new language and was heading to a job off-world. We even learn that she probably dropped out of college and worked part-time to support her family, yet the narration (and, by extension, the pilot) dwells on her being a pretty young girl. And while it was probably incidental, having her overcome the idea of death to by stymied by the idea of being ugly when she dies, on the heels of the repeated noting of her good looks, is a bit.. unfortunate. Granted, this was written in the 50's, so that was probably pretty progressive, but...
 * Quite apart from the lack of security and the unwillingness to think of alternatives, one apparent oversight on the part of the author is how on earth is an EDS pilot supposed to get back home?
 * He's not... he is stuck there until he can be retrieved in a year's time. It's a potentially one-way mercy dash. Life's cheap out here on the rim.
 * Considering the EDS is a supply ship, it's not unreasonable to assume it carries its pilot's rations. Of course, it's not unreasonable to check for stowaways before you launch either.
 * Reason has no place in this story.
 * Rations for a year, or however long it takes another ship to swing by and recover him? He'd better hope his destination has a fatter "safety margin" than his ship, or they might have to draw straws....
 * You people seem to forget, he's landing at a colony. They will feed and cloth him for a year until a ship can swing by to pick him up. The colony has no trouble doing so, their only problem is the disease he is bringing the cure to. Plus there are likely a few people dead from it already, so he can take their place.
 * One short story entitled 'The Cold Solution,' (Analog magazine, early '90s) not only dealt with most of the fridge logic by having the stowaway being a cute kid who wanted to visit an uncle on a plague-stricken colony world, but proposed a working solution.
 * Is that the one where the guy cuts his limbs off -- you call that a solution?
 * The gal cuts her limbs off, thank you.
 * Well, they have regeneration technology, so that's not a problem.
 * The pilot/narrator mentions that regeneration only works reliably with children, so she thinks she's out of luck (although she doesn't think it will affect her career as a spacer).
 * Assuming the theory of cutting her limbs off would reduce the weight enough to allow the ship to land safely is workable, the idea that a ship pilot would be able to (medically speaking, the fortitude to do so is another issue) do so without killing her is rather unlikely, to say the least.
 * Er, how exactly does "having the stowaway be a cute kid" solve any of the Fridge Logic problems? If anything, a little kid sneaking onto the flight deck makes the Swiss Cheese Security problem stick out like an even sorer thumb.
 * The kid would weigh less than the girl, draining less fuel, so they have to dump less weight than in the original story, so they can get by with just jettisoning some limbs instead of a full person. This Troper has never read The Cold Solution, but it seems like that's where it's going. The problem of the kid getting onboard in the first place is still there, though.
 * The key wallbanger to this story is something engineers call MARGIN OF ERROR. The author obviously had no perspective whatsoever on how a decent engineer thinks. No engineer with a full deck of cards is going to design a spacegoing vessel--- several tons of machine, fuel, and life support (air, water, food)-- with a margin of error for fuel smaller than a couple hundred pounds. And if fuel was literally THAT tight, why didn't they make it a glider wing like the Space Shuttle, or at least install a parachute?
 * The problem with your proposed solution is that, as the title change implies, it changes the theme of the story. "The Cold Equations" is about how the universe is rigid and uncaring, not about how greedy people cause tragedies. The engineering mistakes are definitely ridiculous, though.
 * That isn't a problem with the solution. That is a further problem with the original story. If the premise can't survive even basic analysis, than its a bad premise.
 * Greedy and appallingly naive at the same time. If anyone had wanted to sabotage the UBS's mission, they could've just strolled on in, stuck a bomb in the cubbyhole the girl had hidden in, and walked out again. Or, if no bomb were available, even a simple load of luggage or junk that weighed the same as the girl could've skewed those equations enough to scrub the mission, with no radiant heat to betray its presence until too late. Heck, merely forgetting to empty the closet of whatever supplies it'd held before launch would do that.
 * For that matter, why does this ship even have a "closet" big enough to hide in? The most efficient allocation of mass (i.e. the only one that would be considered, given the "no margin for error" premise) would be to have a cargo compartment (with, at most, some hardpoints on the walls to attach stuff to -- certainly no installed shelving, doors, or other clutter to provide a hidey-hole) and a cockpit just barely big enough for the pilot.
 * It would actually have made more sense if she was just hiding in a corner of the hold; maybe it was originally meant to ferry slightly larger cargo, so there was just enough space for her to squeeze into. Having a closet is... odd.
 * In fact if they're willing to cut things as close as they appeared to the mission could have been endangered by him sitting too long on one side and altering the course by a tiny fraction of a degree during the trip, killing him and (since there is no one to jettison) leaving the entire population of the planet to die. Would have gotten the point across even better than the story he wrote.
 * I always wondered why they didn't have something on the ship that would light up red and go beep when the maximum was reached while they were loading it. Or prevent the ship from being deployed if it was over max. And if weight was such an important consideration, why didn't they have small, slightly built people piloting the thing instead of big bruiser spacefaring dudes as per usual?
 * "The Cold Equations" has been so long and so widely hailed as a "classic" that when Richard Harter posted the original version of his "Critical Analysis" -- a lengthy, detailed Fridge Logic analysis -- fans reacted in horror and outrage (or, as Harter himself put it, "The original posting triggered an extended discussion, conducted in the calm, even-handed, dispassionate style for which usenet is famed for").
 * Let me say two quick things in favor of Tom Godwin, the author of this short story. The first is, he DIDN'T want to kill the girl off. He sent the story to Astounding Magazine multiple times, each time with a non-lethal way of fixing the problem. It was the magazine's editor John W. Campbell who rejected each of Godwin's happier endings. It was Campbell, not Godwin, who wanted the girl to die. The second is that had the girl not been killed, NO ONE would remember this story 50+ years later. The cruelty of dealing with the situation in such a harsh manner is what made this story immortal, and I suppose Campbell probably understood that. The fact that it's horrific and goes against convention is what makes it stick out in a sea of similar stories. I mean, seriously people, how many people do you think would still be reading Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" all these years later if that story ended with everyone coming to their senses and abandoning their killing ritual?
 * It's true that it's memorable because it has a cruel Downer Ending. It's still an Idiot Plot.
 * YMMV clearly, because every 'solution' made above makes wildly optimistic assumptions, misreads the text or outright ignores the laws of physics as applied to spacecraft. The only complaint that can justifiably be levelled at it is that it is not clear in ruling out the impossibilities (every member of the crew, and the colonists, understand the situation so implicitly the jump straight to stoic despair) with the exception of the (huge and expensive) hyperdrive motherships, this is a very, very hard piece of scifi
 * The problem isn't the solution -- as mentioned above, the problem is the fact that the scenario is implausible in the extreme for multiple reasons.
 * That's not necessarily a problem, if you read it as a morality play. But if the story is an Aesop about an impartial universe sometimes requiring cruel actions, the moral starts to fall apart once you wonder if things would have been different, had whoever designed the craft considered a margin of error. Or, if that would have been too inefficient, maybe they could have replaced the closet with a button that flashed before take-off if the ship was over its weight-limit. Or maybe this carefully-constructed ship and its precious cargo could have been better-secured, so that random college students can't just walk aboard. After a point, the moral sounds less like "An impartial universe forces cruel choices" and more "Human error forces cruel, potentially-avoidable choices."
 * While "Stupidity can get you killed" is an entirely valid Aesop, and may even have been the one the author intended to tell, it vastly dilutes the message when you realize that the plot cannot exist unless everyone in the entire chain of events, from the original designer of the courier ship to all the officers on the mothership in charge of arrangements and security surrounding the launch to the pilot himself and his total failure to search his ship for intruders before taking off, which is when you're supposed to do it, was stupid. Indeed, we have a trope for that.
 * The real tragedy of this story? The stowaway, the person we're supposed to look down on the most for being stupid? She is the only person in this entire mess who wasn't stupid. She was ignorant, which is an entirely separate thing -- and furthermore, she is the only person in this entire mess who has an excuse for either stupidity or ignorance, precisely because she is not a trained officer or engineer like, oh, everybody else relevant to the plot. Of course, there is a reason that untrained people should not be allowed to walk around spaceships without having first been given at least a basic safety briefing as to what not to do, but a failure to have that done is not her fault, its one of the other allegedly trained experts who have no excuse for not knowing better being an idiot again.
 * Here's one for you: If so little additional weight requires enough expenditure of fuel to throw off the landing, shouldn't the ship already be doomed because it expended more fuel launching?
 * Also, if there is no margin of error at all, the mission couldn't have been expected to land successfully, given that it was piloted by a human, not a computer. Turn on the rocket engines a few seconds too late or too early = kaboom.