I probably read it sometime before 1970, but I might be lying.
I don’t remember if it’s a short story or an episode in a novel.
It involves a small crew of some sort of exploration or trading vessel.
They land on a planet that lacks space travel but does have powerful artillery and clever control stuff.
At a key point in the plot one member of the crew, a small creature who can jump far and fast, is hiding outside the ship.
The locals have the ship surrounded and have pointed an artillery piece at the main port.
The shells are not powerful enough to damage the exterior of the ship, but if they open the door even for a fraction of a second, they will get hit with a shell.
Finally they decide to chance having the outside guy jump through the air toward the door. The control computer opens the portal just long enough for the guy to fly through.
Sadly, the artillery shell that is automatically fired when the port is seen to open gets through the door.
It destroys the (sentient) computer that controls the ship.
In the milliseconds before it is destroyed, however, the main computer downloads a route “home” into the “idiot” nav computer so that they can get away and get home.
They mourn the dead computer.
The lesson I took from it is how human-centric my intuition about response time is and how really fast computers are.
My vague recollection is that the author was Poul Anderson and it involved a small (fiveish?) crew of humans and non-humans that adventure around. It may be one of the Technic Civilization stories, but it might not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I probably read it sometime before 1970, but I might be lying.I don’t remember if it’s a short story or an episode in a novel.It involves a small crew of some sort of exploration or trading vessel.They land on a planet that lacks space travel but does have powerful artillery and clever control stuff.At a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14,24,19],"tags":[381,346],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9241"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9241"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9243,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9241\/revisions\/9243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}