"The Feeling of Power"

[EdS2]

(10-04-2015 03:04 AM)TASP Wrote:  I can't recall the name of the story or if it was a Clarke or Asimov, but the gist of the story was a spacecraft had a computer failure and the crew could not do the necessary calculations to plot a return to earth, otherwise, the ship was fully functional.

The captain divided the crew into 2 teams, and fed each team the relevant data and let them do the math manually with paper and pencil in tandem, with the captain checking their computations for differences from time to time to rule out errors in computing the trajectory home.

And they did make it home.

"Into the Comet" by Arthur C Clarke - from Tales of Ten Worlds, one of the first SF books I read.