In the late 70's I started reading the then recently issued reprints of H. Beam Piper. (Do ye so also--if you can ever find copies of them on the shelf at a used bookstore.) The summer of '76 was spent in Los Angeles, and wound up having one or two conversations about Piper with Jerry Pournelle. The first thing I asked him was if he also knew what the Oomphel secret was. (Read the novel Uller Uprising first, then read the short story Oomphel in the Sky. There is a secret, a play on words, and Piper even tells you what the secret is in the short story.)

Eventually I decided to help Pournelle and John Carr "reconstruct" H. Beam Piper's universe. I reread everything and highlighted all planet names and distances in order to reconstruct the never seen star map.

And things did not start to add up. Space Viking's reference to two hundred billion cubic light years worked out to a sphere with a radius of 7,800 light years. Yet the frontier planet Tanith wasn't more than a thousand light years from Terra. In fact 780 LY was the perfect distance for it to be.

That "hundred" was a mistake.

Then it wasn't.

Every single Federation novel of H. Beam Piper had a math error. A hundred in Space Viking, a million in Little Fuzzy, five hundred missing planets in Cosmic Computer, etc.

Damn clever. Only that extra million in Little Fuzzy was ever deleted by an editor. Either Piper was making an undeclared declaration about the inherent value of editors, or by some sort of precognition, he didn't want anyone to be able to reconstruct his universe.

So from H. Beam Piper, I got into the habit of deconstructing SF Universes.