In the third consulship of Augustus, the victorious general Marcus Terentius Varro received command of three legions of dwarves with orders to occupy a certain planet. Each of the dwarves had a mass of exactly 48 pounds or, in the classical Greco-Roman measure, one talent.
The planet which Varro was directed to secure happened to be solid gold and in low orbit around such planets the time needed to travel one radius is always 8 minutes. This is true of all gold planets regardless of size. On the larger gold planets one simply goes faster and on the smaller ones slower, so that it always takes the same 8 minutes to go one radian. On silver planets it takes 11 minutes and on aluminum planets it takes 21, but on gold ones (and indeed on any others that have the same density as solid gold) the skimtime is invariably 8 minutes.
Skimspeed, the maximum circular orbit speed, was half a mile a minute on Varro's planet. The camps having been fortified, Varro directed the dwarves to adjust the catapults so they would each launch a talent mass horizontally going half a mile a minute. The scouts and Tyrolian dwarf irregulars criss-crossed strategic areas of the planet with bungee cord anchored to petons driven at intervals into the gold.
Classically, to find the mass of a central body one cubes the speed of any circular orbit and multiplies by that orbit's radian time. This gives an "attractiveness" quantity which is proportional to the mass by a ratio called the gravitational constant. In calculating the attractiveness, a skimming orbit will do as well as any: (½ mile/minute)3 × 8 minutes = 1 mile3/minute2, showing that Varro's planet had unit attractiveness. To find its mass one then multiplies by the reciprocal gravity constant, which assigns each unit of attractiveness one quadrillion (1015) units of mass. Varro, being a Roman, measured the mass of planets in talents and he reported to his Prefect that this planet's mass was a quadrillion talents.
When one of the dwarves had business at another camp he would have himself catapulted horizontally at half a mile a minute in the desired direction. When he got there he would reach down and grab a bungee cord. Some of the veterans with previous experience had brought hooked canes with them— with which they could reach out and deftly twig a bungee cord at their destination as an aircraft landing on a flight deck might snag the dragline with its tailhook.
note: G is 1.00 mile3/minute2 per quadrillion talents and the reciprocal 1/G is 1.00 quadrillion talents per mile3/minute2.