the same math that measures a serve-and-volleyer — "play three hours of high-level competitive…"
play three hours of high-level competitive jr. top-level [sic] tennis and then calculate the Mean Value of the ratios of first serves to appearances at net and appearances at net to points won; for a serve-and-volleyer, this is how to tell how serve-dependent his match-performance is.
Context
Pemulis's warhead-distribution shortcut is really a piece of tennis-brain, and he says so: the Mean-Value trick works on "anything that varies within a (definable) set of boundaries" — "a tennis court’s boundaries," or "a certain drug’s urine-level range between Clean and Royally Pinched." The same instrument that apportions megatonnage measures the two things that actually govern an E.T.A. body: the lines it plays inside and the urine it has to keep testable. And he offers the athletic application straight — — the war game's math handed back to the sport it came from, a way to quantify exactly how much a player's match hangs on his serve. Eschaton's cleverest procedure is, at bottom, an instrument for reading a tennis body.