we are house-sitting for the in-laws, and they have amazon prime logged in on their TV. finally trying out #TheExpanse! watched ep1 last night and excited to get through more of it this weekend.
i might be able to get the account password from mother-in-law, but i really don’t want to get my own subscription or support amazon in general… is there another way to watch without uh, sailing the seven seas?
watched the first season yesterday, really loving it so far. it’s a little more grounded and realistic than most of the #SciFi i’ve consumed in my life, which is a nice change of pace.
also, the linguist in me now wants to learn the Belter creole #conlang. whoops. #TheExpanse
The scientific accuracy of The Expanse astonished me. That has something to do with the fact that show runner Naren Shankar has Ph.D degrees in applied physics and electrical engineering.
@mishamouse@nyrath
yep – all the tech feels very real, except for the kinda magical fuel efficiency of the Epstein drive, and even that is very hard-SF compared to pretty much any other SF TV or films
@tkinias@mishamouse@nyrath This is a particular irk for me - all the current theoretical space drives, anything in the "we might be able to build this one day" category rather than "needs a new branch of physics", are either tiny (well below 1g) acceleration and decent Isp, or high acceleration and terrible Isp. Something of a plumber problem, probably most people haven't spent as much time reading up on this stuff, and designing RPG campaigns within its limitations, as I have.
@RogerBW@mishamouse@nyrath
yeah, similar – when you’ve done worldbuilding around the constraints of plausible drives with total ∆V budgets of a few tens of km/s, it’s hard to let go of
@RogerBW@mishamouse@nyrath
I’ve actually wondered whether, if the story/setting requires out-system travel times of days rather than months or years, it might be better to employ handwavium thrust plates (like in non-TNE Traveller) than torch drives with implausibly low fuel requirements.
(Again, Expanse is great despite this! But just thinking of my own worldbuilding...)
@tkinias@mishamouse@nyrath That's the way I'm tending now. Physically plausible insystem drives basically give you slow trains: this spaceship is going to Mars, it's going to take seven months, and you can't change your mind once you've started. So if I don't want that, I might as well go the whole hog and hang a big flag on it saying "look, this is magic, just accept it".
@RogerBW@mishamouse@nyrath
An interesting question, then: If we can make up some new physics, is there a way to get Newtonian movement (accel/decel, not ‘jump’ or magic inertialess stuff) in such a way that you can do style extended 1G burns to get around a system quickly(ish) that doesn’t give us Bursidian planet-killers?
@tkinias@mishamouse@nyrath One I plan to play with a bit: something that gives you a usefully high cruise speed relative to the most influential mass (which is generally going to be solar until you're quite near a planet or moon). The speed limit is much more important than the acceleration. Obviously it's very non-physical.
@RogerBW@tkinias@mishamouse@nyrath Well, Orion drives might be comparatively high acceleration and high ISP but they have their own issues.
(McEnroe's The Shattered Stars has tramp starships with high g photon drives. Nothing safer than handing economically desperate people drives rated in Hiroshimas per second)
As a side note, I will observe that The Shattered Stars by Richard S. McEnroe is one of the best Traveller novels that is not (officially) a Traveller novel. It even has the Psionic Institute.
@jdnicoll@RogerBW@tkinias@mishamouse@nyrath An excellent example of Larry Niven's utterly tone-deaf libertarianism is his having coined Niven's Law of reaction drives ("any reaction drive is a weapon of efficiency proportional to its efficiency as a propulsion system") and yet not recognizing the unwisdom of handing out free planetary biosphere pulverizers to any dipshit oligarch who can afford a space yacht (cough, fusion-powered photon rockets, cough).
@cstross@RogerBW@tkinias@mishamouse@nyrath It comes up in, um, The Ethics of Madness, I think, in which a mad man with his own personal Bussard Ramjet glasses the household of the man he holds responsible for all his problems. He later acquires a second Bussard Ramjet.
Nitpick: I think it's the tumbrils that roll up to your door, to take you to the guillotines. Though I suppose the Nivens might insist on the guillotines being brought to them.
The problem with high-energy space drives is why, in my own very humble contribution to the genre, Space Traffic Control departments tend to be loaded up with enough megadeath weaponry to make the Pentagon wet itself... or to have some slight chance of stopping an incoming spaceship with murder on its mind,
Yes, I had postulated that in all civilian spacecraft with high-energy drives would contain remote control scuttling charges.
So if the space ship Exxon Valdez's captain gets drunk and the ship is on a collision course with New York City, space traffic control can neutralize the threat.
@nyrath@jdnicoll@Illuminatus@cstross@RogerBW@tkinias@mishamouse Sound idea. Though you'd want to make sure the scuttling charge was big enough, or created enough directional delta-v to generate a miss... being hit by the white-hot smoking radioactive fragments of the Exxon Valdez wouldn't do much for New York property values either.
Even more so if several ships (with scuttling charges) are clustered somewhere. Like docked to an orbital spaceport. "Send the bitcoin ransom to this address or the station gets it!"
@nyrath@stevejwright@jdnicoll@Illuminatus@cstross@tkinias@mishamouse Of course you have written up CASABA-HOWITZER. (Stattted for GURPS Spaceships in The Path of Cunning.) Though I have to say I'm quite wary of many of these options that turn one big lump into a whole bunch of smaller lumps with basically the same velocity. (And which you can't put a heroic counter-terrorist team aboard.)
Yeah, these "blow up the asteroid at the last minute" solutions always bothered me... as you say, lots of smaller lumps are just as dangerous - at best, you've got yourself hit by a shotgun blast instead of an artillery shell, and that's still going to ruin your day.
@stevejwright@RogerBW@nyrath@jdnicoll@Illuminatus@cstross@tkinias@mishamouse There is at least a minimum debris size below which the fragments will burn up in the atmosphere, but if you have that kind of explosive power you probably have the delta-V to get there before the problem becomes urgent and redirect it more gently, perhaps to a trojan orbit at Solar L5. Detection is the name of the game with planetary defense.
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but the Tunguska meteor burnt up in the atmosphere, yet it still flattened and burned 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km^2
@ssailor67@stevejwright@RogerBW@nyrath@jdnicoll@Illuminatus@cstross@tkinias@mishamouse I've seen it pointed out that this is still not a good idea: even if the whole asteroid burns up so there's no impact, you just added a ton of heat to the atmosphere.
So sure, there's no city-flattening boom, but you just melted your ice caps and burnt your forests. It might be worse!
Naturally I wrote up the Casaba-howitzer. A scifi-esque weapon that shoots spears of nuclear flame, which was studied by the military and is still classified? That's the sort of goody my website was made for.
Agreed, converting one lump on a dangerous vector into several on the same vector doesn't help matters much. Same goes for asteroids
@RogerBW@nyrath@stevejwright@jdnicoll@Illuminatus@cstross@tkinias@mishamouse lots of small pieces have a much higher surface area to mass ratio and will be more strongly affected by atmosphere. A greater portion of the asteroid will burn up, and the remainder will reach the surface as slower, lower mass, bodies.
Another solution to this kind of situation could consist in not allowing something as dangerous as an orion ship or a bussard ramjet to be near an inhabited planet, dock them in a secure (and highly armed) space station and travel to the inner system planets using a regular flight.
@eldadoinquieto@cstross@Lazarou@nyrath@stevejwright@jdnicoll@Illuminatus@tkinias@mishamouse This is a soluble problem if you don't have a large number of spaceships compared with your population: British ballistic nuclear missile submarines can launch their missiles without an explicit command (no PALs here). But that's, what, eight or so captains (plus Number Ones) carefully selected out of 60 million people in the UK.
@eldadoinquieto@Lazarou@nyrath@stevejwright@jdnicoll@Illuminatus@cstross@RogerBW@tkinias@mishamouse I think that's a problem in implausible science fiction only. An Orion ship as originally described (fission devices and pusher plate) is going to be as well protected as nuclear arsenals, and there's probably not enough fissile material to build very many of them anyway. Bussard ramjets probably won't really work, at least as described requiring ionized hydrogen of sufficient density)
The last I heard, the big problem with Bussard Ramjets is Bremsstrahlung and other similar synchrotron mechanisms will cause drag. A proton-proton fusion drive has an exhaust velocity of 12% c, so a P-P Bussard would have a maximum speed of 12% c. A conventional fusion rocket with a mass ratio of 3 has a better deltaV. So what's the point of Bussard?
Now if you have some magic way of harvesting the Bremsstrahlung energy and with some hand-waving use the energy to supplement the exhaust velocity, there is no problem. You'd have a Bussard Scramjet.
Well, I am ignorant as well. The details are in a 1978 Journal of the British Interplanetary Society article by T. A. Heppenheimer entitled "On the Infeasibility of Interstellar Ramjets." Which I have not read (expensive).
I was told the ramjet had a maximum speed, where the relative velocity of the incoming hydrogen equaled the drive's exhaust velocity.
The ramscoop functions as a brake, which counters the thrust generated from the exhaust (same matter, accelerated by fusion energy). If the exhaust velocity equals intake velocity, then the vehicle is in equlibrium, because braking and propulsive forces would be equal.
If you were to set up a Bussard collector and not change the velocity of the incoming interstellar medium relative to it; the maximum achievable density would be set by the difference in cross-section between the central part of the field and its outer limit.
That would be far too low for fusion.
Accordingly, I am not aware of anyone suggesting a fusion scramjet.
(I have seen "use a fusion reactor to power electric propulsion".)
@eldadoinquieto@Lazarou@nyrath@stevejwright@jdnicoll@Illuminatus@RogerBW@tkinias@mishamouse Ha ha "regular flight" (newsflash: any human-carrying spaceship able to exceed escape velocity is a nuke-adjacent weapon, we're just quibbling over the difference between a W88 H-bomb, Tsar Bomba, and the Chicxulub impactor (you don't want to be standing at the hypocentre of ANY of the above).
@jdnicoll@tkinias@mishamouse@nyrath Apart from the whole "we have a bunch of bombs and it doesn't help to call them Express Class Freight Carrier Propellant Charges" issue, you need really reliable bombs and launchers.
@mishamouse@nyrath
(well, OK, the whole idea of stealth tech tested my suspension of disbelief, but again, that’s small potatoes compared to most such media)
Me too. I'm the guy who coined the phrase "There Ain't No Stealth In Space", yet I still gave The Expanse top marks for accuracy.
That bit with tethers in episode #4, using Newton's third law to get one's magnetic boots back on the gantry.
And there was a much later episode which showed the interior of the Rosinante's Epstein Drive, AND I INSTANTLY SAW IT WAS AN INERTIAL CONFINEMENT FUSION DRIVE.
(I think it’s extremely unlikely that this approach will actually get us practical fusion, much less practical fusion drives, but I still really appreciated the use of real-world tech.)
The Expanse gets bonus points for visually showing an inertial confinement design (internal view of a spherical reaction chamber, injection of fusion fuel ball, circular firing squad of lasers ignites ball. And not saying a word about it.
@nyrath@pzriddle@tkinias@mishamouse Since the Protomolecule is alien, I treat it as simply “sufficiently advanced technology” in the Clarkean sense.
On more mundane bio matters, as I recall the show did reasonably well. I was certainly impressed that it foregrounded the notion that Belters were not adapted to 1g environments.
Although if we're digging deeper for quibbles, I never felt very confident in the economics / eco sustainability of the Expanse supply chain. "I'm going to fly this billion-$ rocket to bring you a pallet of gatorade and two scrawny tomato plants, glad I can save your colony from famine"
@nyrath@pzriddle@tkinias@mishamouse That said, one of the notable things about the Expanse is that it had any discussion of economics and labour issues. It’s especially unusual that the latter are so central to some of the plot.
But yeah, the Expanse falls into twin traps of so much SF - the first is conflating small business owners with workers (owning a spaceship with an Epstein ought to be treated like owning your own commercial jet or ship, not truck), and the second is assuming that workers in difficult environments are poor (oil rig workers in Alaska are loaded - only way to entice workers there is to pay huge salaries).
@Alon@nyrath@pzriddle@tkinias@mishamouse In the Expanse the Belter colonies are permanent residences, not gigs you work and then go back to wealthier environs (and here gravity adaptation may play a role). The colonies seem more analogous to poor countries that are exploited for their cheap labour.
@michaelgemar@nyrath@pzriddle@tkinias@mishamouse The Western US was a permanent residence too, and was persistently richer than the East for this reason; Alaska to this day has one of the highest nominal incomes in the country. The Belt is constantly said not to have the demographics of a colony - way too few people for mass exploitation on the scale of British India or even African colonies.
@Alon@michaelgemar Trucking is probably an apt comparison, as is chicken farming. Industries where people who are technically self employed get trapped and exploited by mega corps that control the market.
The Expanse really captures a lot of the modern dynamic. It's not that Earth is rich - most earthers have no prospects and live only thanks to the inadequate handouts of "basic." But belters & Martians are taught to resent them, instead of the rich folks pulling the strings.
@UrbanEdm@michaelgemar The truck driver metaphor was clearly what's intended, but it doesn't work in context.
Trucking is far more of a commodity than ships as portrayed on the show - ships, for example, are not standardized at all, unlike big-business driving like trucks or taxis.
The Epstein drive.
The ship owners on the show are portrayed as far more independent than, say, Uber drivers. They are shown as having the authority and independence of ship captrains.
@Alon@michaelgemar I'm not sure what "epstein drive" is supposed to mean in this context. By the time of the show, it's a 94 year old invention, so roughly equivalent to an internal combustion engine today.
@UrbanEdm@michaelgemar It's literally a weapon of mass destruction. The issue is not the distance from the invention, but how common it is. It is not at all portrayed as something everyone can have; the space docks, for example, are portrayed as far more like ports with scarce space (docking fees are a constant minor plot point) than like trucking warehouses.
@Alon@michaelgemar Cost really is the deciding factor. If it's within realm where a working class person could beg borrow and save their way to ownership, you get small business owners who are still in the same economic tier as their employees.
Docking fees don't mean much. The owner of a fishing boat pays berthing fees, but is still economically closer to his employees than to the cannery owner.
@UrbanEdm@michaelgemar Small business owners not only are not the same economic tier as their employees, ever, but have the exact opposite class interests, and have since the Paris Commune.
@nyrath@michaelgemar@pzriddle@tkinias@mishamouse In Stardust I touch on things like: infrastructure design, exact economic and governmental systems, culture and religion (especially pop culture, and I make the aliens internally diverse instead of planet-of-hats), and so on, more than most SF does. Military isn't really a focus. A change of pace innit?
@nyrath@michaelgemar@pzriddle@mishamouse
there’s also the issue that if you try to apply models from the econ scholarship to interplanetary settings you quickly run into issues like “this exponent is determined empirically from their data set and to apply it to SF I’m literally just pulling a number from my ahem”
@michaelgemar@nyrath@tkinias@mishamouse@pzriddle regarding the biological implications of humans living at low G, I was pretty convinced by this YouTube video by a doctor explaining that Belters would probably be shorter than Inners because the force of gravity is needed to stimulate bone growth. But I can’t blame the authors of #TheExpanse for coming to the conclusion that they’d be taller. https://youtu.be/lIRdWi3tKA8
@alan@michaelgemar@nyrath@tkinias@pzriddle i think they weren’t the first to come up with the trope, i remember reading it in some scifi novels when i was young… couldn’t tell you which though, it has been years. but this is interesting, adding this to my watch-later list!
@tkinias@nyrath i think i can forgive them those couple things! after at, it’s still science fiction.
i really appreciate how much attention they pay to g-forces cause by ship acceleration and maneuvering compared to many other similar shows. that’s one thing that really breaks the suspension of disbelief for me in so many other scifi settings.
@tkinias@mishamouse@nyrath the best science fiction works that way. Change one thing, or a small number of things, in a tightly confined but loosely defined way, and then explore what happens around that thing.
finished #TheExpanse yesterday! all six seasons in about 10 days.
i really enjoyed it, and i think it’s going to leave a lasting impression on my #SciFi preferences in the future. if/when i finish reading #ChildrenOfDune, maybe i’ll take a break from the #Dune franchise and try out the expanse books.
oh, and i think the #rocinante is high on my list of favorite spaceships now.
The Expanse is a great show, near the top of my list. Definitely for Science Fiction, probably replaced Battlestar Galactia as a favorite, especially after that show got a bit goofy in later seasons.
@stpaultim battlestar was the one franchise i somehow never got into! it’s been on my list to check out forever, i know it’s near and dear to many hearts.
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