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Platystemon posted:There’s no evidence of human‐created AI. I'm trying to avoid posting spoilery stuff in the TV thread.  One of the ways they try to keep the setting realistic is there's a lot of stuff they can do but don't because it's expensive/people can't get their poo poo together/whatever.
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Sep 8, 2016 07:39
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The expert systems are pretty drat advanced, Miller's last-gen smartphone can disguise his voice to phreak into the AI of Mao's apartment. Just no Artificial General Intelligences have been developed. And if anything, the Martian development of stealth tech would spur the development of sensors to track all drives, because then you'd have data points that would say: signature X fired on a vector that would take it close to Earth, signature has disappeared, est. time of arrival is Y days, dispatch ship Z to intercept and force it to reignite drives. Like how many data points will there be? A few dozen thousand? A few hundred thousand? It all sounds like a bit of a plot hole in the setting, which is a shame because alot of it seems well thought out. But of course, you can't really tell a story when all the players have near perfect information, which is a concession to the fact that it is a piece of fiction.
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Sep 8, 2016 07:45
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amos can manage a warship's fusion generator singlehandly!!!!!!!!! ofc theres like computery smart poo poo doing everything
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Sep 8, 2016 07:47
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ATP_Power posted:It's kinda quibbling but the Roci actually does do its own aiming of its weapons, it just requires human instruction to fire. A lot of things in the setting are automated, but without internal agency beyond what they were programmed by people to do. Yeah, I felt like I should have added a bit of 'Well, it'll get harder to know what those things are if the system is colonised, even if you could see them'. Baloogan posted:amos can manage a warship's fusion generator singlehandly!!!!!!!!! ofc theres like computery smart poo poo doing everything amos is just really, really, really smart really smart guy
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Sep 8, 2016 08:19
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Phobophilia posted:But of course, you can't really tell a story when all the players have near perfect information, which is a concession to the fact that it is a piece of fiction. I would suggest hand‐waving it with “Epstein drives have low [read: plot‐convenient] signatures”. They can be tracked, but only with relatively sensitive receivers at relatively short ranges. The first paragraph of the first chapter of Leviathan Wakes makes that (and all stealth) kind of difficult, though: “Then Solomon Epstein had built his little modified fusion drive, popped it on the back of his three‐man yacht, and turned it on. With a good scope, you could still see his ship going at a marginal percentage of light speed, heading out into the big empty. The best, longest funeral in the history of mankind.” You could argue that “a good scope” has a very limited field of view, but it’s still a tiny, unpowered ship 7.5 ly out (it’s been travelling at 0.05 c for 150 years). Those are some drat good scopes. e: Envelope arithmetic says if Epstein’s ship was the size of the Graf Zeppelin, illuminated by starlight, and you had a detector the size of the Moon, you could expect one visible light photon to strike your detector every few months. Platystemon fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Sep 8, 2016 |
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Sep 8, 2016 08:24
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Baloogan posted:amos can manage a warship's fusion generator singlehandly!!!!!!!!! ofc theres like computery smart poo poo doing everything Amos can do anything he wants though, he's Amos.
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Sep 8, 2016 08:34
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ATP_Power posted:It's kinda quibbling but the Roci actually does do its own aiming of its weapons, it just requires human instruction to fire. A lot of things in the setting are automated, but without internal agency beyond what they were programmed by people to do. They're not literally aiming and firing like in Star Wars, but humans are involved in the minutiae of ship-to-ship combat at a lower level than just specifying rules of engagement and setting target priorities. Combat maneuvers, for instance, are performed by a human pilot. I agree that there isn't a good reason to make forklifts sentient. There's plenty of reason to make them autonomous, though. I wasn't really even thinking about strong AI in my last post, just the relative dearth of expert systems. They're not entirely missing, but they're not as ubiquitous as I'd expect.
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Sep 8, 2016 08:59
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Phobophilia posted:Something they completely failed to address: the Roci nuked the Anubis, that would have shown up on the sensors. As far as anyone else in the system could see the Rocinante blasted a rock.
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Sep 8, 2016 12:21
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Grand Fromage posted:Amos can do anything he wants though, he's Amos. Space Turtle is as smart as he is deadly. We should all aspire to be part of his murderous entourage.
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Sep 8, 2016 14:00
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Vanderdeath posted:Space Turtle is as smart as he is deadly. We should all aspire to be part of his murderous entourage. How is he space turtle? He is competent and successful with women. He is more like space Billy Walsh/Drama hybrid Alex serves more as a space Turtle, space Vince obviously is Jim, Naomi is space E. Miller is space Ari
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Sep 8, 2016 15:50
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ATP_Power posted:It's kinda quibbling but the Roci actually does do its own aiming of its weapons, it just requires human instruction to fire. A lot of things in the setting are automated, but without internal agency beyond what they were programmed by people to do. It's not radio, it's infrared, and you don't need super high quality optical scopes to do that. Full-sky monitoring at a reasonable refresh rate is something that's readily achievable right with present-day tech at reasonable cost. If you're a scattered teeming mass of humanity living on a bunch of independent and fragile orbital habitats, the ability to monitor the sky for random rocks or derelict ships that are going to put a big hole in your people-house is going to be something that's just as essential for survival as air and water are in the first place, and an IR system capable of seeing asteroids is going to see drive exhaust and ships warm enough to support life plain as day. The stealth thing is a fictional conceit. It's handwaving for the sake of plot, there's nothing wrong with that. It's like a Universal Translator or the Force.
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Sep 8, 2016 16:05
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Of course there is a lot of AI and advanced automation on the ships. Think about how many sailors are needed to crew a modern warship. Now imagine you have to bring air and water and food into space for every guy on board. The only practical way to conduct long range space missions is to automate most of the functions and have a minimal human crew of officers and technicians to perform the supervising duties. The downside to this automation is lack of bodies on hand to do damage control (firefighting, plugging leaks) and the inability to have redundant people around in case of casualties. Also with less sailors, you're more vulnerable to boarding actions. That's basically the only way the Donnager was able to be boarded successfully by a smaller craft.
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Sep 8, 2016 16:23
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Yeah, realistically not only would ever single ship in the system be real time tracked by several countries/agencies at all times, but nearly every asteroid or space rock or bit of debris from a mining accident would all be tagged and tracked automatically. A lot of those wouldn't need constant real time monitoring, but their projected orbit would be recorded and depending on where the object is heading it would get different levels of monitoring. If you went onto an abandoned space station and found a big cargo container you wanted to steal and pushed it by hand out an airlock, someone would know about it. Someone would know about it because you logged your flight plan with some authority. If you didn't, various agencies would pick up your flight and there would be 100 long range telescopes watching your every move. They'd see you board the station, they'd see you open the airlock, they'd see you push the container out and track it. If you picked it up they'd pick you up on some sort of illegal looting charge. If someone else came by later to pick it up, they'd get them too. The only place anything secret or criminal could go down is inside the space stations. Ships dock, people get out, who knows what happens inside. But in space everyone knows what everyone and every rock is doing.
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Sep 8, 2016 16:27
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ATP_Power posted:It's kinda quibbling but the Roci actually does do its own aiming of its weapons, it just requires human instruction to fire. A lot of things in the setting are automated, but without internal agency beyond what they were programmed by people to do. You'd have to be OK with it never being real-time monitoring as well. Depending on where things are relative to orbits, you could be looking at ping return times maxing out at 45 minutes*, assuming the Belt is the outer limit of traffic control. And that's if everything in the control/monitoring system works at the speed of light. * - 22ish light minutes from sun to the Belt. So you have a disc approximately 45 light minutes across to monitor.
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Sep 8, 2016 16:50
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And yet in the tiny tiny area of our planet (though yes there's a lot more noise) we managed to lose track of multiple aircraft in a year and only realised because they were due to check in but didn't. And this is after a US skyscraper complex was destroyed by hijacked airliners.
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Sep 8, 2016 17:14
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Baronjutter posted:Yeah, realistically not only would ever single ship in the system be real time tracked by several countries/agencies at all times, but nearly every asteroid or space rock or bit of debris from a mining accident would all be tagged and tracked automatically. A lot of those wouldn't need constant real time monitoring, but their projected orbit would be recorded and depending on where the object is heading it would get different levels of monitoring. Actually if the Space Station was properly abandoned, with the owner of both the station AND the property inside the station either cannot reasonably be determined or have intentionally abandoned said station and property, then even under normal property law the finder of said cargo container can claim ownership. Not sure about maritime law, but I'm sure space falls under international waters thus abandoned property at sea would fall under salvage laws and be completely legitimate to take.
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Sep 8, 2016 20:20
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flosofl posted:You'd have to be OK with it never being real-time monitoring as well. Depending on where things are relative to orbits, you could be looking at ping return times maxing out at 45 minutes*, assuming the Belt is the outer limit of traffic control. And that's if everything in the control/monitoring system works at the speed of light. Way longer than that. Regular human activity in this setting goes all the way out to Saturn.
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Sep 8, 2016 20:48
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Phanatic posted:It's not radio, it's infrared, and you don't need super high quality optical scopes to do that. Full-sky monitoring at a reasonable refresh rate is something that's readily achievable right with present-day tech at reasonable cost. If you're a scattered teeming mass of humanity living on a bunch of independent and fragile orbital habitats, the ability to monitor the sky for random rocks or derelict ships that are going to put a big hole in your people-house is going to be something that's just as essential for survival as air and water are in the first place, and an IR system capable of seeing asteroids is going to see drive exhaust and ships warm enough to support life plain as day. Thanks for the info, it's fun to play around with the technical hypotheticals but I hope it's not ruining anyone's enjoyment of the series that they don't accurately model space ship stealth in a setting that has the Protomolecule, magical fusion reactors and a spaceship drive that when the authors of the books were asked how it worked, they replied "it works very well". If I recall correctly, the authors have said that they tried to be as accurate as possible on how gravity works, and then took a much freer hand to most other technical areas. ATP_Power fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Sep 8, 2016 |
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Sep 8, 2016 21:30
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Phi230 posted:Actually if the Space Station was properly abandoned, with the owner of both the station AND the property inside the station either cannot reasonably be determined or have intentionally abandoned said station and property, then even under normal property law the finder of said cargo container can claim ownership. That is not how salvage laws work. Salvage law encodes the notion that if you recover lost property, you are entitled to a reward commensurate with its value and your level of risk, *not* that you can just take it and it becomes yours. http://www.sailfeed.com/2013/07/salvage-law-do-you-get-to-keep-an-abandoned-boat/ quote:Under current U.S. admiralty law, which conforms to international salvage law as laid out in the Salvage Convention of 1989, assistance rendered another vessel is considered salvage when: 1) the assisted vessel is subject to a reasonable apprehension of marine peril; 2) the assistance is voluntary; and 3) the assistance is successful in whole or part. If the factors determining reward weight sufficiently towards the salvor, then the reward might equal the value of the property, in which case the owner can say "Just keep the property you saved." But if a boat in a storm starts taking water and the crew abandons ship and the boat just floats up and runs aground on the beach, you don't get to just walk up to the boat and claim it as yours.
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Sep 8, 2016 22:18
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Phi230 posted:How is he space turtle? He is competent and successful with women. Turtle actually has his poo poo together in the terrible Entourage movie. He's wealthy and successful but still drives the gang around because ??? God, Entourage was so bad.
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Sep 8, 2016 22:19
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Platystemon posted:I would suggest hand‐waving it with “Epstein drives have low [read: plot‐convenient] signatures”. They can be tracked, but only with relatively sensitive receivers at relatively short ranges. Presumably they can only still find it because they know exactly where to look. If it ever gets knocked off course, even slightly, it'll probably be lost forever (unless it has like a big glowing tail light or something). This brings up an important point re: stealth chat, there seems to be this assumption that, once a tracked ship stops firing its drive and goes ballistic, its course will remain entirely predictable. I don't see why that would be the case. They need the big, obvious fusion drive to get up to speed, but they can presumably still steer with conventional propulsion or even something as simple and low profile as venting air or ejecting ballast out of one side of the ship. Hell, minor course deviations probably happen all the time. I don't know if the ships are big/fast enough for stuff like solar wind to be a major variable, but any time a ship vents atmosphere, dumps waste, or gets hit by some space junk (not so unlikely when the entire economy is based on people turning big space rocks into little ones), its course will change. Now, the difference might only be a fraction of a degree, but if you're flying from Earth to Jupiter, that tenth of a degree might mean the difference between a soft landing on Ganymede and missing the planet entirely. Obviously, these ships have to be able to change course without cold starting a fusion reactor first, so presumably the stealth ships have a more robust (and sneakier) version of the same tech for getting around unseen. The other really weird assumption I'm seeing is that the view of the solar system in The Expanse's future will be as tidy and unobstructed as ours is. I mean, think about how much crap various space programs have already left in Earth's orbit. The Expanse's setting has had tens of thousands of ships flying around blowing up asteroids, dumping waste, and fighting loving wars in space for hundreds of years. You should have old derelicts still orbiting planets, ghost ships still flying to nowhere, broken down stations spewing out radiation across the spectrum, and old bits of hull, trash, and chunks of asteroid flying in every direction. Imagine how hard it would be to spot anything you didn't know to look for in that mess. Is this unidentified metallic object a ship running dark, or just a hunk of mining waste and old bits of hull like the last 20,000? Is this faint heat signature from a prototype stealth ship or a container of radioactive waste? Hell, how would you notice ordinary heat signatures at all when you have thousands of Epstein drives shining like torches and bouncing their emissions off any reflective object? If you're standing in a room full of torches you probably won't notice if someone in the crowd lights a match. Any system sensitive enough to detect the stealth ships would probably be so mired in false positives that it would still miss them.
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Sep 9, 2016 00:31
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Duckbag posted:The Expanse's setting has had tens of thousands of ships flying around blowing up asteroids, dumping waste, and fighting loving wars in space for hundreds of years. I don't recall the books or show saying there was ever open warfare in the Expanses space age. There were incidents like Anderson Station and the captain of the Donnager mentioned hunting pirates, but never out and out war. I don't think it would be too much of a stretch to say that with cheap space travel and broken poo poo in space you would end up with space salvagers. Especially with how important the Belts resources are cracked up to be.
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Sep 9, 2016 01:34
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Duckbag posted:Presumably they can only still find it because they know exactly where to look. If it ever gets knocked off course, even slightly, it'll probably be lost forever (unless it has like a big glowing tail light or something). Delta-v is delta-v. If you want to significantly change your course, you need to significantly change your velocity. You can get around this to some extent with slingshots, Oberth effect, etc., but you're not changing your course enough to matter for anything with cold gas thrusters or dumping some ballast. The big obvious fusion drive isn't to get up to speed (you're already traveling damned fast), it's to change your velocity to get where you want to go. What else are you using in lieu of the fusion drive? Chemical rockets? Visible as hell. Superheated steam heated by your fusion plant? Visible as hell. The fact that you have an operating fusion plant in the first place means you're already visible as hell because if you weren't cooling it off somehow your ship would rapidly become to hot for people to live in it, which means you're dumping heat overboard and that makes you visible as hell. quote:Any system sensitive enough to detect the stealth ships would probably be so mired in false positives that it would still miss them. Space is big. Really big.
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Sep 9, 2016 01:46
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AirborneNinja posted:I don't recall the books or show saying there was ever open warfare in the Expanses space age. There were incidents like Anderson Station and the captain of the Donnager mentioned hunting pirates, but never out and out war. Yeah, there was at least one incident that almost led to war between Earth and Mars, but there's never been a full-on war in space. Things also start off at least a little cozier between Earth and Mars in the books; I'm pretty sure they were conducting joint military operations until Holden's broadcast.
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Sep 9, 2016 01:52
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When the Donnager’s CIWs start firing, it’s notably the first time CIWS has been used in space combat, by anyone. The major powers had never gone to war.
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Sep 9, 2016 02:26
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They've moved the Earth/Mars conflict up more for the show. The original book political situation is basically that Earth and Mars are bros that work together to exploit the Belt for resources. Earth because it's exhausted, Mars because they need a poo poo ton of stuff to terraform with. There are also colonies at Jupiter that tend to be on the Belt's side since Ganymede supplies a lot/most of the food out there. It gets more complicated as the series progresses.
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Sep 9, 2016 02:32
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Phanatic posted:Space is big. Really big.
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Sep 9, 2016 04:03
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Grand Fromage posted:They've moved the Earth/Mars conflict up more for the show. The original book political situation is basically that Earth and Mars are bros that work together to exploit the Belt for resources. Earth because it's exhausted, Mars because they need a poo poo ton of stuff to terraform with. There are also colonies at Jupiter that tend to be on the Belt's side since Ganymede supplies a lot/most of the food out there. It gets more complicated as the series progresses. Not bros. The relationship between them is more of a tense rivalry rather than the outright cold war that the show depicts. Think of it more like a modern day America and China.
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Sep 9, 2016 04:23
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ZombyDog posted:You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Don't think too much about this. If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
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Sep 9, 2016 14:31
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Phanatic posted:That is not how salvage laws work. Salvage law encodes the notion that if you recover lost property, you are entitled to a reward commensurate with its value and your level of risk, *not* that you can just take it and it becomes yours. ah you say lost property now but in the original hypo you said abandoned huge legal difference between lost and abandoned
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Sep 9, 2016 14:58
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It's legitimate salvage.
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Sep 9, 2016 15:02
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If it's a legitimate salvage, the ship has a way of shutting the whole thing down.
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Sep 9, 2016 15:08
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Phi230 posted:ah you say lost property now but in the original hypo you said abandoned There is, but the only relevance that has for salvage is if you're a crew on the vessel in the first place. If your ship breaks and you abandon it without permission, then *you* can't benefit from salvaging the ship and cargo that you abandoned. If the ship's master gives an abandon ship order, then you subsequently can get paid if you salvage it. That's it. There's no circumstance where salvaging a ship or cargo just means you get to keep it for yourself.
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Sep 9, 2016 15:14
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You guys appear to be arguing about maritime law so I'm not sure what relevance it has. You should probably check with a space lawyer for the real scoop.Typical Earthers, rubbing everyone in the face with the fact that you have oceans.
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Sep 9, 2016 16:37
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NmareBfly posted:You guys appear to be arguing about maritime law so I'm not sure what relevance it has. You should probably check with a space lawyer for the real scoop.Typical Earthers, rubbing everyone in the face with the fact that you have oceans. Good point. Right now, it's technically *illegal* for anyone to remove someone else's property without their permission. Let's say China has a decrepit, broke-dick satellite in a decaying orbit that's going to crash into the ISS. Let's say for sake of argument that the ISS can't maneuver to avoid it, and that we have a new space shuttle or something that could literally go up, dock with the Chinese satellite, and bring it back down to Earth, or just move it into another orbit. As things stand now, that'd be illegal if the Chinese objected. There are no salvage rights in space yet, period.
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Sep 9, 2016 16:42
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There aren’t provisions of maritime law that deal with taking control of drifting ships that are a danger to other vessels?
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Sep 9, 2016 16:47
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Platystemon posted:There aren’t provisions of maritime law that deal with taking control of drifting ships that are a danger to other vessels? As much as there are lots of fiction books that might state it, space is not subject to maritime law. Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_law
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Sep 9, 2016 16:55
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Platystemon posted:There aren’t provisions of maritime law that deal with taking control of drifting ships that are a danger to other vessels? Maybe. But that's maritime law. Which is limited to maritime matters, and doesn't involve spacecraft or debris in space. In the event of a case and absent specific law, maybe it's reasonable that maritime law would be used to inform a judge's opinion of responsibility and liability, but maybe not. http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2130/1 quote:The most prominent issue surrounding cleanup of orbital space debris rests with Article VIII of the Outer Space Treaty, in which space objects, including nonfunctioning satellites and other space debris, continue to belong to the country or countries that launched them.2 There is no right of salvage analogous to the right found in maritime law, which means that even though a satellite or some other space object may not be functioning, it does not imply that it has been abandoned by the nation that launched it. Without consent from the nation that launched and operates or otherwise owns the satellite or space object, it cannot be disposed of or otherwise interfered with. This is further complicated by the fact that international space law deems fragments and components from space objects as individual space objects in and of themselves, which would require identification to determine the owner and either individual or blanket consent to remove it from orbit.
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Sep 9, 2016 16:55
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Grand Fromage posted:It's legitimate salvage. God if they cast anyone other than Joanna Lumley as Tilly it's going to be a loving crime.
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Sep 9, 2016 19:40
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For a derail this is still very interesting. I want to be a space lawyer!
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Sep 9, 2016 20:19
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