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That's one of the things I really like about the series--there is so much mass human stupidity that drives the plot, but it's all realistic stupidity.
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Jan 10, 2016 06:39
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Also beyond the fact that the books come out regularly, each one is a basically self contained story. It's all in the same setting with the same people and there's no reset button or anything, but you could theoretically stop at the end of any of them.
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Jan 15, 2016 14:59
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That would make sense. The first three have a definite arc to them. The fourth is more stand alone and the fifth clearly is starting up a whole new thing. But it's not like ASOIAF where it's really just one gigantic book.
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Jan 15, 2016 17:04
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Professor Shark posted:I think in the books all military ships are actually painted black and are only visible on screens/ by the stars they block Yep. The stealth ships are stealth because they have systems to sequester all their heat for a while, so they're invisible on infrared. And there are coatings to absorb radar/laser detection that are in the "just accept it" tech category like the Epstein drive.
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Jan 24, 2016 12:47
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There are reasons, they just haven't gone into it in the show. I'll spoiler tag anyway but there's no plot info in here, just setting: Basically, Earth is a resource depleted husk with 30 billion people, more than half of which subsist on what they call Basic. They do nothing useful for society and are just kept alive by the government though a kind of welfare system. So Earth gets a lot of its resources from the Belt--the reason it was colonized in the first place. Mars is in the middle of trying to terraform the planet and for that purpose they mine the asteroids for the resources they use for the terraforming. The Belters started as miners for the inner planets and now they want to be free. Colonies wanting to break away from the home country essentially. The Belt isn't really self-sustaining though, so that adds a level of complexity to the whole thing. They hate Earth and want to be free but also rely on Earth more than they're willing to admit.
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Jan 24, 2016 15:41
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Combat Pretzel posted:Current stealth tech and Vantablack might disagree with you to some degree. Yeah it's not an unreasonable technology given what already exists. But anyway, Expanse stealth is: Painted black so you can't really see it. Covered with a coating that absorbs all radar and laser targeting (this is a Mars technology). Heat sequestration. Mars is the leader in ship technology generally and particularly so with stealth. Ships can't stay in stealth for too long because they overheat, and they can't use their engines or weapons or anything without becoming visible.
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Jan 24, 2016 17:56
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mossyfisk posted:If your ship's drive is sufficiently directed, then you're not going to be throwing that much infrared at the people you're flying towards. No but the ambient background temperature is -270 degrees. Any ship is going to glow real bright in infrared unless there's some way to keep the heat from radiating, and you can only do that for so long before you cook the crew. The books mention any ship under thrust with an Epstein drive is visible from anywhere in the solar system.
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Jan 24, 2016 19:25
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Boing posted:This is the story of human civilisation and, by extension, a core part of the setting of The Expanse Yep. A lot of the plot is driven by groups of humans being self-serving, short-sighted idiots, but realistically so.
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Jan 25, 2016 05:34
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They haven't really mentioned it yet but there are also major colonies around Jupiter and Saturn. Uranus and Neptune are so far away that not much is going on out there. I think there's a science station at Uranus but that's it.
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Jan 25, 2016 12:03
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Demiurge4 posted:Probably not worth colonizing it but until now I was under the impression that the asteroid belt was pretty dense with rocks and a hugely volatile area of space. Yeah the way asteroid belts are shown in most sci-fi is totally wrong. It'd be rare to be able to see any other asteroid if you were on one, they average around a million kilometers apart. Planetary rings, on the other hand, are dense and dangerous and similar to the classic asteroid belt. They're ridiculously thin but if you tried to travel through Saturn's rings you'd probably get obliterated. Certainly if you were going lengthwise through them you'd be hosed. They're so thin you might make it going from top to bottom.
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Jan 25, 2016 12:13
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Pompous Rhombus posted:They alluded to "Ganymede Station" at one point is all I can remember, but I feel like I heard something that rang a "Saturn" bell at one point too. Yeah the episode before last mentioned Phoebe, which is a moon of Saturn. Ganymede is a big settlement since it has a magnetic field. The Epstein drive is basically just a super efficient fusion rocket engine, it still follows reasonable physics. Getting out to Neptune is a multi month trip. So it's good but space is still really big.
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Jan 25, 2016 14:48
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The books studiously do not make any mention of the year but the show said 200 years in the future, which I'm ignoring because it seems absurdly short. I've mentally been assuming like 25/2600s in the books. Edit: The only time reference I can find is the Epstein drive was invented 150 years before the beginning of the series. And it was invented by a guy from Mars, when Mars was already heavily colonized, so the 200 year timeline on the show is even more weird. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Jan 25, 2016 |
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Jan 25, 2016 16:11
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Boing posted:'Billions on Mars' shouldn't be the thing that makes the timescale sound ridiculous. I don't think a human population of ~30 billion by that time is even a high estimate by our current population growth projections. You have to move those people, though. Even in the Expanse setting moving, say, ten million people from Earth to Mars each year would be an enormous undertaking, and even that huge amount of migration is only a billion people in a century. These questions are why they haven't specified a year in the books.  I don't know why they said anything in the show.
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Jan 25, 2016 16:33
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The Rocinante can take off and land on planets. The big ships can't, as far as we know.
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Jan 25, 2016 16:51
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Well, the thing with the Epstein drive is they avoid specifics on how it works. The official answer to how does the Epstein drive work is "very well". All that I remember being stated in the books is: It's hugely efficient compared with the old engines, which allows for ships to stay under constant acceleration and have long range. They mention a ship like the Rocinante can cross the entire solar system a few times without needing to refuel. It uses a fusion reactor for its power. The fusion reactor uses lasers. There are two resources: the "fuel pellets" for the fusion, and reaction mass which gets shot out the engine for the actual thrust. It can be used as a short range weapon--you don't want to be anywhere near the engine plume. It is bright enough to be detected anywhere in the system if you're under thrust. There's some sort of magnetic thrust coil involved.
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Jan 25, 2016 17:35
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Lord Hydronium posted:That's the most energy efficient way, but the Epstein drive makes it so energy efficiency isn't an issue anymore and a spaceship can focus on getting there quickly instead. Delta-v is basically a free resource in the Expanse. For the most part yep. There's nothing that defies the laws of physics about the way the ships work, there are just efficiency assumptions made. The energy available to a ship is effectively unlimited as long as everything is working properly.
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Jan 26, 2016 05:38
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Evernoob posted:I'm also quite sad Europa isn't mentioned anywhere, as that moon is supposed to be the most likely candidate to live on (if we can ever reach it). Europa is inhabited. These are all the inhabited places that I remember from the books, I'm spoilering it in case anyone really does not want to know anything: Earth, Luna, Mars, Ceres, Eros, Pallas, various other asteroids, Ganymede, Europa, Io, Callisto, Titania, Titan, other unspecified Saturn moons, and an assortment of space stations like Tycho
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Feb 23, 2016 13:49
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I love BSG and heartily recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it. Internet nerds have gotten retroactively mad about it for some reason, but even negative people I think will agree that it is consistently fantastic up to the middle of S3.
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Feb 24, 2016 10:46
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VagueRant posted:I'll definitely give 33 a look then! But afterwards you should go back to the mini-series? (I was never sure where to start with that show.) Watch the miniseries first. I was really confused starting from 33. The miniseries is good except they hadn't gotten Bear McCreary on the music yet. You won't understand the true meaning of flashlights if you don't watch the miniseries.
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Feb 24, 2016 15:19
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Yeah 33 just drops you right into the thick of it, which is why it's great. I agree, if you're weird and don't like the miniseries for some reason then watch that and you'll be in.
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Feb 24, 2016 16:12
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And reaction mass is the fuel for the reactor. So in your standard chemical rocket, reaction mass and ejection mass are the same thing. In an Expanse ship, the reactor generates a ton of energy but isn't venting the fusion plasma directly out the back to drive the ship.
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Mar 1, 2016 03:41
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Yeah there's a lot of resentment towards Earth because Earth has such bounty and they gently caress it up. They kind of mention this in the show. For people who grow up in the Belt it's like, water just falls from the sky? The air is free? And you're loving it up and coming out here to steal our poo poo?
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Mar 7, 2016 09:08
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Toast Museum posted:I'm not sure how tightly rationed Basic is. Big things like housing and medical care are, but I remember at least one passage mentioning that Basic clothes are freely available from vending machines. Also, I'm pretty sure that having dependants affects at least some rations. I recall a character having to move because their kid went off to college, leaving their apartment with fewer people than it was rated for. You can also game the system, that's why Holden has eight parents.
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Mar 11, 2016 13:41
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Evernoob posted:who "the enemy" is. Human nature.
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Apr 7, 2016 07:59
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I would agree it's the weakest of the series but I didn't think it was bad. If you appreciate the underlying theme of humans being unable to not gently caress up everything because we can't cooperate in large groups, that's seriously hammered on in book 4. It also has (spoilers only if you haven't read to 3) a lot of neat hints about the civilization that created the protomolecule that I'm betting pay off later
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May 8, 2016 12:17
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I think a lot of why it gets crap is it's very different than the other four books. It feels like the writers were a little bored and decided to do something else for a book, like Archer Vice.
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May 8, 2016 12:35
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I usually don't do fiction audiobooks but I listen to a fair number of nonfiction ones. They (and podcasts) are good in the background while playing a turn-based strategy game or city builder or something, or long walks.
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May 20, 2016 10:49
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Amos doesn't threaten. He just casually states facts.
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May 22, 2016 04:10
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I've noticed Chinese and Korean in it in the books too. A lot of the time it's pretty incomprehensible but never when it's important to understand.
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May 30, 2016 02:38
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I was never totally convinced by the whole shoving random words from random languages method of constructing the language, but the different gestures to be visible while in pressure suits is great.
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May 30, 2016 10:32
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emanresu tnuocca posted:That's totally a real world phenomena though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin I know they were going for a pidgin or creole but I don't think they work the way the Belterspeak does. I'm not a linguist but from the language bits of anthropology I had to learn it doesn't follow. The only pidgin I know in detail is the Canton trade language and it's not at all similar. I could be wrong though, like I said languages aren't really my area.
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May 30, 2016 10:41
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They have consistent grammars. Belter doesn't and doesn't make much attempt to. Which is fine, it's just a book, but it doesn't hold up if you stare at it too long.
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May 30, 2016 14:07
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I don't get goofy either, really. I like show Miller more than book Miller.
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Jun 22, 2016 02:25
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emanresu tnuocca posted:I actually think that's the main difference, book Miller is unlikable, he's an rear end in a top hat (although a very sympathetic one), show Miller on the other hand is very charismatic and a swell guy. I still think Miller is a prick in the show, but the actor is very charismatic so it works better.
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Jun 24, 2016 04:42
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Miller definitely is older in the books and more of a general loser. Amos is perfect though, he's supposed to be very amiable while he beats you to death. From the short story about him he got off Earth pretty young, he's probably in his 20s.
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Jun 24, 2016 08:07
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You should always salt your coffee. Salt makes everything taste better.
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Jul 11, 2016 01:50
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I don't remember any livestock being mentioned. Maybe chickens? Most of the food eaten in the Belt is grown on Ganymede and it's mostly plant stuff + vat meat. I would imagine they have space catfish, they're good in a hydroponic loop. Eat the organic waste, poop fertilizer, and eat the fishies.
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Jul 14, 2016 14:36
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koreban posted:Some of us still remember BSG. The greatest scifi show of all time? Yeah if the Expanse is half as good that'd be awesome. (I will entertain arguments for Babylon 5 being better than BSG)
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Aug 16, 2016 04:24
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Hedrigall posted:Babylon 5 praise makes me happy, I just bought the DVDs and have started season 1. I'm really looking forward to the in depth story that everyone seems to laud. It's excellent, I'm rewatching it at the moment. It also rewards a rewatch because the whole thing is so tightly plotted, the creator had 10+ years to work on it before it got made. There are tiny little throwaway lines in the pilot episode that set up poo poo in season 4, it's great. Unlike anything else ever made for TV. As much as people criticize shows for not being planned out beforehand, fact is other than adaptations B5 is probably the only show that's been fully planned from day one and even B5 was extensively reworked during the course of filming. All writers rewrite during the course of making a story, you just don't see that in novels because the author can edit it all smoothly together before releasing it. TV, once it's out there it's out and you can't take it back.
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Aug 16, 2016 04:54
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Toast Museum posted:I guess Babylon 5 is fine if you've never seen DS9 DS9 is also great. Can't we all be friends and enjoy our wide range of pew pew spaceships together? 
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Aug 16, 2016 05:11
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