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Is it not likely that mars will receive a lot of refugees from Earth, thus giving their project a boost? I know they won't all be terraforming experts but those aren't the bodies that are being lost, they are losing the great unwashed at the bottom of the social heap. This is exactly the social strata that refugees are forced into. Mars should open their doors and stop qqing about the empty living quarters.
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Jan 7, 2017 19:32
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Maybe the first book of Hyperion is good. Then it gets all Dan loving Simmons.
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Jan 7, 2017 20:24
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It’s implausible that Mars has lost so much population so fast, but terraforming is a really slow process and it’s absolutely doomed to fail as long as the gates exist.
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Jan 7, 2017 20:34
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ZombieLenin posted:Maybe the first book of Hyperion is good. Then it gets all Dan loving Simmons. I started to switch off when there was talk of a dyson sphere made of trees populated entirely by plot devices that had traveled back in time to arrange everything and that the shrike was in fact Kassad's soul trapped in a murderbot or something. That was the fall of Hyperion? The backwards time girl was genuinely interesting though. Endymion was pure dreck from start to finish. I wish he had writ it in water.
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Jan 7, 2017 20:48
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Platystemon posted:It’s implausible that Mars has lost so much population so fast, but terraforming is a really slow process and it’s absolutely doomed to fail as long as the gates exist. We were just talking about this a week or so before the new book came out. I am 100% with you on this. Prior to this last book that was the only thing I thought wasn't well thought through in the novels when it came to what the socio-economic and political realities that would have resulted from the world the authors had constructed in the background. And I'm not really trying to critique the authors too much here, I'm still 100% invested in the novels, but the portrait of the outcome of the attempted destruction of Earth and the genocide of half the Earths population, was, in my opinion really off.
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Jan 7, 2017 23:05
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Collateral posted:I started to switch off when there was talk of a dyson sphere made of trees populated entirely by plot devices that had traveled back in time to arrange everything and that the shrike was in fact Kassad's soul trapped in a murderbot or something. That was the fall of Hyperion? No that's all Endymion you talking about. despite the boring John Keats storyline, Fall of Hyperion is still legit greatness. gohmak fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Jan 8, 2017 |
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Jan 8, 2017 01:50
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In Nemesis Games, I remember thinking how completely unrealistic it was that Marco could somehow pull off this huge operation with stealing anti-radar material and throw huge rocks at Earth. Then in one of the last chapters, it's revealed that he's basically just a puppet of Duarte, who was the one pulling all the strings. So I don't really agree with the criticism that Marco was too incompetent. He was supposed to be a very charismatic leader with a huge ego and a big grudge against Holden and Naomi. And he has never been portrayed as this strategic mastermind. He was in way over his head, but too proud and stupid to really see it. And the part about Belters being able to keep up in space fights with everyone else was kinda explained with them having access to better juice. Fred Johnson basically died because they only had lovely juice that didn't work as well as it should. My biggest criticism is really how the Belters where able to go toe-to-toe in space battles. Sure they had modern ships, but pretty much none of them have any military training, and there is no way a bunch of people who have never controlled a fleet of warships can fight against a professional enemy. The book tries to portray them as guerrilla fighters, but then suddenly there are these big space battles with 10+ ships on each side, and they trade evenly or even favorably. I actually liked the story about Filip. His first few chapters made me groan about what a man-child he was (even if he's only 17), but the later chapters fleshed him out better. He wasn't mentioned at the end at all, so I've hoping we'll find out what happened to him in later books.
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Jan 8, 2017 13:12
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Sjonkel posted:
Yep, that's huge. You could crew a Seawolf class attack submarine with people you pulled out of the Nigerian navy, but I wouldn't expect it to last long in combat, even if they were given a crash course on how to operate it and its systems. And in the case of the belters, you are talking people with no military experience. Not even in a developing world 3rd rate military. That said, it's actually more noticeable when, in previous books, they had belters fighting toe to toe in boarding actions against well trained ground soldiers. And I only say this because you could spin some story about AIs being able to competently handle ship-to-ship combat. It's still not believable, but it's easier to deus ex machina that in a sci-if setting. Just a little.
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Jan 9, 2017 16:43
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Belters don’t actually engage in many fleet actions, though.  Maybe they would get smashed in a fair fight, but that’s okay because they avoid fair fights.
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Jan 9, 2017 22:30
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Platystemon posted:Belters don’t actually engage in many fleet actions, though. The Free Navy have maybe two dozen MCRN corvettes? The UN Navy and the 2/3 of the MCRN that is left can't match that? Were they all on holiday or something? These Free Navy goons were just hijacking everything in their space, why not dress up some frigates as colony barges, or put several inside hollowed out colony ships and dry fist the FN group of ships that try and board them. Or fill them full of torpedos with auto targetting. Or any number of clever things that a host of very clever military minds (that Avasarala mentioned in her epic put down of Holden) could come up with. Ah but no, the authors said they couldn't do it for some extremely specious reasons that stunk of having written themselves into a corner. As unsatisfying as it is, at least they released the book in a timely fashion. They could have gone back and rewrote it, with the combined fleets of Earth and Mars annihilating the FN quickly and stuck on some other story and plotline, but taken 2 or 3 or 6 years of rewriting before putting it out. It is unsatisfying, but really not as bad as it could have been.
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Jan 10, 2017 01:44
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Pretty sure they mention that Earth's fleet is too busy covering the rest of the planet from rocks.
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Jan 10, 2017 02:05
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Milky Moor posted:Pretty sure they mention that Earth's fleet is too busy covering the rest of the planet from rocks. Pretty much this and I thought the MCRN was having manning issues anyway.
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Jan 10, 2017 02:45
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Milky Moor posted:Pretty sure they mention that Earth's fleet is too busy covering the rest of the planet from rocks. Yeah, that sounds right. I imagine Mars was doing largely the same, just in case. You'd think both planets would be ringed by orbital defense platforms, but whatever. I also still have a hard time buying that some shady admiral could make off with two thirds of the navy. For that matter, what happened to the Martian crews of the ships that wound up being sold to the Free Navy? Did Duarte and/or Marco manage to kill off a huge chunk of the MCRN without anyone noticing? Did Duarte somehow build half a navy's worth of ships off the books?
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Jan 10, 2017 02:53
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Both Earth and Mars lost a ton of ships in the war sparked off in book 2 as well. I got the impression that by book 5 the Earth and Martian navies were already heavily depleted from their war, Duarte probably used resentments about the same war to enable his mutiny. As for belters crewing military ships and fighting in combat, I always got the impression that automated systems were doing most of the hard work and just leaving decision making to humans. Combine that with access to MCRN training sims and vids on their ships and I can see a crew of experienced Belter pirates effectively fighting after much less time than anything we can analogize to in the here and now. If you don't need specialized training to operate the weapon systems of a combat ship under normal circumstances, then if your crew knows how to maintain and fix said ship and know how to pilot an Epstein drive ship, then you have an effective combat crew. We are talking about a setting where the ship's computer is the ship's doctor in addition to doing all of the complicated parts of targeting and firing its weapons, all you have to do is say "shoot this thing now" and it will do so reliably, that makes it a very different world from ours. Remember that Alex was the gunner and the pilot of the Roci for most of the series and he had no experience flying combat ships but was quite effective against professionally trained combatants shortly after he started flying the Roci.
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Jan 10, 2017 03:12
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On the other hand, we can see what can be accomplished by naval gunners trained to the level of proficiency that Bobbie, a Martian marine, has. And she basically accomplishes trick shots with naval guns. Belters would also be less able to withstand the severe, frequent, and sudden accelerations related to being on a spaceship taking evasive action, like Marco's flagship dancing around to dodge railgun rounds.
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Jan 10, 2017 05:10
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K I'm at the last chapter and I gotta say idk what people mean when they are confused by the Belters suddenly being super good at fighting. There's one mention of a bigger fleet combat in/around Jupiter, and the MCRN is fighting alongside Pa's belter ships against the Free Navy which has stolen MCRN ships that may or may not be upgraded with Laconia tech. The Free Navy also outnumbers them 2 to 1 iirc? Plus I'm sure they got some training from the Laconia dudes. In all other combat mentioned, the Belters kind of suck at it. Esp the 3 to 1 against the Rocinante where they are spraying their PD fire uselessly because they are hella out of range. Then everyone accepts Marco's poo poo talking of Filip for 'bad shooting' even though on a real military ship anyone would have known that the PDs were nowhere near effective range and Marco was being 100% a douche. And it's true that the Pella's pilot is the one that juked predictably over and over such that Bobby could get them to juke into incoming PD fire. That's just scrub tier combat piloting imo. It's just like basic that you don't do the same thing a few times in combat because you get predictable - poke your head out of the same spot from cover a couple times and the third time it'll get blown off. Then the only reason their poo poo survived was because Holden disarmed the torpedos. The belters are obv not that good at combat (assuming Marco kept the best crew on his flagship) and rely on ambush + quick run tactics. Platystemon posted:Belters don’t actually engage in many fleet actions, though. Yeah their whole thing seems to have been hit and fade tactics. Collateral posted:The Free Navy have maybe two dozen MCRN corvettes? The UN Navy and the 2/3 of the MCRN that is left can't match that? Protecting Earth + Mars from asteroids and also conducting a massive system-wide assault? There's dozens of stations out there at least. We only got to see details from Jupiter; for all we know 2 MCRN corvettes roflstomped 10 Belter ships elsewhere. Toast Museum posted:I also still have a hard time buying that some shady admiral could make off with two thirds of the navy. For that matter, what happened to the Martian crews of the ships that wound up being sold to the Free Navy? Did Duarte and/or Marco manage to kill off a huge chunk of the MCRN without anyone noticing? Did Duarte somehow build half a navy's worth of ships off the books? Was it really 2/3rds though? More like 1/3rd at most iirc? Also you should take a look at what happened to the USSR's military in the midst of their collapse; 'Lord of War' wasn't really exaggerating if you've seen that movie. Mars4523 posted:On the other hand, we can see what can be accomplished by naval gunners trained to the level of proficiency that Bobbie, a Martian marine, has. And she basically accomplishes trick shots with naval guns. Worth noting that the railgun was an aftermarket addition; if the Rocinante was still a stock MCRN ship she wouldn't have been able to do that. Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Jan 10, 2017 |
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Jan 10, 2017 18:58
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Moridin920 posted:Was it really 2/3rds though? More like 1/3rd at most iirc? I should go back and check, but I believe it was a fairly even three-way split among MCRN loyalists, Free Navy, and Duarte's fleet. It still doesn't make a ton of sense that Mars is immediately a failed state, but if we roll with that, I guess it's plausible that a charismatic admiral could make off with a bunch of ships and sailors.
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Jan 10, 2017 19:10
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Toast Museum posted:It still doesn't make a ton of sense that Mars is immediately a failed state Yeah fair enough though; and you'd think 300 years in the future or whatever they'd have some better ways to keep track of their supplies let alone entire warships.
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Jan 10, 2017 19:11
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Toast Museum posted:I should go back and check, but I believe it was a fairly even three-way split among MCRN loyalists, Free Navy, and Duarte's fleet. Duarte took 1/3 of the ships, and threw the Belters some surplus corvettes, enough to distract the inner belt while he got away, in exchange for the proto molecule sample and killing Smith and Johnson. It isn't spelt out but there can't more than two dozen. PA only has 2 and she is Admiral of their #2 flotilla. How many are mentioned? PA has 2, Marco has 9 (or is it 5?) and there are the 2 that chased the Roci. Any others? The captain of the Donnager expects to make short work of 7 similar sized ships.
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Jan 10, 2017 19:33
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Collateral posted:The Free Navy have maybe two dozen MCRN corvettes? The UN Navy and the 2/3 of the MCRN that is left can't match that? I mean, the excuse was that the free navy was still throwing stealth rocks at the Earth, and the Earth navy was tied to the Earth catching those for political reasons as much as military reasons. I get that, fine. The part that doesn't feel right is the free navy actually being able to put up any coordinated and well executed fleet action against a navy of either Mars or Earth, no matter how many Martian ships they had.
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Jan 10, 2017 19:47
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ZombieLenin posted:I mean, the excuse was that the free navy was still throwing stealth rocks at the Earth, and the Earth navy was tied to the Earth catching those for political reasons as much as military reasons. I get that, fine. Yeah, they were never a threat. Apart from throwing rocks. The authors wasted too much of the book telling us they were a threat. In the end they were only a threat to themselves.
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Jan 10, 2017 20:05
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Throwing rocks is kind of a big deal and if you let them sit there and do it forever eventually you're gonna miss one. They also need to get food/water/resources from the belt + the outer planets because Earth is hosed now. Also I think there's a lot more ships floating around than you guys realize even if most are not mentioned by name. I'm not about to trawl back through the text but Michio Pa is def in command of more than 2 ships and there are dozens of contested stations not mentioned by name (it says so near the end I just read that line) in play. There's prolly a bunch of pirate rear end Belter ships that weren't MCRN property to begin with too. ZombieLenin posted:The part that doesn't feel right is the free navy actually being able to put up any coordinated and well executed fleet action against a navy of either Mars or Earth, no matter how many Martian ships they had. I don't remember this happening? There's the battle near Jupiter but it didn't really say that the Belters won decisively or anything... I don't really remember the Belt even winning that, just Pa lamenting some deaths on her end and wondering if she could have done something different. What coordinated and well executed fleet action are we talking about? Retreating from Ceres? e: It's important to remember that the Mars/Earth navy commanders don't have the information we do either. Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Jan 10, 2017 |
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Jan 10, 2017 22:00
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Moridin920 posted:Throwing rocks is kind of a big deal and if you let them sit there and do it forever eventually you're gonna miss one. They also need to get food/water/resources from the belt + the outer planets because Earth is hosed now. It's not them "winning," but the belters putting up any sort of serious coordinated fleet operation. For example, trying to chase down the escorted Martian prime minister. And even if the Free Navy had the training and discipline necessary to be more or less equal to either the Earth or Mars navy, which they wouldn't, Mars and Earth are always going to have a huge advantage. Leaving aside the fact Holden ran out of military grade juice, I assume two things. The Earth and Mars navies did not and it would be as hard or harder for the Free Navy to restock military juice once used; AND even if it wasn't that hard for the Free Navy to do so, 99% of the Free Navy is born and raised belters. Meaning, as the authors are fond of pointing out, the low gravity of their childhood has given them bodies far more likely to stroke out and die as the result of high gravity maneuvering. Therefore Mars and Earth can always dictate the terms of the engagement and either out maneuver the Free Navy to death, or force the Free Navy to engage on the terms of the "squats" and degrade the combat ability of the Free Navy by making them do what would be low to medium risk G maneuvering for people from high g environments, but will end up killing lots of people with belter bodies.
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Jan 11, 2017 18:55
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ZombieLenin posted:It's not them "winning," but the belters putting up any sort of serious coordinated fleet operation. For example, trying to chase down the escorted Martian prime minister. Weren’t the ships crewed by rebel MCRN sailors at that point?
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Jan 12, 2017 00:06
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Platystemon posted:Weren’t the ships crewed by rebel MCRN sailors at that point? And even then, after Duarte left the Free Navy never had a single victory over an inner planet navy ship. The Free Navy should have been a hollow threat, outside of their capability as terrorists, and they definitely were. It was an interesting scenario, and I think it played out plausibly. ... Except the whole "holy poo poo literally billions of people are dead" bits. I, having grown up in a flawed 20th century nation state, could not help but cry when reading the statistics in this book that I know is fiction. I can imagine people justifying this to themselves, and people ignoring it and getting on with their lives... but I can also imagine people being reduced to a blubbering mess, or being filled with unquenchable rage and hatred. I've posted about this already, but I'm still trying to pinpoint exactly where the issue is, and I think it might be that. The reactions we saw were plausible, but they should have been part of a wider range, and the total absence of grief and rage was really jarring.
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Jan 12, 2017 00:33
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Eiba posted:I believe so. Duarte didn't disappear until the Free Navy captured Medina. There was presumably a period of overlap where not just ships, but basic institutional knowledge was passed along. It violates the main thing The Expanse has going for itself. Plausible world building. If they can't accurately depict human reaction to an event of this magnitude everything else in the story just collapses. Space battle tactical realism of belter bodies vs squats pales in comparison.
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Jan 12, 2017 14:43
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I've felt that the sheer scale of the nightmare unleashed by the rocks falling would be very hard to comprehend unless you directly experienced it. When your total experience of the Earth is from feeds and looking at a point of light that's almost indistinguishable from another star, I think it's more understandable. We have a hard time coping with much smaller tragedies (see people calling the Japanese tsunami karma for Pearl Harbor as an example.) I do agree that the lack of an Earther faction hell bent on revenge is something that seems missing, and the justification that the UN Navy is too distracted stopping more rocks and doing the heavy lifting of the relief effort and fighting the Free Navy seems thin given the circumstances. Earth suffered a blow more destabilizing than anything Mars took, and even after Avasarala's purges in the earlier books, the lack of some level of dissent against the UN's policy feels out of place.
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Jan 12, 2017 22:20
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gohmak posted:It violates the main thing The Expanse has going for itself. Plausible world building. If they can't accurately depict human reaction to an event of this magnitude everything else in the story just collapses. Space battle tactical realism of belter bodies vs squats pales in comparison. This is right on the money.
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Jan 13, 2017 15:06
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gohmak posted:It violates the main thing The Expanse has going for itself. Plausible world building. If they can't accurately depict human reaction to an event of this magnitude everything else in the story just collapses. Space battle tactical realism of belter bodies vs squats pales in comparison. I really don't think that going full on revenge assault is in any way realistic for Earth. This wasn't a 9/11 Marco did to Earth it was a full on 1940's German Style Holocaust attempt. Earth got hosed so hard that right now rebuilding and hanging on is all they can do. Y'all are acting like the fist thing the state of Israel should have done after it's formation was an immediate assault on the Germans who attempted genocide.
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Jan 13, 2017 21:46
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Na'at posted:I really don't think that going full on revenge assault is in any way realistic for Earth. This wasn't a 9/11 Marco did to Earth it was a full on 1940's German Style Holocaust attempt. Earth got hosed so hard that right now rebuilding and hanging on is all they can do. Y'all are acting like the fist thing the state of Israel should have done after it's formation was an immediate assault on the Germans who attempted genocide. These guys gave it their best shot. Earth and Mars could wreck the Belt if they wanted to. Yes, they got hurt, but it’s far easier to destroy than to create. Belters could not stop them from slagging every station. The only thing preventing that is politics. Even an embargo would kill the Belt pretty quickly. Life in space if fragile.
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Jan 14, 2017 00:29
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Honestly, even the way things went down isn't the issue. Crisis mode Earth under Avasarala's iron fist would probably act the way it did. People like Prax just getting on with their lives in the outer planets was totally plausible. The issue for me is that we didn't also see less cool heads. There was no hotheaded advisor who lost their family who advocated letting Ceres starve before Avasarala tut-tutted and put him in his place for being counterproducitvely vindictive or something. And there was no one in the belt who was horrified at the human tragedy. The worst we got was Holden's embarrassing accidentally racist dad, which might have been a cool scene in isolation, but seemed like a commentary on a way less charged situation. It came across as commenting on the real world rather than the inconceivable scenario in the book. Looking at it this way, I'll say it's a failure, but not a fundamental failure- the only issue was that we didn't see more perspectives, and in an incredibly busy book I can believe they just didn't have room for them. They should have made room though, and I hope they explore the incredible trauma and what comes of that in later books.
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Jan 14, 2017 00:42
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I finished the most recent book, and I read it intermittently over about a month while sitting on trains and toilets so maybe I wasn't paying enough attention, but did anything in the book bring us much closer to solving the mystery of what's eating the ships going through the gates? I thought it was kind of a cruel tease, because the previous book ended with that, but then they just kind of forget to mention it again entirely until the end of this one where it's suddenly like "oh right, we can use that thing from the last book as a deus ex machina to defeat the enemy fleet." And then it just comes out and pretty much literally says "we still don't know what it is, but we figured out how to trigger it, good enough I guess". It seems like the end of this book puts us in more or less the same exact position we were in at the end of the last book on that front which is a little unsatisfying maybe, but I generally read it when I was at my least attentive, so perhaps I just missed a scene. (I'm new to the thread, and being careful with spoiler tags--my apologies if that's unnecessary/annoying, but I'm reading the OP as "up to Babylon's Ashes" meaning "don't spoil this book" and erring on the side of caution)
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Jan 14, 2017 00:53
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Ainsley McTree posted:I thought it was kind of a cruel tease, because the previous book ended with that, but then they just kind of forget to mention it again entirely until the end of this one where it's suddenly like "oh right, we can use that thing from the last book as a deus ex machina to defeat the enemy fleet." And then it just comes out and pretty much literally says "we still don't know what it is, but we figured out how to trigger it, good enough I guess". Nah, that’s pretty much it.
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Jan 14, 2017 00:58
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Platystemon posted:Nah, that’s pretty much it. My hope is that there is still more go it and there will be some revelation down the line relating to the gates and their functions. It just seems to detailed and important to just be a deus ex machina.
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Jan 14, 2017 02:37
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HERAK posted:My hope is that there is still more go it and there will be some revelation down the line relating to the gates and their functions. It just seems to detailed and important to just be a deus ex machina. I expect we will eventually learn more about the gave vanishing mechanics, but for the past two books it’s just been a huge tease. Marco had better not come back, but I’m not ruling it out.
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Jan 14, 2017 02:52
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Spoilering this just in case. Sorry to be a  in advance.It isn't a Deus ex Machina. Collateral fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Jan 14, 2017 |
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Jan 14, 2017 16:46
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I kinda hope that there isn't some malevolent alien intelligence actually out there, and Humanity is just sorting through the most catastrophic industrial accident ever.
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Jan 14, 2017 22:43
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I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be an evolving tool like the Investigator that went off the rails and did a great job with an unintended objective.
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Jan 15, 2017 00:51
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How many times did someone "push their food away without finishing it" or "toss the bowl in the recycler with half the eggs left" or "notice with a grimace that the noodles had gone cold and hard" - like twice a loving chapter? Come on space people. There are starving kids on earth that would kill for that stuff. Smdh
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Jan 16, 2017 10:07
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[Character] said something obscene.
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Jan 16, 2017 13:01
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