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a kitten posted:drat it Holden. A common refrain in this series honestly.
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Nov 18, 2016 05:57
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Eiba posted:Honestly I don't know why they're becoming obsolete. You'll always want 0G industry and mining and stuff. All the other planets are down deep wells after all, it'd be silly to send raw materials up from those planets. The Belter identity is rooted in living entirely in space. Why have and raise a child on Ganymede on even worse on Pallas or a ship on the float when you could have one on a planet with at least 1 G and a magnetosphere. The argument for devoting the kind of resources humanity did to the belt and similar projects pre-gates falls apart for a long time when there's thousands of new worlds to just land on. The mining operations that created the Belters as a people are going to become obsolete because the demands for the resources they provided are basically going to go away. Some of this changes with the nature of the universe post Nemesis Games, but in the long term deep space is going to end up being a place where settlements like Ceres, Eros, Pallas and the rest wont be as needed, and wont need to be crewed as permanently. The post-ring world would have deep space be most about transit - not settlement. and when the Belters become economically and politically marginal - they will die outside major intervention because the materials they need to survive will become too expensive for them to afford. The existence of the Epstein drive in this setting changes a lot of the economics of space, going up and down a gravity well isn't a costly thing in this setting compared to the real world, especially when you're discovering exoplanets that have been re-engineered into material depots out there.
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Dec 10, 2016 23:57
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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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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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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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Given how the show has foreshadowed later book events very early, I wonder if we wont be introduced to Duarte earlier in the show than we did in the books. It does make a ton of sense that he would've been involved in the earlier attempt to get the Protomolecule as well.
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Mar 4, 2017 23:05
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Jokes are corrosive to morale, and nothing can undercut the grand project of the Free Navy beratnas.
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Mar 7, 2017 00:14
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I bet the show is gonna change Marco to fit its needs the same way every character has been altered. Shoehorning most of Marco's story into Dawes' character doesn't make sense to me, I see their characters as very different thematically. Dawes is a revolutionary politician while Marco is the raging Belter id manifest in the form of a charismatic warlord.
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Mar 11, 2017 00:59
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Yeah he's a very hate-able character, but in TYOOL 2016 America elected Donald J. Trump to its most powerful political office. Is the idea of an over the top scumbag whose primary defining characteristics are "good at saying things that sound good to his target audience" and "willing to break every norm in the system in service of his own personal ambition and grudges" that far fetched?
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Mar 11, 2017 23:15
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With how the show is handling Bobbie's plot, they're implying a level of Martian complicity in the PM plot far more directly than the books ever did at the same point in the narrative. Makes me wonder if we'll see Duerte in the show far sooner than in the books. I also really want a clean track of that Belter Creole version of the Black Keys.
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Mar 20, 2017 23:58
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IIRC from the mainline books, we really only know that it's viewed as a terrible punishment for someone who has an interest in being a working professional (see how Chrissie uses it as a threat to UN employees,) and I believe that Amos has a line to his old Baltimore contact in book 5 that's something along the lines of "anything's better than Basic" so it may depend on the local administration, or may just reflect a cultural attitude to how living on basic is seen by society. It certainly isn't painted as some wonderful socialistic utopian life though.
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Mar 29, 2017 03:41
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Arcsquad12 posted:Nah, I like that they keep arguing over it. I got a chuckle out of Elias Toufexis being a grammar nazi on the correct pronunciation of Anubis, and then Amos just gives him a look and he shuts up. The guy who plays Holden is OK when he's not doing lovely Batman voice when he's supposed to be super serious.
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Oct 7, 2017 21:35
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I'm not reading the previews this close to release, but based on this info, it's not what I expected, but I am interested to see where they go. Seeing the old crew of the Roci as the last vestiges of the way things used to be dealing with the new era. I am looking forward to seeing Peaches and Amos as grizzled old-timers, and new cast members is a good thing in my opinion. One big open question is where Filip is gonna end up in all this.
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Nov 21, 2017 22:39
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I think the thing about book four is that everyone was expecting a very different story given where the third book left off, so it feels very out of place. That said, it's absolutely worth reading, especially given that book six pulls on quite a few of the threads from it. While it's a bit slow to start, there's a lot of important world-building and plot in the back half, and while the climax isn't as system shaking as the other books, it's a good ride. I also enjoyed Havelock's B-plot.
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Jan 24, 2018 21:50
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Duerte is responsible for the rocks falling on Earth in case people forgot, Marco was his distraction for his coup to become god-king off the backs of horrifying human experimentation. Avasarala has done a lot of terrible things but it's not even close to the same ballpark.
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Mar 31, 2018 04:25
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I'm pretty sure that Duerte's 'immortality' is gonna have some problematic side effects beyond what we've seen so far.
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Mar 31, 2018 05:02
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One option could be a deployable carousel type of pseudogravity like Peter Watts used in Echopraxia: For planetary gravity or under thrust, the hab modules are oriented "down" but on the float you spin up the hab modules, and the flywheel counteracts the spin of the hubs on the ship's trajectory. Though depending on how realistic you're trying to make your setting I think you have to ask if there's any good reason for void ships to ever go into a gravity well, the additional capabilities you'd need to engineer into the ship to make it atmo-capable are going to be a bunch of dead mass in space, and unless you have an Epstein drive, you're wasting a lot of energy pulling your whole ship up a gravity well as opposed to having purpose made shuttles or something like a space elevator to ferry crew and cargo.
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Apr 26, 2018 14:58
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Torch ships which are capable of doing continuous burns for passenger transport might be more what you're looking for if you want a "gently caress it resources don't matter we just want to be comfy" without artificial gravity. Why fly like dumb cargo shot out of a glorified cannon with a really unpleasant start of the the trip and similar deceleration at the end when you can comfortably travel at X G pseudograv the whole way? If you're imagining a multi-solar system setting where transit between systems doesn't take decades if not hundreds of years, I feel like you're throwing enough of physics away that artificial gravity isn't too far fetched. Check out http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/ if you aren't aware of it and want way more info about all kinds of possible sci-fi settings and tech described in far too much detail. ATP_Power fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Apr 27, 2018 |
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Apr 27, 2018 01:27
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I feel like it's been recommended before in this thread, but if you enjoy explorations of alien thought, Peter Watts' Blindsight is worth checking out. (Along with the rest of his works imo) Imagine you're the protomolecule.
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Sep 8, 2018 00:11
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Drone Jett posted:I question Laconia’s logistics capabilities if it took four years to resupply their most important ship after it was damaged and used up ammo for it’s big gun. Given the unexpected consequences of using that big gun in realspace, and the other projects that they needed the ammo for, I can understand why it wasn't the first priority. Not like it wasn't capable of taking care of any Sol based resistance without it. Just finished it and really enjoyed how they're pulling the pieces together, a hell of a lot happened in this book and I'm here for the conclusion. Also Goddamn Amos, last man standing indeed.
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Mar 28, 2019 04:49
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One thing that's kinda odd about the past two books is that Filip I guess just went back to his home planet and isn't going to matter in the rest of the narrative?
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Mar 28, 2019 23:09
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Duarte was a commander in Nemesis Games, I could see him having been a Lt. during the events of the first three books, and having risen up the ranks fast in the depopulated officer corps of the post-war MCRN. I bet we're going to get some of the plot of the Vital Abyss sometime this season and that could also be where they introduce him.
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May 16, 2019 14:41
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Rebuilt or not, Amos does have a thing for picking up strays doesn't he? Him being the space dog caretaker at the end was one of my favorite little story bits. What I'm really curious about is what exactly is going on with Duarte the elder at this point, and what his relationship to the 'Vandals' is. It sure seems to me like the modifications made to him and the blackouts have made him mostly operate on a different order of perception than other people and is somehow able to interact with reality at that 'level'. Maybe his current behavior is because he's constantly perceiving reality like the people who went Dutchman or went through the 'bullets' did? Could be that his protomolecule-human hybrid brain is allowing him to interact with reality on a different scale without getting vooped out of existence like the 'Romans' did. I'm still not convinced that the 'Vandals' are actually some kind of intelligent entity, everything we've seen so far could just be mechanistic reactions to interacting with reality at a different level than we're used to and everyone's over anthropomorphizing it. I'm also wondering if the authors have read Watts, the whole discussion about Human brains being 'a field combat version of consciousness' reminds me a lot of how baseline Humans in Echopraxia are compared to the transhuman intelligences in that setting: Peter Watts - Echopraxia posted:"[she] called you a roach. Unless I miss my guess you took that as an insult, too.”
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Aug 23, 2019 17:47
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Could also be for flashbacks, or a split of the story arc like season one and two did with Leviathan Wakes.
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Oct 31, 2019 21:52
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If the latest season is in the can, I feel like you might be able to write him out without too much reworking, but it'd still be a mess. And having a hard recast would also be a mess too. poo poo sucks man.
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Jun 25, 2020 21:23
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