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Why would you not tie up Holden or get rid of all of his access or even space his dumb rear end if he can't be trusted not to literally cause the apocalypse.
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Apr 23, 2020 19:13
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It kind of feels like they played System Shock 2 or something and thought the whole The Many idea concept was super cool.
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May 13, 2020 18:24
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Artificial light works just fine as long as it's the right kind of light. So it should be pretty trivial.
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Jun 11, 2020 01:54
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Omi no Kami posted:I assumed the giant mirrors were cheaper because the cost of making and positioning the mirrors was lower than the electricity bill you'd run up lighting industrial-sized greenhouse domes, but I suppose a civilization that can build giant farming operations on Ganymede could conceivably have a cheap, plentiful way to generate electricity. Depending on the plant you could do it with just a regular if bright light-bulb. Giant mirrors are likely more expensive to maintain.
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Jun 11, 2020 05:26
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T-man posted:??? how so? big and reflective is all you really need in a mirror, a few correctional thrusts for drift or repositioning. lights on the other hand require precision manufacturing, maintenance, power generation, and all the manufacturing and maintenance that comes along with that. Er, you do realize that those mirrors aren't invincible right? And 'big and reflective' isn't a cheap thing to get in mirrors. Like, you have to actively work to make sure they aren't damaged and cleaned. Today they are incredibly expensive, more-so than big lights. I mean, mirrors have their own host of maintenance and are very expensive to replace too. It's not a simple and cheap endeavor to keep them about. You don't need particularly special lights for a greenhouse, just ones that emit the kind of light your plants need. Also, lights look cooler when you smash them.
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Jun 11, 2020 05:54
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tokenbrownguy posted:You actually do need very special, expensive, and energy intensive lights for efficient Yeah I should have editted to say 'depending on the plants' as the kind I use to have experience with didn't, because it was plants that didn't require much sunlight. Space mirrors are drat expensive though. Like, from my poking around, ten thousand dollars per pound of mirror to get your space mirrors.
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Jun 11, 2020 19:54
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Khizan posted:The thing about mirrors as opposed to lamps is that mirrors are largely a one-time cost. You'll have to replace mirror panels occasionally, but once in place it's pretty much done as long as nothing absolutely catastrophic happens. A bit of fuel for orbital corrections and you should be good for a long time. Grow lights continually require power, maintenance, replacement of bulbs, etc. While mirrors are also going to require maintenance and fuel and such, I imagine that it would pretty easily end up being less expenditure overall. Yeah. I mean I actually looked and it turned out the 10k/lb was JUST the rocket cost and couldn't find a drat thing about how much proper mirrors for this kind of thing might cost to work in space. T-man posted:I believe we're meant to understand that there's a fair amount of manufacturing in space, since that's where all the asteroid materials are. In which case transit would be trivial. In conclusion mirrors rule bulbs drool. Bulbs are still cooler to break.
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Jun 14, 2020 03:31
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I begged Milkfred for him to bring it back and I'm glad he wanted to bring it back. I may not be a fan of Expanse, but I appreciate this well-balanced and well-done Let's Read of it very much.
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Nov 16, 2020 10:41
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I feel the best way to handle cool-down chapters is to get characters to talk/do something that expresses their character through what they do to cool-down. Also it's weird that they have a fair amount of stuff that could just be a couple of lines, but then cut out all the nitty gritty conflict and negotiation.
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Dec 16, 2021 11:59
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Five thousand rounds sounds like not a lot for a triple barrel gatling gun. Like modern-day gatling guns can fire 6000 rounds per minute.
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Dec 23, 2021 02:11
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Interesting. Thanks for that! I didn't think to compare it. It makes you wonder if the only get loaded with such a small ammo count because they fire in bursts and won't be engaging in protracted firefights (which would fit with them being a reconnaissance unit.) Or maybe it's a case of the authors not doing the numbers. I think they just thought gatling guns sounded cool and didn't realize that the point of them is firing long sustained bursts. They're mostly used on aircraft and sometimes tanks because they require electricity and lugging around a power source and the feed system for them alone is very difficult on foot, needless to say.
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Dec 23, 2021 04:31
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Khizan posted:Some thoughts on the 2mm round: I don't really have a problem with them having powered armor-wielding gatling guns in general, just the fact that 5000 rounds is expected to be all that's needed with a gun expected to expend that all in a couple minutes of firing. EDIT: That's why I was suggesting they didn't know much about gatling guns and just picked an ammunition number that seemed like a lot. Kchama fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Dec 23, 2021 |
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Dec 23, 2021 14:16
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General Battuta posted:There are ways it makes sense. Planes don’t carry a lot of ammunition, generally just enough for a couple seconds of firing. This is because you only need a few rounds to score a kill and most of your time will be spent lining up a shot. Bobbie’s armor may be designed with the assumption you’re just going to aimbot people with one or two shots. It still kind of sounds like a ammo-hungry would be ideal for it. As far as I know, the reason why aircraft have them despite only having so few rounds is that you're almost never going to get many chances to shoot it and you'll need an immense volume of fire to hit something like that, especially with only a second or two of opportunity you'll likely have. It seems like an autocannon of some sort would be more ideal in the circumstances. ... Of course, this might be why Holden decided on the gatling.
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Dec 23, 2021 17:57
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General Battuta posted:I mean an autocannon is much, much, much, much bigger than a 2mm (or 6mm) gatling gun. Absolutely! I was just trying to come up with a better replacement if you absolutely needed a big hulking gun with big firepower that didn't rely on hurling huge amounts of ammo super fast. Granted, this all depends on just how strong the powered armor is and its capabilities. I don't have much clue on that.
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Dec 23, 2021 18:34
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Khizan posted:One problem with that is that the ammo for that kind of gun is correspondingly massive. Instead of carrying 5000 rounds you end up carrying 50 so you'll probably end up with fewer total shots, especially if the gatling gun has a switch for something like a 20-round burst. That's true. I'm an idiot so I don't actually know what the answer would be in this situation.
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Dec 24, 2021 03:36
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Khizan posted:Cooling in in space is extremely difficult because vacuum is a perfect insulator. When you heat something up on Earth it cools off by heating up the surrounding air, which then rises up and is replaced by cooler air that absorbs more heat and so on and so on until the environment and the object are at equilibrium. When you heat that same thing up in a vacuum it cools off very slowly because there's nothing around it that can absorb the heat. Do these fights happen in vacuum? I was under the impression that they were in places with at least some atmosphere. The gatling design isn't good in a vacuum though, because a gatling deals with heat by having multiple barrels so that they heat is dispersed among them. In fact, they are extremely bad in a vacuum as a result of those properties you mentioned. Kchama fucked around with this message at 11:24 on Dec 29, 2021 |
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Dec 29, 2021 00:05
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The woman feels like a missed opportunity to be honest, since she ends up basically not mattering and we never find out her deal before Strickland kills her and the others just shrug and don't immediately shoot him for it since he was very blatantly not just stalling her if he had a gun pulled on her and could shoot her at any time.
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Jan 12, 2022 06:29
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:It's odd because I don't think we really needed to know what the deal with the woman from the prologue is. I just assumed she was some random member of the conspiracy who Strickland employed to fake the part of Mei's mother. Then, in this chapter, she seems to be Strickland's superior or, at least, a conspiracy veteran. It's hard to tell though because while we know she was part of it (presuming Protogen) for seven years, we don't really know how long Strickland has. He worked in a university lab on Ceres then swapped out to Protogen at some point. I feel like the woman could've been folded into Avasarala's Earth intrigue stuff somehow, even if not blatantly. Like, in some chapter Avasarala mentions she's suspicious of someone with distinctive features and then she shows up in this chapter. "Haha, oh, that's Director So-and-so, cool." Yeah, I agree. If she didn't show up again I would have forgotten her entirely as just some mook, so to speak. But her reappearing just to be suddenly killed just raises questions.
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Jan 12, 2022 09:45
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drat I started  ing when I got to the end of this. I want to hear more of your thoughts on this book, as this is further than I've even seen of the TV show.
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Jan 24, 2022 16:11
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The earliest books I've read with that setup would have to be the Wheel of Time books, which do it incredibly annoyingly. Also it feels like being a prologue character in these books is insanely hazardous, considering the nasty fates Julie and this book's one had. And yeah I probably should get on watching the rest of the show. I just ran out of steam with it.
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Jan 25, 2022 11:37
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Consider this a double post because I didn't reread far enough into the let's read before commenting. I mentioned System Shock 2 and how Eros seemed like The Many then. And it's still true. Especially with how it came from human/alien hybrids made from parasites that fuse together into a giant collective mind that takes over a space station. Though Eros dodging makes me think of that great bit in Super Robot Wars Destiny where during a climatic battle to stop a group from dropping an asteroid on Earth, the Earth just... disappears and the asteroid hits nothing. And everyone just freezes and has no idea what to do next.
Kchama fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Jan 30, 2022 |
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Jan 30, 2022 04:24
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I dunno if I'm alone here, but Holden is actually one of the main reasons I can't actually like the books, because Holden is a loathsome moron and the fact that everyone lets him keep being in charge despite doing his damnedest to blow up the whole solar system with his stupid broadcasts so it just poisons my view of everyone.
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Jan 31, 2022 17:32
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:A character like Jim Holden needs someone to rein him in and keep him in line. That character should probably be Naomi, but the closest we get to it is her breaking up with him because he's imitating Miller. And I mean, given Naomi's relationship with Marco Inaros who the books position as a dark mirror to Holden, you'd think she would be wary of Holden's behavior and be his voice of reason. If that planning had been there. I think the issue is, beyond nobody being there to even attempt to rein him in, is that he's not even a good paladin. He's not inflexible in his morality to an extreme, he's just very stupid. Like I think someone described him as a Lawful Stupid paladin and that's definitely closer. He's not putting the party in danger because he wants to avoid lethal confrontation until he's sure that the enemy will not accept mercy or surrender to the party bloodlessly. He's putting everyone else in danger because he immediately flies off the handle and just blurts out every little thing he finds without even doing any investigation or research to understand what he's uncovered. The closest he gets to being a reining in is when Miller talks to him and points a lot of this out but even Miller doesn't even try to stop Holden beyond telling him to do what Naomi would do, despite Holden being a known threat to, well, everything. He's definitely caused as much damage as Dresden did, who Miller shot on the spot the moment he thought the guy would get away with it. Holden's actions resulted in the set back of Mars terraforming for decades and the destruction of Deimos. Never mind everyone who died in the warfare caused. If he had just loving waited and pieced the clues together, Dresden wouldn't have gotten the wars he wanted to hide everything, at least not so easily.
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Feb 1, 2022 04:15
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:
Antagonist, to correct your typo. Also, it does sound like this would normally be the wrapup for a book. All the antagonists are defeated summarily. Honestly, Bull's story seems extremely uninteresting since his entire plot is just "guy doesn't like what he is doing, and the moment he does something to stop Bull, he is instantly defeated." Clarissa's was a lot more interesting but just kind of abruptly stops. Anna and Bull actually feel relatively pointless as their own distinct plots.
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Mar 3, 2022 23:42
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Posting here to remind you that I really like what you're doing. I've been busy and quiet, so I haven't responded, but know that I am eager for more from you.
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Apr 4, 2022 00:58
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Does that 20 include all the people killed on the original ship? The setup actually makes the refugees come off as the real villains to be honest. Which I guess why Murty just happens to shoot the ringleader immediately so they can shift to him being the bad guy.
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May 26, 2022 14:39
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That makes sense, regarding the number of dead. I kind of feel like maybe the Coreys didn't know how to make the corporation the bad guys since unlike most Evil Corporation stories they actually haven't done anything warranting murder. They hadn't even had a chance to do bad things before the colonists started killing them to take over the joint. So they just had the guy who had been the face of the deaths be suddenly killed and "Oh that's a murder! The corp has revealed their true evil ways!" by popping the guy in charge of the Murder Everyone faction while in the middle of threatening more murder.
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May 27, 2022 01:10
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It kind of feels like Havelock was not suppose to be Havelock but some other new character, but then the Coreys decided they needed an established character so it could be two new, two old characters. Which might have been fine but they decided it after they wrote all of his chapters and they didn't feel like rewriting everything to be in line with Havelock from before so they just threw in some references early on and that's it.
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Jul 11, 2022 15:25
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The human conflict in this book totally misses me. Like on the whole we're just expected to expect that the corp are bad guys cuz they are a corp, but the colonists absolutely are at a fault for a lot of the mess and somehow. The book somehow made the corp come off as the sympathetic party despite how they clearly wanted to make them the bad guys from the start. The whole Basia thing is the big indicator that they kind of planned on it being a 'both sides have issues, or the corp isn't the pure bad guys' thing since the guy in charge of the bombings is executed immediately and everyone else is presented as more or less innocent and just good fellas protectin' themselves from the unjustified corporate thugs... but it shows up at the 90% mark and doesn't seem like anything is gonna happen from it because they've already committed to killing all the Bad Corp Guys. Also, it kind of feels like Holden suffocates the air out of the rest of the character's plots. Kchama fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Jul 29, 2022 |
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Jul 29, 2022 00:36
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I just don't think the authors have a clue how to write villains at all.
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Jul 31, 2022 00:40
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Got a link to the Worm reading? Also, I kind of feel like the book names are uhh.. kind of lame. And yeah I'm still reading along. I suppose I should read the books myself, but I feel like I get a good understanding from your Let's Read.
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Sep 2, 2022 04:36
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To bring up ships from a universe I'm familiar with, Gundam (Universal Century for this conversation specifically) has the various factions have different main draws for ship names (but this isn't absolute). Like the Federation mostly has their ships named after mythological/historical figures and places (Pegasus, Alexandria, Jeanne D'Arc, Salamis, Argama), with some oddballs for named for various reasons, like the General Revil (a famous Federation general), or Ra Cailum (could be a corruption of something? Sounds Egyptian). Zeon favors presumably made-up words with mythological monsters mixed in, like Garuda, Endra, Rewloola, and Musaka but also odd stuff like the Lily Marleen, named after a German love song, or Zanzibar, named after a real-world location. Not a lot of naming after people, outside of the General Revil and a few others named after war heroes. But Gundam cares about the ships a surprising amount for a show that doesn't focus on them, so there's endless details and tons of named ones.
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Sep 11, 2022 15:32
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Why Julie Mao's racing ship? That seems like a very odd thing to do. Also  that Holden really just goes "oooh, shiny" and press random buttons without putting any thought into it. I'm also not sure why Fred trusts him so completely since Holden's the type who'd kick off deadly wars because he's an easily manipulated idiot.
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Sep 13, 2022 22:46
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:In my head and my heart, it is Winston Do-art. But isn't it like, a universally-famous and renowned racing ship that use to belong to one of the central figures of the Martian Conspiracy? Even if it's been taken by the UN, it still seems like it'd attract a lot of the wrong attention.
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Sep 14, 2022 01:14
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:That's a good point. It's an interesting plot development given how much of the novel has been focused on the lengths people are going to hide 'missing' ships. I wonder if the Coreys will do anything with it? This isn't me being cute, I generally don't recall if it comes up! Oh, I got my wires crossed on the Martian Conspiracy, you're right. It's been so long I kept thinking they were Martian, not Belters. Though, I wasn't actually thinking the bad guys, but other people who would notice a famous ship belonging (even if it was 'use to') Belter corporation that directly caused untold havoc and destruction in the system. Also I can't imagine that a racing ship would be particularly amenable to using as a 'get around' ship, considering that it'd probably be stripped down to the bear minimum in everything so as to make sure it was as far as possible.
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Sep 14, 2022 02:47
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Oh my god, Dakar? Is this really a Gundam reference? I know I mentioned Gundam earlier, but that was just as a joke. For context, Dakar is where Fifth Luna (a large asteroid) was intended to be dropped on Earth in Char's Counterattack, targeted because that's where the Earth Federation's political HQ was located. EDIT: Also I'm been thinking about the Rocinante and how they got it. It was a ship the Donnager just carried in an internal bay with 7 other similar-sized ships? That's pretty wild since the Donnager's 500m long. The Roctinante/Tachi can't be THAT small if it can fit at least 9 people with some comfort and have a bunch of weapons and be able to be a completely independent craft, so it'd be using up a very appreciable amount of ship space to carry fully independent vessels. Kchama fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Oct 3, 2022 |
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Oct 3, 2022 22:59
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 This is what the wiki shows as its schematic for the book version, which honestly makes it seem quite big and spacious if it can fit ten fairly large rooms. If the Tachi hadn't been a fully independent ship able to go on long-range journeys on its own, it wouldn't be TOO weird if it was a carrier that acted as a battleship too, but the fact that it carries a complement of full-sized independent warships in its hull is very weird. Kchama fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Oct 4, 2022 |
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Oct 4, 2022 04:44
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I kind of get the impression that there's a Honorverse-style issue with the ships. When they made the Honorverse board game, according to the devs, they had the issue that very often, Weber's descriptions of the ships didn't actually match the official stats of the ship, or agree with itself. The example they gave was that this ship was described as the most heavily armed of its class, but when compared to the other ships in its class, it actually had the least weapons. Also, I think I mentioned this before, but I'm pretty sure that the setting is based off of the Zone of the Enders, which had a pretty much identical setup (the Enders being people who lived out past Mars, just like Belters), and even did "Mars has quality, Earth has quantity" with Mars using powerful and near-magical Orbital Frames made using new materials that are impossible to come by on Earth, while Earth uses LEVs that are cheap and more 'hard scifi'. I also wonder if Mobile Suit Gundam similarities means it plays a role. The OYW has a similar setup too. Zeon/Mars has quality of Mobile Suits, while Earth has quantity - the units that defeated the mighty Zeon war machines were the GM, a cheap mass production copy of the Gundam which was already obsolete against Zeon's forces by the time the GM is rolled out, and the Ball, a worker pod with cannons strapped to the top. Earth used expert pilots combined with mass numbers to outmatch the super-advanced enemy Mobile Suits piloted by greenhorns. I kind of feel like those things would be in the Corey's wheelhouses and might play a role in why the world-building is the way it is while avoiding the specifics that this sort of thing requires.
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Oct 10, 2022 10:36
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Another small thing I noticed while putting some of this together is that, for all the focus on torpedoes and railguns, the Expanse factions do actually possess formidable laser technology. Protogen has automatic defense lasers powerful enough to cut people in half, Martian gantries are mentioned as being reinforced to withstand lasers. They're common enough that, in Caliban's War, Holden notes that his armor has specific anti-laser plating. Yet lasers never feature beyond anything for communications and electronic warfare, except for Ashford's plan to turn the Behemoth's comm laser into a weapon. I wonder if it might be one author sticking in the high-tech stuff and then the other author never letting it be used. It's kind of weird that they wanted to be so 'hard' scifi when all the interesting stuff in the story is the wild magical alien hyper-tech.
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Oct 12, 2022 03:12
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Putting out a book a year is fine as a goal but it kind of just feels more like they didn't really start giving a gently caress until they actually started to have some real successes with the series. Also, "throw it in" can be totally fine, but even 'pretending to be hard scifi' kind of is at odds with that. Aesthetic is a good description. All style, no substance.
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Oct 12, 2022 08:50
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