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Milkfred E. Moore posted:There’s a nice bit that Omi points out: The impression I remember getting from Miller was that he's a burned out alcoholic, but he used to be really good at the job and he doesn't realize how far his abilities have declined.
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Mar 25, 2020 10:25
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General Battuta posted:Fred Johnson is such an unassuming name. I don't know if I like the choice or not. It's kind of cool to give The Butcher of Anderson Station a 'just a guy' feeling, but it's also a little bit "GM didn't have a list of names written down and had to adlib." I like it. The full name, "Frederick Lucius Johnson", has a kind of a wild west gunfighter vibe to it. John Wesley Hardin. James Butler Hickok. Frederick Lucius Johnson. Sounds appropriate for the Butcher of Anderson Station. Then the informal version is so plain and vanilla that it sounds like a car dealership. C'mon down and check out the low low prices at Fred Johnson Cadillac, etc. It works for me. Also, I really don't find a problem with Holden not recognizing him immediately from the vid call. Colonel Frederick Lucius Johnson, the Butcher of Anderson Station, is an infamous political figure. You just don't expect somebody like that to give you a call out of the middle of nowhere and be like "Hey, this is Fred Johnson." There's tons of public figures I would recognize on the news but probably fail to recognize if they just Skyped me out of nowhere.
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Mar 26, 2020 07:26
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Crazycryodude posted:IIRC in the books Earth and Mars are nominal allies instead of rival superpowers at this point, and even if they are in a cold war you can't just go around blatantly stealing bleeding edge military vessels the diplomats seem pretty insistent it would turn into a whole thing. Even if you discount the diplomatic issues, you still have the fact that governments generally are not too fond of privately owned warships. Keeping the Tachi would be like stealing a Russian bomber complete with armaments and having the USA go "well, finders keepers, enjoy your bomber."
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Apr 2, 2020 05:09
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:From there, Miller wonders about getting another job - if it’s even possible for an old man like him. Omi and I find it strange that, while Miller contemplates working as a shady bouncer or black marketeer, he doesn’t give any thought to what Havelock made sound as a pretty awesome job. “I don’t think Miller’s pride would keep him from taking it,” Omi says, “and he’s definitely not averse to violence for money, so what gives?” Eh. Protogen is an Earther company through and through. I can't really see Miller deciding to go be their Havelock just for money. I think his pride would have stopped him, because he's at that point where that pride is all that he really has left. He's just learned that he's the office joke, that the only person who wanted to work with him was the Earther outcast, and that he got the Julie job because the boss assumed he'd just blow it. He just got fired because he "couldn't be trusted". Joining Protogen would be running away and admitted that they were right and he couldn't hack it anymore. It makes perfect sense to me that he'd double down on the Julie thing. He's proving to himself that he still has it and that they were wrong about him. There's even bits where he thinks things along the lines of "they made me into a mouse, but this is pretty good work for a mouse" and "I can't do anything about Ceres or the war, but I can still find Holden and Julie and the Scopuli, because I'm a detective and that's what I do." I also couldn't see him on the anti-Holden kill team. He obviously doesn't have any trouble deciding that somebody needs to die, nor does he have any trouble shooting them immediately after making that decision, but I never really get the feeling that he'd go for straight up mercenary work or murder-for-hire stuff.
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Apr 7, 2020 11:06
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Omi wants to bring up: The station is laid out so that everybody coming from the port has to go through the casino to get anywhere else in Eros. Miller's inside the casino watching the entrances from the port. It's less "run down sex worker dragging the arrival terminal" and more "topless cocktail waitress in the casino". Milkfred E. Moore posted:Basically, Eros is filled with casinos, drug dens, brothels, and fake-fighting rings. I found that last one kind of weird - like, all these other vices exist on Eros, but the blood sports are all faked? Like pro wrestling? I think the impression is supposed to be less more like unregulated boxing where some of the fights are fixed, not 100% fake straight up 'sports entertainment'. Snatch, not WWE.
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Apr 8, 2020 08:32
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Omi says: “It feels weird to me that Holden has such an issue with Miller treating his (former) badge like a license to kill. Honestly their friction never felt natural to me; it always felt like the writers wanted these two to disagree, but didn’t build it into the text in advance and settled for Holden just flying off the handle every time Miller does something morally dubious. Amos is way, way worse as far as Crime Guys go, and as far as I can tell Holden never once gives him poo poo about it.” I think this all boils down to trust. While Amos might be a remorseless killer, he's Holden's remorseless killer. Amos has this whole thing going on where he knows something is wrong with him and so he chooses to follow Holden's lead. It's been a while since I've read the series(though I've been reading along with the thread), but I can't remember any times where Amos straight up crosses one of Holden's lines. He's incredibly loyal to Holden. Miller, on the other hand, is a lot like Holden himself at this time. He is going to do what he thinks is right and drat the consequences. Holden comes by this by being a Lawful Stupid Paladin while Miller is a burnout who no longer values his own life, but the effect is basically the same. If Holden believes that the greater good demands that he spread information blindly despite the risk it could start a war or get his ship torpedoed, he's going to do it. If Miller decides that the greater good demands an extrajudicial execution of a prisoner, he's going to do it. They both have a knight-errant thing going but they have very different views on what exactly that entails, which is why Holden never trusts Miller. He knows that if Miller ever decides that the crew Rocinante needs to die, he's going to start shooting. Though, really, this all starts to make sense during/after the events in Eros; as to why Holden has these issues with him at their introduction, I have no idea.
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Apr 11, 2020 10:41
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Huh. I figured all Belters would be pretty familiar with those alerts and what they mean. I mean, that was mentioned a few times back on Ceres. Omi seconds it: “Holden, the earthborn space trucker, having to explain how radiation works to Miller, the crazy paranoid belter stationhead, is odd.” Miller's spent almost his entire life on Ceres where there's large amounts of rock to protect people from radiation hazards. It's one of the safest places in the Belt. Holden, on the other hand, spent the last several years in a rickety space truck while occasionally going EVA to check on distress signals and such. I'm not at all surprised that space trucker Holden is more familiar with radiation hazards than Miller, who seems to be the belter equivalent of a 'city slicker'.
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Apr 14, 2020 02:09
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Omi no Kami posted:the first four books I've read all show a lot more polish and greater business awareness than you expect from a lot of new fiction authors. Daniel Abraham already had a published four book series under his belt when he wrote the Expanse books and Franck, while not a published author, was GRRM's personal assistant while the GoT HBO series was being developed. I'm not really that surprised that it came out all but Netflix-ready.
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Apr 16, 2020 23:31
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Sarern posted:When I read these books, I also wonder why Naomi isn't the Captain. Naomi always has the good ideas, and Holden, at first, has generally bad ones. If Naomi had told Amos to throw Holden out the airlock, this series would have been one novel long. So why isn't Naomi captain? IIRC, Naomi is (Nemesis Games spoilers) in hiding from her crazy ex that attacks Earth. That's why she took a dead-end job as an engineer on a crappy water hauler when she's absolutely qualified for more. She doesn't want to be noticed.
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Apr 23, 2020 23:55
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Miller is drinking bourbon. I wonder again what we're supposed to take from this, with the bit where Miller had kicked the alcohol but then found Julie dead in the shower. Miller sobered up when he was on the hunt. He had poo poo to do and he had to be sharp. Now the poo poo's done. He knows what happened to her, he knows why it happened, he knows who was responsible, and he knows the plan to go after them. Now all he has to do is make sure that he's in killing condition when the plan goes down, and that's never been a problem for him. He can relax again. Also, I think LW feels more like Miller's story because Miller is just a stronger character with a better writer. Honestly, I really want to read the alternate universe Expanse where Miller is the one that survives.
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Apr 27, 2020 00:15
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I love this part with Miller because he's doing exactly what Holden does, and Holden hates it. Miller's found something he thinks is wrong, and then he's taking immediate decisive action and to hell with the consequences. He listens to Dresden, decides that he's going to get away with it, further decides that Dresden needs to die, and then he kills Dresden. It's very similar to the "Holden sees thing, decides everybody needs to know it, tells everybody immediately without consulting others" incidents. The big difference here is that Miller's thought about the consequences and decided that they're acceptable, and Holden never even considers them.
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May 1, 2020 21:08
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Holden tells Miller that Dresden and his Protogen buddies are hosed up because they think they can choose who lives and who does. "That sound familiar?" Holden says it's not different at all. I've always liked this part because Holden is so fast to go after Dresden and Miller for 'choosing who lives and who dies", but he never even realizes that in his own way he's worse than either of them because they're at least choosing. Dresden's a monster but at least he's a monster with a plan. Holden, on the other hand, has started wars and caused death and destruction out of sheer carelessness. He's yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater and his defense is "Hey, I thought I saw a fire, I had a responsibility to tell people, it's not my fault people got trampled to death, I didn't force anybody to start running". Milkfred E. Moore posted:I'm not quite sure I buy Fred wanting to have Miller around, much less paying him to be a high-level strategic advice guy At this point, the only person out there who can match Miller's level of experience with the Eros proto-mutant-thing is Holden, and those two are also the only eyewitnesses to all the guard fuckery and mercenary evacuation poo poo that went down on Eros. And on top of that, Miller killed Dresden and so can be used as a bargaining chip in the future. And I mean, Tycho Engineering is ridiculously wealthy. Whatever Miller's getting paid from them, it's the equivalent of pennies in the couch cushions of their fifth vacation house. Definitely worth it to keep him close.
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May 6, 2020 10:03
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Amos starts trying to figure out the numbers in his head, before realizing he can't. Naomi says it'd take "about ten exajoules" based on her own head math. I don't know how plausible it is to run the numbers like this, but I'm also fiercely dyscalculic and can't find it plausible to do basic long division in my head. I think it's pretty plausible. Here's how I'd estimate it.
If you know the figures off the top of your head(which I did not but Naomi probably would), it's a pretty easy calculation because you're just multiplying powers of 10. This kind of estimation is super-rough napkin math that's pretty much just looking for how many digits are in the number you're looking for and you're okay with being off by a few orders of magnitude in either direction. As for "100 kilos convertered directly to energy", this comes from E = mc^2. 1 * 299, 792,458^2 is roughly 8.98*10^16, so that's how much energy is in 1kg of mass. We'll round that up to 10^17, because 8.98 is a lot closer to 10 than to 1, so it's a lot closer to being 10*10^16 than it is to 1*10^16. So if 1kg of mass gives you 10^17 joules, then 100kg converted directly to energy would give you 10^19 joules, or 10 exajoules.
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May 18, 2020 00:01
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I think the problem is that the strict A-B-A-B styling of the chapters forces them to dedicate a disproportionate amount of the ending to Holden, even though the ending would work a lot better with occasional paragraphs about their arduous stern chase interspersed throughout the story of Miller on Eros.
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May 20, 2020 19:58
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Well, okay. It doesn't do much for the excitement because, at best, it means the CO of the Ravi is trying to stall. At worse, it's a bizarre decision made by that same CO to give Holden ten minutes to get ready for battle. In most situations like this, the bad guy gives them something closer to ten seconds. I think this is more that he's not giving them a ten second task and he has to give them an appropriate window to do the things that he's asking them to do. If the job's gonna take 10 minutes, you have to give him at least 10 minutes to do it.
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May 26, 2020 11:34
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Additionally, the epilogue doesn't really do much. There's no real sequel hook, no real fun twist, and it overall feels more like a denouement than an epilogue. As far as twists go, maybe if Fred had said he'd tell the 'true story' of Miller then, with a fit of imminent speech anxiety and desire for system-wide peace, decided not to, that'd do it. I feel like that'd be a fun twist of how history is made by people with really human frailties or something. I guess when I think of the phrase 'generic sci-fi space opera politics book ending' I think of something like this epilogue. It's not bad, but it doesn't really make me want to read the next one. Which I think is interesting because, in my opinion, a lot of the Expanse novels have really interesting epilogues! My guess is that it's because they weren't expecting to land a multi-book contract with Leviathan Wakes. It has a kind of "open enough to lead off a series, but functional as a stand-alone" quality to the ending. There's definitely room for sequels, but if it flops and stops here it's at a sort of stopping point and it's not obviously a failed series. It's got a very 'safe' feel. I'd guess that future books don't have this sort of ending because they sold books 2-6 off of the strength of Leviathan Wakes and didn't need to worry about that kind of thing. Omi no Kami posted:Since we're between books, this is as good a time as any to solicit other people's opinions on something I've thought about a lot: how do you guys feel about Holden and the Rocinante crew as recurring protagonists? Because I'm really split- I like them as characters, and I have fun every time they show up in the books, but I honestly feel like they could be removed from every single book without much trouble. Leviathan Wakes is very explicitly Miller's story, and I think the upcoming Caliban's War has it even worse: it's pretty much all Bobbie and Prax's story, with Avasarala providing a critical supporting role to fill in the gaps. I like all of them except Holden. I think he's easily the most boring character on his ship. Every other character is more interesting and more involved in the story and the world, to the point where it feels like Holden's real job in the plot is to be a loving idiot when the plot happens to be in need of one.
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May 29, 2020 11:02
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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. This is because the vast majority of that cost you mentioned is just getting the stuff out of the gravity well and up to orbit. Really, the cost to get anything into space is about $10000/lb because rocket launches are expensive. In the Expanse, those costs are trivialized. Space travel and infrastructure are cheap. That's why you can have brokeass Belters cruising around in space jalopies. Mirrors are going to be way more affordable for them than they are for us.
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Jun 13, 2020 23:33
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Same, I have missed this thread.
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Nov 16, 2020 06:30
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Omi was curious about this paragraph. The second sentence starts with " In any new assignment...", implying that she's thinking of various jobs she's had in her years of military service. Getting a new assignment/posting is still a new boss and new coworkers and a new workplace, even if it's with the same ultimate employer. The "what if I gently caress up and say the wrong things and everybody hates me and my boss thinks I'm stupid and..." kind of worries that go along with that situation seem like they'd be fairly universal across the military/civilian spectrum.
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Jan 8, 2021 10:59
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Alex pops open the airlock and they all pile in. Both Omi and I had a moment's confusion when Prax comments that everything on the ship is sideways, which confused me because I'd missed that the Rocinante was on her belly - I'd just assumed she was resting on her drive cone. The idea of the Rocinante resting on her belly at all just doesn't seem to fit to me - but, hey, that's what the authors say, so, that's what goes. It makes sense to me when you figure that the Roci is a military ship. Landing the ship belly-down seems would make it easier for troops to board and disembark, and it allows the ship to approach the landing zone in its normal flying configuration. That means that its weapons and point defense stay in alignment with its direction of travel, and it doesn't have to lead with its vulnerable drive cones when landing. And when it's landed, it's more stable in windy conditions and has a lower target profile against ground-based weaponry. Those things seem like they'd be worth dealing with the awkwardness of having some things oriented sideways when under planetary gravity. I'd imagine that civilian transports and such would probably be designed to land with their drive cones facing downwards
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Jan 15, 2021 07:53
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:
To me the Rocinante's ship class has always felt like the Martian Navy just uses that as their jack-of-all-trades small armed ship. Instead of having specialist boarding shuttles and specialist ground assault shuttles and so forth, it settled on a torpedo bomber that can do a bit of everything. Maybe it's not great at everything, but it's functional and that's what really matters. This seems pretty reasonable to me. Battleships have limited carrying capacity and parasite ships that can't participate meaningfully in naval warfare are largely a waste of mass and volume. Makes much more sense to design their torpedo bombers for multiple functions. Sure, you have to make them a bit bigger, but I imagine it all balances out when you figure that a specialist shuttle would still need engines and a reactor and environmental and all sorts of other necessities that every spacecraft needs.
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Dec 16, 2021 12:49
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Some thoughts on the 2mm round: The formula for kinetic energy is 0.5*mv2, so you could get significant energy out of a 2mm projectile but it would need to be going really fast. Here is some super rough math on it. I'll approximate the two bullets as cylinders for ease of calculating mass. A modern 5.56 round is roughly 20mm long, so the first will be 5.56mm x 20mm and the second will be 2mm x 20mm. This means that the first cylinder has a volume of 0.486cm3 while the second has a volume of 0.063cm3. The density of lead is 11.34g/cm3m, so m = 5.5g for the first and 0.7g for the second. The muzzle velocity of a 5.56 out of an AR15 is ~990m/s, so I'll round that up to an even 1000m/s for easier calculation. This gives the 5.56 mm cylinder a KE of 2750 J and the 2mm of only 350 J. Getting the 2mm up to the KE of the 5.56 requires it to be fired at a blistering 2800m/s, which is roughly Mach 8. As a comparison, the absolute fastest current muzzle velocity of a rifle is the .220 Swift at ~1200m/s, so it seems like bullshit. However, she was carrying this weapon on Ganymede and Io, both of which have atmosphere so thin as to be effectively nonexistent so you can basically negate air resistance as a factor in aiming and acceleration, and we know that they have electromagnetic acceleration weapons from the Roci's railgun. Combine those two things and I'm willing to handwave that they have some kind of electromag gatling gun for use in those kinds of situations. Would draw a shitload of power but hey, that's why they use it with powered armor.
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Dec 23, 2021 07:10
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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.
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Dec 24, 2021 00:26
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I'm under the impression that the reasoning for a design like that is a. cooling and b. rate of fire. 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. With that in mind, I feel comfortable handwaving that the gatling design is needed for whatever cooling system they use for it.
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Dec 28, 2021 11:38
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Kchama posted:Do these fights happen in vacuum? I was under the impression that they were in places with at lease some atmosphere. Ganymede has an atmosphere but it's ridiculously thin. Earth atmospheric pressure is about 101,325 Pa. Mars has an atmosphere of about 610 Pa. Ganymede has an estimated atmospheric pressure ranging from 0.1 Pa(from a 1972 study using visible light) to 0.0000012 Pa(based on observations from Hubble). Io's atmosphere is estimated at something like 0.0003 Pa. So the atmosphere exists but it is super super thin. I don't think it would be thick enough for effective cooling but I could be wrong about that because looking that up is where I drew my effort line. And yeah, you're right about the gatling gun thing now that I think about it. I guess they just want the option for raw firepower despite needing a less efficient cooling system?
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Dec 29, 2021 02:15
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Caliban's War, Chapter Forty-Seven posted:Holden looked around the room, seeing the shocked looks from Avasarala and Naomi but ignoring them. Prax’s need for his daughter to take precedence over everything else had almost put them all in danger again. And while Holden intellectually understood the man’s drive, having to stop him from killing them all every time Mei’s name came up was stress he didn’t need right then. It left him angry and needing to snap at someone. I love this bit because it's another bit where Holden really hates his personality traits when they crop up in other people. You see it a lot with Miller in LW. Holden hates him for deciding that the Greater Good required the execution of Space Hitler without ever reflecting on the fact that he used that exact same justification to start a loving war. Similarly, here he's thinking about how stressful it is that Prax's dedication to his daughter potentially endangers them all, without ever realizing that that's what he does to everybody around him every time he hears a secret.
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Dec 30, 2021 12:58
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Chapter Forty-Nine: Holden God, I forgot all about this one. Holden really is the worst about hating on other people for displaying his own personality traits. Just fuckin’ ices this dude out of nowhere and thinks “Miller would like that” without ever realizing that maybe that maybe he should be ashamed of himself for treating Miller like poo poo. Honestly, I feel like these books would be way better if Holden never got a POV chapter and you only ever saw him through the eyes of the others. Keep him as a central figure and important to the story, but only ever show him through the eyes of Amos/Miller/Bobbie/Naomi/Avarasala/etc. Do the chapter on the King from Larson’s viewpoint. That kind of thing.
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Jan 10, 2022 11:05
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:It feels odd that two years + however many they'd spent on the Canterbury, Holden still knows so very little about the people he calls his friends and trusts to have his back in a crisis. It seems like Holden is just like, well, we'll let sleeping dogs lie and that no one ever talks about their background and that Holden never picks up on hints or theorises or whatever. Never even really speculates. Never seems to be bothered that the past is sometimes prologue. The feeling I mostly got is that the old Canturbury had sort of a "nobody resorts to working on this lovely space truck without a reason, and nobody cares about that reason as long as you do your job and don't cause problems" thing to it. Holden's a discharged navy officer, Naomi's in hiding, Alex had that bad split with his ex-wife, Amos is Amos. Everybody's got a past and nobody wants to talk about it, so nobody talks about it. Also, I like Bull. Yeah, he's a bit Millery, but I also liked Miller. 
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Jan 31, 2022 05:38
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Also, did anyone pick up on all the doors and corners stuff that's been going on? Juarez gets shot going around one. Amos kills two dudes who rush into a room. Clarissa's big moment is opening a door. I guess Proto-Miller was right about those being where they get you. But like a lot of things in these novels, I'm not sure if it was intentional or just a happy circumstance. It's just how it is. Corners and doors are dangerous, and Miller was the kind of guy who would know that kind of thing. Imagine you're entering a room with the intention of shooting me, and I know you're coming. That's not a great situation for you, because you have no idea where in the room I'm going to be and you can't shoot me until you find me and get your gun pointed at me. On the other hand, I already know that you're going to be in the doorway so I'm going to be off to the side somewhere with my gun aimed at the door, probably behind cover of some sort. Corners are similar. I could be behind cover 50 feet down the hall with my gun aimed at the corner you're trying to turn.
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Apr 7, 2022 02:58
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