Well of Souls Forums

Well, I've recently caught up with the new TV show on SyFy called The Expanse (That is, seen up to Episode 4) and thought I'd like to discuss it. It certainly seems to be the hardest sci fi show I've seen, at least as far as Space Opera-type shows go.

Space travel seems highly Newtonian, and their ships are oriented internally so that the bow is up, and the stern is down. This gives them a sort of acceleration-based gravity; the rest of the time they use mag boots to keep their feet on the ground. I don't know how they keep gravity on the Ceres station (though I think I read that in the books they use rotating sections).

Humanity has colonized Mars and the asteroid belt, and one of the series' main conflicts seems to be the growing tensions between Earth, Mars and the inhabitants of the belt, called Belters. Said Belters suffer from physical deformities as a result of growing up in low gravity, such as underdeveloped muscles and improperly formed skeletons.

Thus far, my favorite part has been the space combat in Episode 4. The ships first launched torpedoes at each other, coincidentally I'd like to point out that said torpedoes did not have contrails, like a lot of missile weapons seem to inexplicably have these days, then use railguns when they close in.

mallet: they spun up ceres and dug out the station inside, so 'rotating sections' is not entirely wrong, the sections in question are just attached to a rotating asteroid.

and 'contrails' in space are not entirely stupid as long as reaction drives are used...just mostly stupid, but visually pleasing.

Even if a chemical rocket engine is used, the missiles should still produce oblong drive plumes, rather than leaving streaks through space. Babylon 5, The Last Starfighter, and now the Expanse did this right, as opposed to Battlestar Galactica. I understand that it's an artistic trope, but it's one that annoys me.

Yeah, posted about it in another thread but kind of regretted not making a new thread, the show is so good it deserves to be known.
Best scyfy show to date, lots of things to love, in particular the space battle, even if we didn't see much of it.

mallet: imperfect combustion could leave a 'trail' it would not be there for long, would disperse rather quickly and not be visually identical to contrails, but as I said, not ENTIRELY stupid, and if 'a visual thing does not follow physics perfectly' is the worst you can say....well it probably isn't but still.

and yes I agree that it is nice to see them get it right, but it is not one of my pet peeves.