How accurate is the depiction of space battles in the expanse compared to what they might be like in real life?

How accurate is the depiction of space battles in the expanse compared to what they might be like in real life?

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  1. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Poor but much better than Star Wars

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Poor
      Can you elaborate?
      t. Curious

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Different anon, but I think the range is way to close, I get that viewer needs to see battle on the screen, but it's probably not very accurate

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Or in that scene, very cool effect, but those sparks would keep bouncing around the hull instead of staying suspended(especially since they vented the air from the ship to avoid explosive depressurisation after a hit)

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Shit, forgot the file

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            explosive decompression is a bit memey

            1 atm is just not enough pressure to do much damage to even lighter structural materials, especially if a leak is relieving pressure

            remember, anything up there that wasn't built there had to withstand launch G-forces at one point, and if it was built there all its parts had to - there's nothing to ISRU in LEO, LMO, or LLO

            IIRC the ISS uses tape over leaks as a temporary fix, and usually the losses are so minor they take a while to even notice with some of the most sophisticated life support diagnostic equipment available

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            >especially since they vented the air from the ship to avoid explosive depressurisation after a hit
            It was to avoid losing precious atmosphere, they pumped the air from the bridge into an internal tank.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >I get that viewer needs to see battle on the screen

          The first battle in the book was not actually "shown" or described by narration. It was experienced through the main character's perspective as they were locked in a ship's brig. One of the characters had military experience and was describing what he thought was happening based on what he heard the engines doing, which weapons were firing. It was a very effective scene that was diminished in the show when they actually just *showed* the ship-vs-ship action, dissolving the excellent claustrophobia that came from not knowing what was actually happening.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            I think books in general have it much easier to convey distances and passage of time

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              Part of the problem is that even if the combat distances are measured in "mere" hundreds of kilometers, space combat runs into the "Star Trek Problem"/submarine movie problem. You've got guys watching little blips move on screens in a dispassionate, relatively quiet, dimly lit CIC with the rumble of engines, the thudding of weapons, and the grunts of the crew from the G-forces.

              Then there's some gigantic bangs and thudds and damage alerts and the aluminum can the crew is riding in is torn open and everyone dies. Trying to portray space combat has all of the worst components of trying to do a good submarine movie. There's either wait times that stretch into hours for maneuvers to take effect, or short duration jousting matches that leave both sides crippled, or slow affairs where the distances largely make portraying things in a visual medium for the general masses difficult.

              What The Expanse should be praised for is less the realism of the show, and more that they were able to both convey a better sense of the scale of distances in space and also make the combat visually interesting and fast-paced enough that it was actually fun to watch.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >You've got guys watching little blips move on screens in a dispassionate, relatively quiet, dimly lit CIC with the rumble of engines, the thudding of weapons, and the grunts of the crew from the G-forces.
                That sounds interesting to me. In fact you can do away with the people all together and just show the readouts and the screens.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                I've been hoping for something like a mix between the traditional submarine movie in the vein of Hunt For Red October or Crimson Tide but done with ships in the style of Theo Bouvier's take on Children of a Dead Earth ships for years now. There are weapons that could give you both realistic performance over 1000+km ranges and also the visual spectacle that you'd want for a visual medium such as tv/movie, but would still conform to more plausible paradigms.

                Something like 200 ton gunboats rapid firing casaba howitzers (nuclear HEAT shells, essentially) from VLS cells could be made cinematic as fuuuck if given an Expanse style budget, and even lasers can be made interesting when used in contrast to other weapon systems. One of the funniest descriptions I've heard of space combat with casaba-howitzers VS lasers was a quote from projectrho on the subject:

                "Combat might evolve into a cross between a chess board and a pinball machine. Chess, when it comes to intercepting your target and setting up a cross-fire they cannot dodge, and pinball, for when the nuclear warheads detonate and you have 30 seconds to outsmart your opponent and out-maneuver their projectiles."

                I don;t know about you, but that sounds fricking awesome to me.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Oh shit this sounds awesome for a "near future" space combat game. I'll keep that in mind for my future lunar warfare game

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                play nebolous. it's basically red october in space.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Didn't the series do a version of this scene later on in the series, from the pilot Alex's perspective - the scene where a railgun round comes through the cell and takes a guy's head off

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              It's the first on screen ship combat in both the book and the show.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          That.
          Also, a big problem with TV/movie space battles is they often have the spaceships on either side lined up in formation like the days of sailing ships. That makes sense for movie drama but it's not realistic, in space there is no up or down, the idea of ships on either side of an imaginary line being grouped up in rows and square formations makes no sense.

          The trouble is that having ships super-far apart maneuvering in complete 3D where there's no clear way to distinguish "the good guy's side" from "the bad guy's side" fricking sucks to watch in a movie.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            I don't know, you could just incorporate that confusion as part of the suspense. Seconds tick by as crews work to try and ID who's who as fast as they can before one of them gets zapped by the other. Visually it could be something like watching a cloud of dots turn from yellow to green or red.

            Battles would be held 1000s of kilometers apart and the winner would be determined by who fired their relativistic kill payload first.

            I think in the expanse there really isn't anything that can speed a payload up to relativistic speeds in a useful time frame.
            On that note, would it possible to keep using slingshot assists over a period of a hundred years to gradually accelerate a small asteroid to relativistic speeds before slamming it into the earth? A final frick you from Marcos Inara to be delivered at some point in the future.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              >slingshots
              >relativistic
              That's not how gravity assists work.

              I do remember reading something about using two closely orbiting black holes for something like that but it was messy.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              > keep using slingshot assists
              you can't use these indefinitely because if you're above the solar system escape velocity your subsequent assist yeets you out of the system entirely

              assists only work if the gravity of the assisting object is enough to keep the assisted in a system-bound orbit - the faster you're going, the more gravity you need to pull that off

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Black holes?

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                introduces two more problems:
                1. closer to relativistic speeds you are, closer to the event horizon you need to be for sufficient gravity for the assist
                2. closer to the event horizon you are, more severe gravitational shear forces would be

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Not him but
        >Space being huge and empty means that there are vast expanses(no pun intended) of nothingness in which as soon as there is anything it will be picked up, even if only in infrarred(i.e:we caught rogue planets by their infrarred signature)
        >Having no practical way to hide(too slow) and access to nuclear reactors, means that you can power really ludicrous stuff, like gigawatt lasers, nuclear shaped charges or railguns
        >This means, that there is a far higher advantage in having more powerful sensors and intelligent ordnance than in going close and fast(because the first rule of combat is that range trumps everything else)
        >Unless the spaceships are going to defend close orbits, there is a huge penalty for mass, meaning that armor is arguable ineffective

        Things can be exaggerated to such extents that saying that space battles would be an exchange of planet generated-terawatt lasers and drones/missiles would not be so far fetched. Of course someone would say "but politics!" and then I would say you are right, it's just that then we open a weird can of worms in which we have to define things like "what orbits would constitute territories?" "Can space stations form independent polities?" "if a spaceship starts reaching relativistic speeds do we consider it a weapon?" and so on and so on...

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        This is what WW2 mine shells did to aircraft.

        ?t=438
        All AA cannons use this basic principle even today when canons are basically not used in an AA role except by poor countries.

        This is an Expanse battle.

        ?t=95
        Notice how the cannons are used at very close range, missiles are used sparingly, and nothing is exploding but gets clean holes through instead.

        Real space combat is going to be giant missile barrages like you would see in a lot of 80s anime (but without the smoke trails because in space you don't have visible smoke trails or shock diamonds due to the vacuum conditions), and lasers. Lots of lasers. Laser turrets will bleed laser light off a centrally mounted laser inside the craft. The only traditional guns will be spinally mounted with very limited traverse if any at all, and they will be few in number because cannons are heavy and you don't want the mass penalty.

        It's not going to be fun or exciting. It's going to be all through instruments and AI will be making a lot of the decisions.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          The show is obviously made more theatrical for audiences but in the books a lot of time is spent explaining how much work goes into battles and maneuvers and such.

          Basically, combat in the expanse is split into three spheres:
          1)long range, with missiles, fought over millions of miles
          2) railguns, which are basically hitscan weapons but the caveat here is the you have to perforate the ship through its entire length otherwise you just make an easily patched hole ike another anon said ITT.
          3) this is "close" range but still fought over thousands of kilometres and actually rarely happens like in the show.
          Basically half the battles described arent even the prominent since most of the characters black out from the extreme high gravity maneuvers their ships go through. Lots of time is spent on just planning the battle out and pre-programming what the ship will do, so once the crew blacks out it runs on automatic. Most "close" range fights in the books are extreme high-G jousting matches where ships zoom past eachother at ludicrous speed and shoot at pre programmed trajectories. And there is always a real chance tha the crew will simply stroke out from all the drugs and the high gravity.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >reddit frog
          disregarded

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        I remember one scene where a rail gun round pierces the hull, takes a guys head off, and all that is in the aftermath when they impromptu seal up the hull punctures are a few drops of blood. Ever seen a rail gun round fired? That shit creates its own plasma. You can bet things would look more like a bomb than someone really adept with a ball-peen hammer.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          This also makes me wonder why we haven't seen more space fiction get deeper into speculation on expansive impacts (pun on the title of the show was not intended, but I accept it). It'd make much more sense to focus on that in space, since there aren't annoying things like friction to worry about for the most part. Think chain shot, but futuristic, I guess. You want the rounds to expend as much energy as possible on impact, and not go beyond target. To that point as well, i think a LOT more focus would be on precision of each round, and so much of the spam sort of point defense systems we see in The Expanse.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            and *not* so much of the spam sort of point defense

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >1) We can reasonably assume that the vast majority of space battles will be either in orbit of something, or close enough to a large enough planet/moon/etc that the biggest concern for plotting manoeuvres is the planets/moons gravity
        >2) Even without that ships are not going to move, or even pivot, that quickly. They are going to be massive things - with a shitload of inertia to overcome for even minor attitude adjustments
        >3) Unless we discover a pretty impressive vein of naturally occurring Handwavium somewhere in the solar system ships are not going to be able to accelerate the way they can in the Expanse
        >4) Stealth in space is moronic, completely and utterly moronic. It's a potentially interesting narrative device, but it's just not physically possible
        >5) Ships probably won't ever be within visual range of each other, through the combination of 4 and 2 combat is going to be very long range artillery/missile duels - the sort of thing where you may well need to wait a full day or two between firing a volley and seeing if it hits/what sort of effect it had

        If you can stand the addition of some fairly ridiculous tech (shields, widespread use of heavy particle beams, interstellar 'jump space' drives and 'hypernet gateways', etc) then the 'Lost Fleet' series is worth a read. It puts a lot of focus on how communication lag due to lightspeed limitations will affect fleet battles where both sides can see each other for days before combat begins, and shows what a multigenerational 'forever war' would actually do to a society and military. It's also one of the rare modern sci fi books where the characters act like believable professional military officers and adults rather than squabbling children or unflappable baddasses.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      this.
      The big issue that the expanse misses is that "stealth" is impossible in space. Even the voyager probe which has left the solar system and has basically a walkie-talkie tier radio on board can still be detected through its radio emissions.
      Like if you launch a rocket, everybody from here past pluto will know about it.

      A high end gaming rig with an antenna and a telescope would have ID'd those spaceship instantly.

      That being said the MCRN marines are fricking cool and I still can't believe those idiots for changing the helmet to see muh actors.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        When people say stealth is impossible in space, usually it's referring to blackbody radiation, which is impossible to get rid of. But just because blackbody radiation is theoretically detectable doesn't mean that there's necessarily the technology to detect a small object in space at room temperature.
        Now, if a ship is firing its engine, obviously that's easy to detect, but I was under the impression that the stealth ships in-universe aren't firing their engines when they need to be stealthy.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Nope. by turning on your drive, you will reveal your mass and your velocity. which in turn gives away your destination and time of arrival.

          But even if you would be using a CO2 bottle nozzle to get around the system your reactor would still be running hot. or your piston engine or whatever the hell it is that gives you electricity and life support systems. Even the ISS has massive radiators to get rid of the heat it's producing. your ship would need the same, even without a massive powerplant attached to it.

          And that's barely scratching the surface on IR detection.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            IIRC expanse ships use water as reaction mass in their engines and superheated steam as RCS propellant so they probably just dump all their heat through maneuvers and their engine plume

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              doesn't matter. doubly so if you have an engine plume in the first place. And in order to store that water in the engine in the first place you need power to do the heat exchange required to keep your life support on.
              So now you're back to
              >running a powerplant to not die in a sauna
              >burning the engine to technomagically get rid of heat

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                They use some ultra efficient fusion engine, it's really the only thing that isn't as hard sci fi aside from the aliums.
                The efficient engine also allows for manageable amounts of water being stored in the ships. And they mention how ice mingon for reaction mass and drinking water is the equivalent of oil today in importance

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                You're not understanding what I'm saying.
                Your super efficient engine is not operating at -273 degrees. You as a human can not live at -273 degrees. you would even die at 0 degrees. you need room temperature to not die. by being room temperature you are glowing like a star compared to the background temperature.

                This isn't about how efficient or magical their engines are. it's about temperature and sticking out like a sore thumb regardless of engine or powerplant power use.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                or to put it in other words: the only way to reduce your IR visibility is by being the same temperature as the things around you. in space that is -273 C more or less.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Or fighting in the area around the Bowtie/Butterfly (?) Nebula

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            It seems to me this is a ECM problem.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              Not really. IR is passively detected. there are no signals to mess with because basically your opponent is simply taking a picture. he's not sending out radio or light to bounce back around and intepret the return.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >in-universe aren't firing their engines when they need to be stealthy.
          The stealth ships they do have in universe use radar absorbent materials and advanced heatsinks so hide their thermal signature to get close to their targets.
          Close in the expanse means a few hundred thousand kilometres.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          not necessarily just blackbody, it will also occlude the CMBR (even if you don't buy the explanation for its origin, it's still a relatively constant background compared to local variations from objects)

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >The big issue that the expanse misses is that "stealth" is impossible in space.
        What do you guys think of this(?):
        http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2016/03/stealth-in-space-is-possible.html

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2016/03/stealth-in-space-is-possible.html

          ignoring the somewhat obvious caveat of not including aperture size, this ONLY deals with IR emissions. While this COULD be enough to fool current-day tech, it would be impossible if you're actually trying to hide from an enemy spaceship.

          Like those ships would basically be on the lookout for suspicious stuff 24/7. Looking for star occlusion, light and radio emissions or even high resolution visual ID. And since they are mobile, they would move into positions where ie data transmission between mars and the fleet would be great. or analysis of generated intel pictures and data could be shared and networked between ships, fleets to fix what another ship might have missed.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            You know what? Maybe the best stealth is if there are 50 kabrillion ships all flying about in space, and they can see them all, but they don't know which ones are civvies, allies, or enemies who suddenly come in to do a skirmish. If there was a solar system absolutely crammed back with loads of different space nations, and PMCs, almost like a Chinese warlord period but in space, maybe then you could get surprise attacks, because you don't know when the shifting alliances are going to break. Detection normally assumes you detect the enemy entering your territory from 1000 AU away and send long range missiles to destroy them, but if the boundaries break down and it's a constantly shifting multi-faceted gang war in space, then perhaps the enemy is already inside? You can detect everyone, but which one is an enemy, and which ones are suddenly going to be an enemy based on shifting politics could make closer range space battles possible (at least for a while; "the empire long united must fall, the empire long divided must unite").

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              This is solved by vetted civilian beacons anon.
              The enemies civilians are fair game.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              Ahh, so modern US carrier fleet doctrine.

              Find the carrier amongst the horde of relatively equally sized cargo ships.

              This is genuinely a fun read about it: http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-031.php

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          The fact that Drummer never got her breasts out is a fricking travesty.

          If you just want to hide your heat signature, could you not unfurl like a giant sail or umbrella in front of you that you supercool down to the required heat? Then you can burn as hot as you like behind that as long as you keep it between you and the thermal sensor, right?

          I want to frick Drummer so bad it's like a physical ache in my penis.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            >If you just want to hide your heat signature, could you not unfurl like a giant sail or umbrella in front of you that you supercool down to the required heat?
            If you engineer and use it perfectly then that sounds like it might give you a few minutes of dramatically reduced heat signature - which is still going to stick out like a sore thumb against a backdrop of a few billion cubic kilometres of literally nothing. It also wouldn't help defeat a basic telescope, which would presumably be the primary military spaceship sensor system.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              >primary
              i dont think there will be any 'primary' sensor system. there's so many different ways of detection that are all good at certain things that naming any one as the foremost among them would be stupid, imo.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Fair enough, I call it the 'primary' sensor because it's would be the hardest to defeat, and as a passive sensor it would have half the lag-time of something like radar. I absolutely would not suggest having telescope only ships, but I do think it would be the most frequently used method of spotting targets.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              >If you engineer and use it perfectly then that sounds like it might give you a few minutes of dramatically reduced heat signature - which is still going to stick out like a sore thumb against a backdrop of a few billion cubic kilometres of literally nothing.
              I don't know how you're justifying that.
              Also :
              >"Uh Captain, there's a black spot against the equally black background"
              >"It's called space, STFU moron"

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            You can keep Drummer and her brother husbands and sister wives, I want to break my dick off inside Clarissa Mao.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Man, there are some women that are just inexplicably sexually appealing in a manner that I cannot explain. Drummer (Cara Gee) definitely fell into that category. So does Jessica Henwick from both Game of Thrones and Of Love and Monsters, which was a really fun movie; would recommend.

            Children of a Dead Earth style spacecraft are out of the question because the reactors invalidate the cone shape through neutron scattering. Having radiators and any equipment that close to them would essentially cook everything exposed unless you used a cartoonish amount of heavy shielding (which would ultimately kill acceleration). Tubes are the answer and radiators for heat dissipation would either have to be triangular pointing away from reactor radiation or placed further out of reach in the center of a spacecraft. Conventional rocketry makes the cone valid but the gains from nuclear power are insane.

            >Children of a Dead Earth
            I've never heard of it but it sounds like it's worth a watch, thanks.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              it's a game. It's really well done but gets some important bits wrong here or there but the impression is correct. It's also indie jank to the maximum so good luck

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >it's a game.
                Well what the frick was this anon talking about

                https://i.imgur.com/ZYE7Rmm.jpg

                I love this movie for the starship section alone.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                that's the ISV Venture Star from Avatar. It was drafted by actual aerospace engineers so it's probably the most realistic spacecraft in Hollywood. It's also strictly for transport.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Thanks, I either forgot or if it's from the second, haven't seen it yet.

                https://i.imgur.com/XijRysj.jpg

                You can keep Drummer and her brother husbands and sister wives, I want to break my dick off inside Clarissa Mao.

                They really have good fricking waifus in the show

                >israelite titty monster
                >pajeeta smokers voice granny
                >Amazonian Pacific islander

                Isn't funnier in the books because Holden has very obvious jungle fever for brown buff women.

                Can't disagree

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Both Avatars have it, but Avatar 2 has the clearest images of several of them.
                Also I bet you never saw the deleted scene from 1 when they were forced to leave the planet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSaKqwWe9ZQ

                You can pirate the Amazon rip right now, it's alright I guess. Avatar 2 was utterly astounding in 3D 4K though, never seen a film match it in visuals, ever.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                It's so unreal that homosexuals were saying that a fricking JAMES CAMERON sequel would bomb.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                PrepHole is generally filled with morons.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                I've never seen anything like it in theaters. I'm sure it probably doesn't hold up as well at home or through streaming story wise but that shit was legitimately like a window into another planet in IMAX

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                It had some things going for it for sure

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                They obviously spent all the CGI effort on the face, rest looks like shit.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >It's also strictly for transport.
                Not necessarily anon. We can weaponize it. Remember what board you're on

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                I mean they did in Avatar 2 in the most destructive way possible

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >It's also strictly for transport.
                Kzinti Lesson, anon :^)

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                I got hard filtered by the Vesta Overkill mission

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              They really have good fricking waifus in the show

              >israelite titty monster
              >pajeeta smokers voice granny
              >Amazonian Pacific islander

              Isn't funnier in the books because Holden has very obvious jungle fever for brown buff women.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >israelite titty monster
                Who?
                Also Holden, a man after my own heart.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                The reporter chick with the beak

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                How could I forget that beak?

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Frick the beak, I would exterminate all palestinians for a chance to motorboat those fat khazar milkers

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >pajeeta smokers voice granny
                The actress is actually Iranian.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Amazonian Pacific islander
                I appreciated the many low angle shots of her in a tight space outfit climbing down ladders. I think one was even in slow motion.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Amazonian Pacific islander
                the lengths I'd go to, good lord.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                That is an incredibly sexy image of a woman that I just never found attractive as a whole. I mean I'm not saying she doesn't have her moments but its' like she's struggling not to gain weight and her face is too small for her head.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Her character was absolutely demolished by the show.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                I could honestly forgive everything about the character if they just made her work out. As it was, watching a flabby person with zero visible muscle toss grown men around was just comical.

                I'm willing to suspend my disbelief on female physical strength if they at least put in the effort to LOOK strong, but they almost never do. It's never excused for a man, male actors have to at least have a decent physical frame if they're portraying someone strong, but with women there's just no effort.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                They'd have had to cast Gwendoline Christie to get anything like that kind of towering physique.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Women just don't gain muscle like men do. They don't really get toned frames. Look at female powerlifters and shotputters, to support the muscle mass they have to eat a shitload, and most of those calories get get turned into fat cells so they look fat as frick.
                there's no substitute for testosterone.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Plus the chick is Polynesian

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                I don't buy this. You don't need a ton of bulk to look strong. You just need some muscle and more importantly muscle ton. Diet, squats, pull ups and ab exercises combined with some cycling are more than sufficient to give a woman a strong looking physique.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                I don't think you understand what healthy bodyfat % is for women. To look muscular women have to be at starvation levels of bodyfat. Especially with a space suit on you'll never see significant musculature on anything close to a healthy woman.
                It's really that simple.
                Also the strongest women I've known (literal cowgirls that herd cattle) are just big. They aren't fat, they are just stocky.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Fat does not equate to fit and if you want to portray a female badass warrior, she would look more like the female UFC than a a flabby islander. I'm not going down some rabbit hole with you on beauty standards or what is healthy. I'm just saying other anon,

                I could honestly forgive everything about the character if they just made her work out. As it was, watching a flabby person with zero visible muscle toss grown men around was just comical.

                I'm willing to suspend my disbelief on female physical strength if they at least put in the effort to LOOK strong, but they almost never do. It's never excused for a man, male actors have to at least have a decent physical frame if they're portraying someone strong, but with women there's just no effort.

                has a good point.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                https://i.imgur.com/SKna9dg.png

                Fat does not equate to fit and if you want to portray a female badass warrior, she would look more like the female UFC than a a flabby islander. I'm not going down some rabbit hole with you on beauty standards or what is healthy. I'm just saying other anon, [...] has a good point.

                Those two thots are looksmaxing. If they were really strengthmaxing, they'd look like this. Almost every girl you see that's not literally a country's top lifter or athlete in the event they compete in is looksmaxing over strengthmaxing. Every girl at the gym, every instathot every "UFC STRONK WOMAN". The number of women who actually seriously train is infenitisimally small.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                I guess see

                https://i.imgur.com/FvwNlPj.jpg

                What if those flakes were plutonium?
                [...]
                Male fighters/soldiers don't look like powerlifters so why would the females?

                >Male fighters/soldiers don't look like powerlifters so why would the females?

                https://i.imgur.com/FvwNlPj.jpg

                What if those flakes were plutonium?
                [...]
                Male fighters/soldiers don't look like powerlifters so why would the females?

                see
                >If they were really strengthmaxing, they'd look like this.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >You and him fight for my entertainment

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Kek, kinda but no, both posts responded to me in disagreement. However, the way they are also diametrically opposed to each other invalidates their points. It's like some beautiful triad thing or something.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                You're a massive homosexual.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                And you have massively shit taste, gay.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            >The fact that Drummer never got her breasts out is a fricking travesty.
            We do see her breasts in S5 I think

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            >could you not unfurl like a giant sail or umbrella in front of you

            That will turn you into a shining void spot against the cosmic background. To make matters worse you actually can't hide your power source emissions and besides the immense waste heat fusion as well as fission reactors to a lesser extent spew neutrinos like stars - those can and will be detected by anyone with a brain.

            Space propulsion is even worse as an active fusion drive will be literally visible from light years away.

            Basically "space ship" stealth with all the fancy engines and guns is impossible inside a solar system with active listeners.

            If you want to stay hidden until the right moment you have few options beyond being small, inert, and preferably hail from interstellar space.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            So true.
            Drummer is my all-time celebrity crush.
            The funny thing is I don't even go for women who look like her. It's just her mannerisms, energy, and accent. The fact she's also banging hot and smokes cigars just makes it surreal.
            Her husband's a lucky guy.
            But I am too so I can't complain.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        "Stealth" ships in the expanse refer to ships that
        a:Use radar absorbing materials
        b: Alter their drive signatures to obfuscate the ships make and model
        c: attach components or shells to their hull to alter their radar cross section
        d: alter their transponder codes to make themselves seem like a different ship
        e: have large internalized heat sinks to prevent radiating ir light for limited periods of time
        f: A ship that has temporarily shut down it's reactor and is drifting ballistically
        g: some combination of the above.

        There is no perfect stealth just methods for temporary stealth.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >a:Use radar absorbing materials
          as discussed at great length above, your heat signature from your drive is orders of magnitude greater than whatever your radar crosssection is.
          >b: Alter their drive signatures to obfuscate the ships make and model
          >d: alter their transponder codes to make themselves seem like a different ship
          This is not stealth. This is the equivalent of painting a new name on your ship and flying a different flag. You will still be easily tracked, just not identified. You being on an intercept course with a military vessel is what will give you away, not your ships name. The only exception would be a pre-planned move where your enemy is expecting ship A at time B and you have successfully taken the place of ship A in port.
          >e: have large internalized heat sinks to prevent radiating ir light for limited periods of time
          >f: A ship that has temporarily shut down it's reactor and is drifting ballistically
          Ok fine, you press a button and the entire ship shuts down. you vented all the heat, all the air and now you're running dark. also full emcon because ELINT is a thing. Great, you've successfully disappeared from everybody's displays.
          First of all, we still saw your drive a minute ago. we also saw it a second ago. Or maybe Ganymede Control saw you and fed us your last known position and vector. Even WW2 tier dead reckoning would have plotted your position accurately given that data, not to mention a computer program specifically designed for it.
          Second of all, disappearing from all scopes raises questions. Are you in distress? Are you a smuggler? Is your ship stolen? Why does your last vector show you on an intercept course with our fleet? Why aren't your responding to hails?
          >g: some combination of the above.
          Congratulations, you've successfully pretended to be a ship you're not and are without maneuvering abilities due to power shut down. You have done exactly ZERO to avoid optical detection through star occlusion.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            additionally, the OP asked how accurate to IRL space battles the expanse is. not how it might somewhat make sense in their world.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Part of the issue with the Expanse is information overload. There's so many cargo haulers, skiffs, liners, rock hoppers, miners, wild catters, pirates and the lag with communications being a thing sometimes up to several hours that there's simply no way to realistically track and interrogate the drive signature of every single ship like that. It's like orders of magnitude more than a current flightradar24 screen, and those are already moronic. Secondly, unless you're going way out then ships are going to be flying near you all the time.
            I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's another factor to consider.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              Oh also, Belters (which are described as being most of the ships out there, even if they're nominally owned by earth corps) are described as being inclined to flip their transponders on and off all the time just to frick with inner navies for the fun of it.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              Oh also, Belters (which are described as being most of the ships out there, even if they're nominally owned by earth corps) are described as being inclined to flip their transponders on and off all the time just to frick with inner navies for the fun of it.

              You're thinking of manually sorting through all this, when in reality it's really simple using on board systems. Who has radar or wake target AND is broadcasting a transponder? Who has no transponder BUT has a wake? compare wake signature with the database and check for transponder match! Which one of the remaining targets is on an intercept heading?

              Finally you will ALWAYS be pretty much alone in space unless you're docking in port or actively being pursued. If I depart for Ceres right now, and you depart for Ceres tomorrow, our tracks will diverge massively due to the solar system moving. And thats assuming exact same mass and thrust.

              But ok, lets say we basically have non-stop shipping activities with identical ships. Shipping will be divided into basically 3 categories: shipping goods, shipping people and recreational.

              The first two will either take a best-time or best-economy plot to go from A to B. For example FedEx might burn 1.3 Gs to make amazon prime deliveries and their only restriction would be OSHA type rules about exposing pilots to G limits or ship certification G limits. now DHL might only burn 0.85 Gs because their ship is older or they are empty. Rules for pax ships might specify something like 0.9 to 1.1 Gs. Cruise liners take a pre-determined route.

              So EVERYONE is on a unique vector that can be traced back to departure and extrapolated to destination.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        I mean, if all of the systems are internal and they can make decisions on their own without giving off any radio waves or signatures at all besides maybe propulsion? Could you not make something that looks like an asteroid? Not even that, but how about fighting in areas with lots of space junk?

        Also, would you, in theory, be able to send a huge swarm of munitions at an opponent in a legitimate attack- but also mix in some boarding vessels with the volley, using the volley as a decoy, knowing that most of the volley will be intercepted, but launch the volley in such a formation that the boarding vessels will be protected and will be able to make their insertion and latch onto the enemy ship once the volley closes in on target?

        You've got to be creative and think outside of the box. Its mindsets like a lot of the anons in this thread which causes doctrine and strategy to stagnate.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >besides maybe propulsion?
          propulsion is the easiest to spot out of all possible methods of detecting you. this has been discussed at length in this thread alone.

          >Could you not make something that looks like an asteroid?
          Sure. But the second that asteroid starts emitting heat or radio waves the jig is up. Additionally asteroid tracking would likely be tracked by either governmental bodies or civilian companies simply to prevent collisions in space, so the sudden appearance of a new asteroid would both raise questions and likely be tagged as a hazard to navigation.

          >send a huge swarm of munitions at an opponent in a legitimate attack- but also mix in some boarding vessels
          You need thrust to move things from A to B. this thrust is dependent on mass. So unless your boarding vessels have the same mass as the missiles, any competent point defense system will differentiate between 2 separate threats. Which one gets prioritized would likely depend on user selection or a preset. Even if your boarding vessels have the same mass, unless your launching billion dollar racing yachts with gimbal seats at your enemy, they will be limited by G force. so again you have one threat approaching that is doing 12 G corkscrews to avoid your CIWS fire, while another threat is chugging along at 2 Gs or something. So not only does your ruse not work, but it's actually easier to shoot at your pods. And we're assuming you built a top-secret spaceship with missile sized pods that noone knew about and noone knows about your secret pod missile capabilities.

          >Its mindsets like a lot of the anons in this thread which causes doctrine and strategy to stagnate.
          It's actually mindsets like that that cause massive loss of lives by implementing strategies not backed up by the laws of physics.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            >It's actually mindsets like that that cause massive loss of lives by implementing strategies not backed up by the laws of physics.
            Oh damn, innovation in warfare means that people die. Oh no, no one can die in warfare- it's just not acceptable.. except when it is. The sad truth and the grim reality of war is that millions of men had to be charged into machinegun fire for "distinguished" military thinkers to understand that such a tactic was no longer possible or desirable.

            >so again you have one threat approaching that is doing 12 G corkscrews to avoid your CIWS fire
            The idea is to cover up an boarding action with a large volley of fire that looks to be a legitimate attack. That's the core of the strategy. Why would the boarding vessels behave any different than the missiles themselves? That's the point.

            Also, what makes you think that CIWS fire is perfect and can never be penetrated? If this was the case, we'd be talking about a battlespace where no one could actually harm each others ships in any meaningful way, because defensive tools would be so advanced that not a single thing could get through to actually hit the ship in question.

            By the way, it is obvious to me that G force would not work the same in space as it would on earth. Even if you were under constant gravitational pull, that pull couldn't possibly be constant or consistent at all distances.

            Answer this physics question: what happens when the international space station is pulled 1 mile closer to earth?

            Why does it take X amount of rocket fuel to escape the atmosphere? Maybe I missed something somewhere in physics class, but I assumed that once you were far enough away from a planet that it could no longer pull you in with the same gravitational force. I mean you guys are acting like gravitational force is constant and consistent no matter where you are- if so where does the boundary end? Why aren't we all getting pulled into the sun right now?

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              >Why would the boarding vessels behave any different than the missiles themselves?
              >Also, what makes you think that CIWS fire is perfect and can never be penetrated?

              So you have incoming. Do you A. fire at that shit, or B. let your ship be hit.
              Since you want to saturate the CIWS to let your pods through, you need to make your decoys hard to hit. hence super-fast or weird maneuvers to make sure the CIWS has to fire in a lot of different directions and doesn't hit all missiles. If you just throw softballs they get shot down. But your boarding pods either have the option of: 1. being a simple target to hit for the CIWS. or 2. turning the boarding teams into mush by pulling Gs. Those options are both shitty. I guess you could fire a massive amount of missiles, but given that payload is king in space, it's far easier for me to carry smaller AMMs or 20mm than it is for you to carry respectable decoy missiles. You also don't have the advantage of sea-skimming or any sort of beyond the horizon stuff that make incoming missiles harder to detect at sea.

              >but I assumed that once you were far enough away from a planet that it could no longer pull you in with the same gravitational force.
              Sure, it's just that you can't just coast from A to B in a straight line. You'd basically be doing what real spacecraft are doing today: use minimum fuel and then use gravity to take you the rest of the way. ideally with a superbrain computer that doesn't require course corrections along the way as that would ruing your "running silent" strat. Which means you can't hit a moving ship that can adjust its speed or heading during your transit. And the sooner they adjust speed or heading, the easier it is for them, which will mean they'd do a 10 second burn to get clear while you still have 2 days to intercept.

              >what happens when the international space station is pulled 1 mile closer to earth?
              it will need more fuel to maintain its orbit

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >There is always a limit to how far you can see.
                Not in space there isn't. there is no horizon to protect you, there is no ocean to hide your wake in.
                We can TODAY take pictures of the entire sky. we can TODAY detect probes with miniscule cross sections and single digit wattage radios beyond pluto. We are tracking thousands upon thousands of asteroids and planetary bodies.
                We're talking about an amount of data that can be processed and analyzed using TODAY's tech. At absolute minimum this technology would both be improved heavily and be installed on spaceships, especially capital ships like the Donnager.

                the TL:DR is that everyone sees everything

                Here's a real threat: dumb slow small bombs that are easily shot down by AMM but armored against lasers and low caliber guns. Just keep shooting them until the enemy uses up all their ammunition and are then slowly torn apart by dozens or hundreds of small explosions.
                Or maybe instead of depleting their ammo you go after their fuel and just keep forcing course correction after course correction with dumb ballistics until they can't move anymore and are torn apart.
                The bigger and more heavily armored the target the MORE vulnerable it is because of the cost to move it.
                If a station has too good of a supply line to deplete, then just chuck rocks at it until it has to move. Or not even rocks, gravel! Orbits, unlike transits CAN be saturated by debris.

                Or more realistically you ditch open warfare and just sneak a bomb onto one of the resupply ships timed to go off after it docks.

  2. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Battles would be held 1000s of kilometers apart and the winner would be determined by who fired their relativistic kill payload first.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      People say that shit about missile spam these days, but war is chaos.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        US proved it pretty well during GW and GW2.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Muh RKV
      Dunning-Kruger Black personhomosexual
      >if close enough to actually aim an RKV at a maneuvering target without worrying about light lag, acceleration would require massive amounts of energy to reach relativistic speed
      >if range is long enough to accelerate with reasonable energy requirements, target can simply change speeds at random intervals and the RKV will miss
      RKVs are planet killers, not ship to ship weapons.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      A lot of fighting in The Expanse is long range missile spam vs point defense.

      https://i.imgur.com/tngb2rA.jpg

      How accurate is the depiction of space battles in the expanse compared to what they might be like in real life?

      Not too far off but I'm disappointed by the lack of missiles.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      if projectiles can't move at or near FTL speeds than close range actually makes more sense since otherwise the enemy can simply detect the projectile with lasers and then adjust course so it misses.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      If they can travel through space, making AI guided payloads would not be particularly difficult.

  3. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    The best depiction we have, but it is still speculative. The physics are accurate and the technology is consistent, which essentially makes The Expanse unique in television Sci Fi.

    If I have to nitpick, I'd say that I doubt torpedoes designed for vacuum and zero g would look anything like the cylindrical torpedoes we presently use. Also, if you have fusion drives you could probably power laser point defense weapons, but they get a pass IMO for not wanting to have space laser battles like every other Sci Fi franchise.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      plus since they want to be more accurate, the lasers would be much less interesting to watch, since it wouldnt be the traditional movie beams or bolts.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Lasers do exist in the expanse universe and are used sometimes to shoot down missiles but the in universe tech advanced so much that a torpedo is adequately shielded against thermal energy so most often it will reach its target before the laser burns it up

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          They use lasers for communication though

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >If I have to nitpick, I'd say that I doubt torpedoes designed for vacuum and zero g would look anything like the cylindrical torpedoes we presently use.
      Uhm ackshually, in one of the blogposts for Children of the Dead, the dev found out that long, cylindrical pointy missiles are actually more survivable than other shapes thanks to their low profile and sloped design.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >Children of the Dead
        ?

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          He means Children of a Dead Earth.

          >Muh RKV
          Dunning-Kruger Black personhomosexual
          >if close enough to actually aim an RKV at a maneuvering target without worrying about light lag, acceleration would require massive amounts of energy to reach relativistic speed
          >if range is long enough to accelerate with reasonable energy requirements, target can simply change speeds at random intervals and the RKV will miss
          RKVs are planet killers, not ship to ship weapons.

          Well...there are Micron guns but those are throwing basically flakes of dust at relativistic speeds.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            What if those flakes were plutonium?

            https://i.imgur.com/dLQ5QfU.jpg

            [...]
            Those two thots are looksmaxing. If they were really strengthmaxing, they'd look like this. Almost every girl you see that's not literally a country's top lifter or athlete in the event they compete in is looksmaxing over strengthmaxing. Every girl at the gym, every instathot every "UFC STRONK WOMAN". The number of women who actually seriously train is infenitisimally small.

            Male fighters/soldiers don't look like powerlifters so why would the females?

  4. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Static laser space stations ready to fire on anything hostile in space and loitering spaceship sized ballistic missiles to hit planetary targets would be the most realistic depiction of space warfare but it's boring and doesn't make for a good action series.

  5. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >accurate
    Depends on how much you want to adhere to reality, or rather what technologies you allow to exist in your suspension of disbelief that permit the setting as represented. In a purely "no fun allowed" scenario, assuming only existing technologies, then no scifi space battle would make any sense: first off orbital mechanics are a b***h, secondly space is frickhuge in a way that simply can't be figured by the human mind, so no spaceship would get into dogfight range with each other basically ever, especially if they were to engage. Engagements would proceed as any other air engagement nowadays: detection would occur either by shipborne radar, or by smaller dedicated detection systems displaced around, the latter allowing non-LoS detection. In case of kinetic weapons, the only chance of survival of the defender would be active countermeasures as it's likely that no ship would carry enough delta-v to outmaneuver a missile; in case of energy weapons, like lasers or EM radiation the only defence would be a shielding with a surface that would reflect or scatter the vast majority of the incoming radiation, and a significantly oversized thermal management system. Assuming that the attacker had the capability to collimate the beam on the target (range is a factor), then probably sacrificial ablative shielding would be the best solution. Space doesn't offer any concealment and survival and victory would be entirely based on technological level of the parties involved, a war would be over extremely quickly if two or more factions would engage each other, especially because the investment needed to get into it wouldn't allow for any sort of radical asymmetry.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >In a purely "no fun allowed" scenario, assuming only existing technologies, then no scifi space battle would make any sense: first off orbital mechanics are a b***h, secondly space is frickhuge
      lmao stfu and refer to

      https://i.imgur.com/NMw0RNT.png

      play children of a dead earth

      the Expanse is much less bad than every other big budget sci-fi show/movie out there but it's still pretty bad.

      even in the nuclear reactors and lasers possible in that game are a bit much, the fundamental dynamics are pretty on point and the US could have a NTR or nuclear pulse driven railgun/laser craft out there patrolling the gravity well of every major body in the solar system within a few decades, if they really put their budget to it.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >d the US could have a NTR or nuclear pulse driven railgun/laser craft
        >NTR
        N-nani?

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >nuclear thermo rocket
          cum brain can't inherent future

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          The NTR driven rockets use the dark energy produced by a man getting constantly cucked on board.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >patrolling the gravity well
        Spysats exist. Just don't expect some stylized age of sail cannonades from those.

  6. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    play children of a dead earth

    the Expanse is much less bad than every other big budget sci-fi show/movie out there but it's still pretty bad.

  7. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Very dumb, imagine still using bombers to bomb enemy planes, this level of moronation, Ontop of it, they have FTL travel and could fire ammo at lightspeed which could destroy hulls from llight years away and yet decide to fire at each other from 10 kms

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Ontop of it, they have FTL travel and could fire ammo at lightspeed
      >The Expanse

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >>The Expanse
        sorry but I'm not a nerd :^)

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Have you considered not being a homosexual?

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      You clearly haven't seen the Expanse.

      One thing of note about the OP battle –it still isn't perfectly realistic, but that they're that close is explained in universe. It's a boarding mission, and they're there to get in between the target and its defense ship (pictured) and the boarding vessels being shot at, which are depicted as being very far away at this point.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        so endless bombardment until they travel from a range that gives the enemy 95% target success to... a range that gives 100% success.
        if you treat it like battleships in the ocean (which they do), then any boarding boat will be swatted. it's a completely different ball game.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >they have FTL travel and could fire ammo at lightspeed

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      someone can't read

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      I read this and though, kek that's a great troll but then...

      https://i.imgur.com/0Zbhidl.png

      >Ontop of it, they have FTL travel and could fire ammo at lightspeed
      >The Expanse

      You clearly haven't seen the Expanse.

      One thing of note about the OP battle –it still isn't perfectly realistic, but that they're that close is explained in universe. It's a boarding mission, and they're there to get in between the target and its defense ship (pictured) and the boarding vessels being shot at, which are depicted as being very far away at this point.

      https://i.imgur.com/QQz8wki.jpg

      >they have FTL travel and could fire ammo at lightspeed

      someone can't read

      None of the responses called you out on it.

  8. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    It's pretty good compared to its contemporaries. It's not perfect realism by any definition but it's probably the best on TV out there right now. It is however the best balance between hard sci-fi and space opera I've personally seen.
    The only thing that really offends me is the complete lack of radiators. These ships are powered by massive fricking bullshitium fusion drives kicking out an entire city grid's worth of energy and there isn't one in sight throughout the entire series.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      I think the books (I don't remember if show also) explained that ships bleed heat using liquid helium. And they use heat sinks

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      I often think about these style of radiators, and then realise they could theoretically have heat expended internally and direct it all out one hole using mirrors, therefore reducing self visibility from the direction you're attacking.
      I've been toying with the idea for ages and the only real issue is the added weight and you'd need materials we don't have access to at this time to make it useful enough for the large reactors they use in these.
      If you only need the radiators facing one way you can do the one sided radiators, or only on one side of the ship.

      There are also materials that can use waste heat to power lazers, so there's all sorts of futuristic fun that could be had.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        No.

        t. aerospace engineer

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Yes

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          With a mix of IR sources, mirrors and lenses it's doable anon.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Wouldn't work. Heat removal is limited by radiator surface area and every mirror would absorb some of that heat. THEN you'd run into issues trying to get heat from multiple radiators out a single hole. Namely, there's no configuration of mirrors that actually does that. The end result is the entire ship heats up and the surface of the hull becomes the radiator. You could try limiting heat generation but that would just make the warship useless. Maybe a spy probe but not a warship.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Unless you spend more energy to increase the surface temperature of your radiator, you are surface area limited. Black bodies only reject energy as a function of its temperature vs its surroundings. If it's surroundings are supercooled surfaces or the dark of space, you lose efficiency and therefore need yet more radiator.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >complete lack of radiators
      The "Epstein Drive (lmao)" is very similar to that of the VISTA ICF drive. ICF meaning inertial confinement fusion, which is to say that the actual fusion takes place outside of the ship itself, in the VISTA design, this would happen a couple of hundred meters behind the ship. It would still look like as if the rocket exhaust was coming from some internal combustion but it would in fact be happening outside of the ship in a pulsed mode at a rate of something like 10-100 times a second. I believe the ships also use some sort of reaction mass like water to increase the thrust. This would also have the benefit of increasing the mass flow rate to an adequate rate that would enable the ships heating system to be considered an "open cycle" rocket. Now of course we're still dealing with a fusion rocket generating literally trillions of watts of energy perpetually so you're still going to need some radiators. But these two aspects - the ICF configuration and the mass flow rate "open cycle" effect, greatly reduces the requirement for radiators. You still need them, but not as much as you'd think.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Why would you need any radiators? You could just water cool what you need then dump the water into reactor thrust.

        I thought the Epstein drive was just internal fusion not some weird forcefield fusion behind the ship.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >Why would you need any radiators? You could just water cool what you need then dump the water into reactor thrust
          Anon, the amount of waste heat you would have to get rid of at a single point in time would be measured in GW's to even possibly TW's worth. You don't just splash water onto that.
          >weird forcefield fusion behind the ship
          They're magnets.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Why if the fusion is outside the ship?

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              the magnets react with the energy created by the fusion explosion which is used to push the rocket in the opposite direction

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                No, why is the internal heat going up if fusion is outside?

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Because no tech is 100% efficient so the magnet generators or whatever are going to heat up in addition to all the heat you're absorbing from a fusion candle lit right next to your ship. Even the life support keeping the humans alive in thier ship is a constant heat generator.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                That is not the conversation I was having. The standard stuff could be watercooled and ejected into the water fusion jet. The multiple tetawatts of heat is what made no sense. Even accounting for the superconductor magnets.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                The whole point of the design is the massive gain in thrust efficiency to weight. Your water dump cooling method just brings back the problem the design was solving by replacing massive fuel loads woth massive water coolant loads. Also I answered your question of why you are still getting heat.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      think of what action movie gunfights are to real ones, thats what expanse fights are to what real orbital fights will probably be like.

      sure most of the stuff shown is possible but very unlikely to turn out this way because it's constructed for looking cool and maximizing cinematic tension.

      What is this from and where can I find more of it?

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        The designs are by L5Resident on twitter, the animations were made by some Frog I can't remember the name of.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          I wonder if IRL space forces in the future will use some sort of "carrier" type shit or cycler that these ships use as a home base that allows the crew to live the majority of their time in a spin hab, only boarding their ships for routine short patrols or for reacting to enemy presence. If not then that would force the crew to spin their own rocket which would mean they would have to gather at one of two ends for spin gravity which would make for very, VERY cramped living. I doubt the psychological toll wouldn't outright make that not feasible. You can't also say that they will just have to live in zero G for extended periods because that is laughably bad for you physically.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Just make the ship have a diameter of like 10, 20 meters and have it spin along the long axis?

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              Vertigo go WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              Could just have the ship split in two with a tether. Or maybe have several ships tether together in a "camping/biovac" arrangement using tethers. They'll need to be able to do things like that for refueling and tether propulsion anyway so it's not like you'd need specialized equipment or training.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Everyone autistic enough to be interested in realistic sci fi space battles should check out the game Children of a dead Earth. Also Atomic Rockets has enough info on the subject to keep you reading for weeks. http://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarintro.php

          It was made by slappyfrog. He has a bunch of similar animations.

  9. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    I'd also like to point out that using this picture as an example isn't really fair when talking about the distances involved, as this specific battle is the closest engagement in the series and was specifically engineered in-universe to be a Knife fight, and wouldn't have happened otherwise by the universes own rules.

  10. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    There's no air in space, spaceships like the falcon millenium and other x-wing can't dive, turn, climb the way they do.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      the fighters in Babylon 5 showed some pretty sweet zero g manuverability iirc

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        forgot link

        Nasa being impressed with the concept for use as a utility type vehicle speaks to its practical design

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          the fighters in Babylon 5 showed some pretty sweet zero g manuverability iirc

          Sci-fi will never be realistic. People should just stop worrying about it. If space fighters even have pilots, or assume it's a fighter for moving people like in the expanse, the idea that it will have a front and back or that there's any reason to put the wienerpit oriented in the direction of travel with a window is silly. Put it in the safe middle of the plane with a spherical projection of space around it, if you like. The pilot can gyroscopically stabilized and would feel nothing in terms of pitch and yaw.

          As a side note, we used to make fun of old sci-fi movies because the rockes would land upright, which is ridiculous. Now Elon is doing it.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            the realism of the tactics wasnt as interesting to me as designing something that was actually able to take advantage of no atmosphere and no gravity,

            I agree though, why man a ship to do something that could be done for 1/4 the price and with greater efficiency by an unmanned vehicle/rocket/whatever

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Reject modernity, embrace tradition.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              GORDON'S ALIVE?!

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              The saddest realization in life is realizing no one will EVER make a movie like that ever again. Not intentionally.

  11. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    0
    It would be beyond-sight kinetic projectiles.

  12. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    They'd certainly not be this close range.

    Realistically you'd want to save on as much mass as possible and use the little fuel you have on combat maneuvers with the most efficiency. Once in motions, spaceships would be predictable targets as stopping, turning and accelerating or deccelerating would be costly. Kinetic projectiles would be shot at pre calculated positions in the ships trajectory most likely as a form of AHEAD style ammo. A ton of tiny tungsten balls forming a deadly cloud too small for point defense to target and covering a large area.

    Autocannons or whatever that is in the webm just don't make sense.

  13. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >Ye Olde /k/ Times
    >1892 Edition

    >You see my dear fellows, so called aerial warfare, assuming it could happen at all would simply involve two balloons floating around each other at the mercy of the winds. If by some miracle they happened to float within range of each other and then they would poke holes in each other's balloons with rifle shots, until one lost enough lift and then would slowly float to earth. There would be nothing interesting or exciting about it, and you certainly wouldn't be able to paint an interesting picture of it at all. Jules Verne is a hack with no understanding of modern scientific principles. Another spanish prostitute, my dear Duke D'Anonyme?

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      I challenge you to a duel over your idiotic statement

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        As the challenged party I have choice of weapons. I pick lances with us mounted on elephants.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        So that's a no on the spanish prostitute? Ah well, more for me.

  14. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Realistic space combat threads are reliably the most kino ones on PrepHole

  15. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Not great, but so far above the old pew pew 1970s energy blasters and shields that it's the best by default.

  16. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    I have never seen the expanse, nor do I know much about space other than it's big and there is no air. Therefore I expect space combat will be like submarine warfare (but without a concern for making noise) because the ocean is also big and you can't breathe underwater.

  17. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Not spaceship related, but I always wondered the plausibility of Bobbi’s Martian power armor as it’s depicted in the TV show. It’s shown to be capable of running at speeds of what seem to be around 30-40mph with the magnetic boots that are designed to counteract the lack of gravity. It’s also shown literally preventing an entire belter boarding ship from drifting away from a Martian gunship by holding on to both ships while the movement servos merely get damaged and not completely broken.

    There doesn’t seem to be any kind of visible power supply or anything, so I guess it’s powered by a miniature version of those magic fuel pellets that the ships use, but contained within the suit?

    The wrist-mounted rotary gun seems to fire caseless heavy ballistic rounds. Sort of like a .50 cal but mounted on your wrist. I’m not sure if they’re magnetically assisted, or similar to real life guns that use gunpowder as a propellant, or a combination of both. She fires off hundreds of rounds but there doesn’t seem to be any kind of visible spot on the suit that stores the ammo. It’s just a uniformly shaped suit and the guns just spit ammo as if the rounds magically appear in the chambers.

    The books describe it as being able to withstand ground zero of a nuclear explosion, and the show does portrays it to be impervious to small arms and even high explosives, so I’ll just assume that it’s made of some kind of fictional unobtanium or something. The Martian “recon armor” that’s worn under the power armor, which is some kind of form-fitting light body suit, is described as being able to stop small arms rounds fired at close range with barely even a scratch. It’s never shown doing it though, there’s only one scene where Bobbi just picks off a round that somehow got through the power armor and got embedded in the recon armor and remarking that it just “itches”.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      that's... holy hell, people compliment this story's "realism"?

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        it's relatively realistic compared to pew pew space laser warp factor 9 beam me up scotty spin up the jump drive tachyon particle black hole time travel shields at 25% captain me wee bairns cannae take it laser sword dogfighting space planes space fantasy, which is 99.99% of all "science fiction", so something that even makes a pretense at accuracy is refreshing

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          honestly when i rewatched Trek i was surprised how consistently the "technobabble" was just a genuine explanation of a story beat within the rules of the setting

          feels more realistic to me than superpower magic infinite bullet space suits, because the trek writers would acknowledge such equipment as the nexus of tactical and strategic decisions that such a thing existing would become... and i'm not convinced The Expanse could pull that off from what i've seen of it. IMO your setting loses a lot of realism if you're not considering the consequences of things added to the setting to the setting as a whole, and Trek has a LOT of effort put into those sorts of considerations (in fact i remember a lot of the technobabble being an explanation of why X thing wasn't in regular, universal use - because everything that could be generally was).

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            oh and for the record i've seen the first two seasons in their entirety

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        This thread has confirmed to me that indeed my suspicion that most of the people I hear on PrepHole who b***h about The Expanse have either not seen it/read it, only absorbed bits and pieces through clips and videos about it, or are contrarians who just hate it because of how much attention it gets.
        Most of the detractions ITT about how space combat "would really happen" have nothing to do with the settings and parameters of the universe in which the fricking series takes place.

        Yes, realistic in the sense of plausibility and a much more slavish-than-usual adherence to physics and the rules they lay down in-universe. Think realism as when people referred to Battlestar as such back in the mid-00s. It wasn't "realistic," but the space navy air craft carrier actually functioned a bit like a real life air craft carrier, complete with Marine detachments and Fighter Squadrons, and many of the cultural bits associated with carrier life. I guess it's a semantic game of realism vs. authenticity. Authentic things don't necessarily need to be realistic. Everyone loves the Omaha Beach scene from Saving Private Ryan, and yet the MG42s are only 50 meters away, maximum, from the landings in the film, whereas they were at least 100 meters or more away in real life.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >Yes, realistic in the sense of plausibility and a much more slavish-than-usual adherence to physics and the rules they lay down in-universe. Think realism as when people referred to Battlestar as such back in the mid-00s. It wasn't "realistic,"
          I mean you still have the audience to hunk about. No normie frick is fount to watch a show where half the episode is about planning trajectories and shit, you havw the books for that.

          All in all I think it was a decent adaptation that brought something fresh into the SF genre.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          I can't watch it without skipping entire sections because the acting is moronic. But I spent most of the thread talking about other series anyway.
          You can see there is reasonable nitpicking for the expanse. The "stealth" micrometerorite swarm attack for instance makes me seethe to this day let alone other things.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            TBF the show suffers from a lot of issues with some of the acting (except Thomas fricking Jane, the legend), cinematography, and pacing early on, especially with seasons 1 and 2. The show had a weird history regarding it's budget and style, but it seems to sort out well enough by season 3, especially the second half of season 3. I don't know about the acting, things seemed to peak to me with season 4 and it took place mostly not in space, but I think that might be an unpopular opinion.
            There's definitely reasonable nitpicking of the show, there's a lot to nitpick. It's the other driveby shit from anons who seem to have barely seen or read bits of the show sperging out harder than me.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >have either not seen it/read it, only absorbed bits and pieces through clips and videos about it, or are contrarians who just hate it
          heaven forbid that it actually sucks; no, it has to be unfair reviewers!

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            That's the thing, it doesn't suck. Another Life fricking sucks. Most of the recent Star Wars catalogue sucks. Recent Star Trek mostly sucked until very recently. Prometheus sucked.

            Season 1 of Altered Carbon was good. Raised by Wolves was bretty gud. Continuum was pretty good. Fricking Stargate SG-1 was good. Battlestar was good. The Expanse was good.
            I mean granted subjectivity and all that shit but damn. I'd hope quality shit isn't labeled shit just because it isn't *100%* non-moronic even though it's billed as "one of the most non-moronic sci-fi."

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Nah, season 1-3 re really good, but it's mostly coasting on Patrick Jane. The post Amazon episodes are noticeable in their lower budget.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              patrick jane? do you mean thomas jane

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Youre right I got him mixed up with the dude from the Mentalist

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              TBF the show suffers from a lot of issues with some of the acting (except Thomas fricking Jane, the legend), cinematography, and pacing early on, especially with seasons 1 and 2. The show had a weird history regarding it's budget and style, but it seems to sort out well enough by season 3, especially the second half of season 3. I don't know about the acting, things seemed to peak to me with season 4 and it took place mostly not in space, but I think that might be an unpopular opinion.
              There's definitely reasonable nitpicking of the show, there's a lot to nitpick. It's the other driveby shit from anons who seem to have barely seen or read bits of the show sperging out harder than me.

              Thomas Jane was good, but Jared Harris was outstanding. The pair of them gave performances so high above the rest of the cast it was kind of embarrassing. The guy who played Ashford in later scenes was also good.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                The show really uplifted some characters from almost unimportant side ones to really fricking good ones.

                Ashford was great but he was barely in the books and Amos is so fricking good.

                It's a shame that they also ruined Naomi as a character.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Thomas Jane was good, but Jared Harris was outstanding. The pair of them gave performances so high above the rest of the cast it was kind of embarrassing. The guy who played Ashford in later scenes was also good.
                The three of these actors are by far the best actors the show had on, they're all established performers. Thomas Jane, Jared Harris and Ashford was played by the chad David Strathairn. The way Ashford went out still gets me every time.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        She's STRONG BROWN WOMAN. Of course they are going to shatter any realism when depicting her capabilities.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        The spaceflight physics are realistic, with the design of the ships making sense in relation to how they travel, and there is good attention to detail regarding things like artificial gravity and how soundwaves don't travel in a vacuum.
        The big caveat are the magically hyperefficient engines that power all the ships.

        The less important stuff like how guns, medical tech, or holograms work is handwaved. Just assume nanotech has become really advanced or something, it's the future.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      It's mostly because of the budget limitations if the show.

      Book power armour is basically the power armour from starship troopers, they look like massive steel gorillas and it's very bulky.
      They obviously could make it work in the show so they just slapped on some plated over a bodysuit bit it isn't any different in its capability than in the books.
      Especially with the budget cuts around S4.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >budget cuts around S4
        Well that explains the ending of the series that resolves absolutely nothing. It seemed like they just wanted to get the show over with.

        It also sucks that the actor who played Alex got #metoo’d and they just wrote in a scene where he stroked out during a high-speed ship burn, spent all of five minutes explaining it, and he’s never really mentioned again.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          The seremies finale was actually pretty much exactly how it happened in the books, it was a high point of the later season of which half of them were taken up by fricking Naomi centric episodes.
          The Alex death was a cop out but it's not like his character is that important, actually the show fleshed him and Amos out more then the books ever did.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Budget cuts and Alex getting metoo'd are what resulted in the very rapid conclusion to the show. The last season featured extensive reshoots after Alex's actor got got, and since the creators weren't interested in recasting, and since his character doesn't actually die in the books and remains a central character, I guess that drove them to ending it the way they did.
          Which sucks, I was super pumped to see the Laconian Empire arc come to screen. Same for the Free Navy arc, but it got badly truncated and parred down for that final, rushed season.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Ehh, i think the free navy arg got adapted pretty decently. But Laconia is a problem to adapt because of the huge timeskip and the scale of the conflict and such.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            >see the Laconian Empire arc come to screen
            And thats when it loses all plausibility and iirc someone told me it turns into Macross sans the Zentradi and mecha.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              >and iirc someone told me it turns into Macross sans the Zentradi and mecha.
              So no discount Journey saves the galaxy?

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                No...maybe Rush, but that's a sore compensation.

                GORDON'S ALIVE?!

                The saddest realization in life is realizing no one will EVER make a movie like that ever again. Not intentionally.

                Childhood was enjoying Trek and Wars, adulthood is realizing what inspired them is the real joy. Say again, frick the standard they set and bless the movie Dino picked up that George couldn't.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                I still enjoy Trek....oldtrek anyway. But as it stands we're more likely to end up in DS9 than TNG

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                I too. If anything, the aesthetic. Sadly, it lost interest after modern Used Future, etc.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                I think it's important that at least some people out there still strive for society to attain the future Star Trek presents. Things weren't always perfect, we nuked ourselves and got uplifted by the Vulcans, but we grew to something we never had achieved before. Even the Dominion War, as horrific and brutal as it was, people still tried to hold onto their ideals

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                "Ceaser can do no wrong" Well, what is the state? A man or its people? I wonder, will someone be thinking the same when we end up with these flying?

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                That wasn't the point of what Bashir was saying, he was making a statement on how times being tough is when it's most important to not discard the things your society is built upon because it shows how little importance they truly held. Much like how free speech is easy to defend when no one is offended.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >everyone says In the Pale Moonlight is about how far Sisko and Starfleet will go for the sake of the greater good
                >watch it
                >he tries to go by the book as much as he can, only skirting it by lying
                >the assassination was done by Garak without approval and all Sisko was required to do was not tell anyone the truth
                Shit the way everyone described this episode, I thought Sisko was going to have a sniper phaser looking at the senator through his scope on Romulus.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Fire Bomber
                >Discount Journey
                How the frick did I never make that comparison before? It's so obvious in hindsight with the types of songs they play and the general notes Fukuyama usually hits

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                ...then is Waulkyre technically discount Go Go's or Bangles?

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Don't know, never saw Delta. I haven't seen anything past Frontier

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              Pretty much. The Magnetar class ships are pretty much the Macross without the carriers-for-arms and the ability to transform. Also, Amos' story takes a very interesting turn.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          as much as i loved the character of alex the accusations were in the dozens, at least a few of them are going to be true. as to why they didn't recast, probably a mix of other actors being unlikely to fill in as well and budget restraints.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >It’s never shown doing it though, there’s only one scene where Bobbi just picks off a round that somehow got through the power armor and got embedded in the recon armor and remarking that it just “itches”.
      There is a scene in the later seasons where she gets shot up and has visible impact bruises on her.

  18. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Well comparing the Expanse to the vast archival footage of Space Midway, we can clearly see that it's completely scientifically accurate.

  19. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    The Expanse is has fairly accurate physics but it assumes that all ships have magic fusion engines with nigh unlimited high G thrust.

  20. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Children of a Dead Earth style spacecraft are out of the question because the reactors invalidate the cone shape through neutron scattering. Having radiators and any equipment that close to them would essentially cook everything exposed unless you used a cartoonish amount of heavy shielding (which would ultimately kill acceleration). Tubes are the answer and radiators for heat dissipation would either have to be triangular pointing away from reactor radiation or placed further out of reach in the center of a spacecraft. Conventional rocketry makes the cone valid but the gains from nuclear power are insane.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      The reactors are viable, they would just be smaller.
      Alternatives could be similar to my favourite ship I guess.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        The reactors are viable but not in a cone shaped form factor. A cone doesn't lend itself to hiding in the reactor shadow unless they're on the opposite end people are used to and even then the entire point of having a cone becomes invalidated. Instead of thick-assed cones the new meme needs to derive from either two thinner cones ass-to-ass or, more realistically, much more of a cylindrical shape. When getting into shit like NSWR propulsion Attack Vector: Tactical handles itself well by keeping the reactor array on a truss as far from the crew and equipment as possible.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >Instead of thick-assed cones the new meme needs to derive from either two thinner cones ass-to-ass
          Is the ass in the ass anon?
          Mind if you draw a shitty paint drawing of what you mean.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Just think of two cones meeting at the base. You'd still get the tapering for any line-of-sight weapons you'd want on both ends as well as a shadow shield that can handle the neutron scattering. Cylindrical is still superior though.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              Ah I think I understand. Appreciated anon.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        I love this movie for the starship section alone.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Cameron always has shitloads of world building where he goes into autistic detail.

          It's why his movies are so fricking good

  21. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    It's a good show and one of the few that have inertial damage to the crews. It's considers "hard sci-fi" but is it strictly realistic? Of course not, nothing on TV is, not even the news.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      After they get past season 1 hard sci-fi goes out the window anon.
      I really wouldn't advertise it as such.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        See and I thought Season 1 was pretty bad. Actually, for me the show as a whole ebbs and flows from nearly unwatchable to badass. The whole film noir investigator chasing down the blue crystal was just weird and in later seasons it had to have it's "woke" moments followed by Naomi crying way to much to be entertaining. They broke up that shit with just enough cool stuff to keep it watchable and I did watch it, all of it. I'd give it better than a "meh" but not an "awesome". So, I guess it's just "good".

  22. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    You could've at least posted a webm you dipshit.

  23. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    It's gonna be exactly like submarine combat but at distances several orders of magnitude greater and with frictionless newtonian maneuvering

  24. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Good for Hollywood, but still lacking. idk why ciws is portrayed as the primary means of missile defense and never ECM or some kind of SM equivalent, especially since in one episode Holden did use his torps to defend another ship from incoming ones. But it was never used before or since then.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Torpedos being used to intercept other torpedos is constantly referenced throughout the series.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        name another time other than holden using it to protect bobby and avasarala. if its used in the book, than fair but seems like we're talking about the show here. i also stopped watching after the penultimate season because it was getting really bad with the naomi family shit

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Like... in every other space battle? The one that instantly springs to mind is when the Rocinante intercepts the ship that escaped from Tycho after zapping Fred Johnson and stealing the protomolecule. They definitely have a torpedo duel and it's referenced later as when they go over the battle logs, which includes a prominent visual of torpedo intercepts, they talk about how one of the torpedos is unaccounted for and how it probably had it's warhead removed and the protomolecule sample inserted.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            stop lying, no they didnt. donnager vs stealth ships had zero missile intercepts, it was all PDCs

  25. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    As others have said I don't know how you can even have a fusion reactor on your ship without baking your crew alive. Eventually I want to make a website dedicated to building an open source spaceship design. So I've given this some thought. Ultimately for any realistic ship efficiency will be the key to make it work. How efficient is your reactor and making power and thrust vs waste heat? How efficient are you at recycling water and other resources? For the fusion reactor you would have to combine it with a fusion thruster. So instead of heat radiators like the ISS your rocket nozzle should be a way of losing most of your heat. Still going to need heat sink fins on the hull as a secondary cooling system. But I think it can be done.

  26. 11 months ago
    Anonymous
  27. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    really inaccurate. projectile weapons will eventually be outlawed irl because debris fields will frick the solar system. instead we'll be using things like cyber and electronic warfare, lasers, etc. shipboarding will be common too with marines using melee weapons and paintball guns.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >debris field
      lmao if a satellite isn't actively trying to keep itself in orbit, it'll deorbit in like five years.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Why this is true of low orbit satellites it is not true of higher orbits. Those can take many decades. Some like over 50 years.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          thats just for earth. the moon has things called masscons which makes lunar orbits extremely unstable. a fight in lunar orbit would send debris all over the place.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            That makes little sense. Especially so that we can map high and low gravity on Earth. I'm sure we can on the moon and add it in to the nav computer. Debris, no.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              Funny you should say that.
              Mapping has been done multiple times.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Well there you go. Doesn't change much.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              scientists and engineers: lunar orbits are unstable
              (You): nah uh thats dumb

  28. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Not accurate at all. Real space combat is firing a cannon-launched missile at a target 3 weeks away. And the target uses lasers when the missile is a few days away and spends days trying to shoot it down before it hits. The first one to run out of missiles dies.

  29. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    So if the Expanse is Hard Sci-Fi, and Star Trek/Star Wars is soft Sci-Fi; Where would Battlestar Galactica fit in?

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Expanse and old Star Trek are hard scifi. New Star Trek is soft scifi. Star Wars is science fantasy.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      BSG is in a weird gray zone. The one thing that has always bugged the shit outta me though with it was that the big ships have no maneuvering thrusters, while the Vipers and Raiders do.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      oh thats neat. I just noticed that Pegasus has a lot more missiles missing that must be its enhanced ECM suit working.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        That's exactly what it is.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Fricking hardcore is what it is.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      BSG didn't explain how anything worked. That is why it went the weird middle place.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      fricking stupid that they couldn't find fricking ice in space in BSG. dumbest thing ever it's a combination of a couple of the most common elements in the galaxy and we find it everywhere we have the technology to look closely at.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        It wouldn't make for an interesting plot, same thinking as zombie movies etc. People trip over their own shoelaces and stupid shit like that because the obvious isn't as entertaining or engaging.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        It seems you have not seen the greatest space movie of all time, "Ice Pirates".

  30. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    I keep hoping that, with enough centuries, space battles become like LoGH. Probably won't happen but a man can dream

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Horrific slugging matches that last days and have millions of casualties? I think part of the reason the FPA and Empire spent their history bankrupting each other instead of one conquering the other is the absolute shitshow that is trying to command these large fleets in space with jammed communications via shuttle messengers, etc.

      Part of the reason Yang and Reinhard are "galactic heroes" and centerpieces of the story is their mastery of command and their differing ways of managing their subordinates. They're the exception. Its fun and interesting to watch, but I would not wish that future on us.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >Horrific slugging matches that last days and have millions of casualties?
        No I just mean ships blasting each other well outside of visual range with hilariously overpowered lasers

  31. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Expanse has accurate projectile protection with their C-RAM style side guns but large ship battles are far too close contact. In the hypothetical space flight industry where thrust-vectored rocket control is essentially *perfected* then you'd expect a MUCH higher use of guided munitions.

    Therefore they should be farther away in space battles because the development of these munitions & combat strategies goes like this:
    >munitions are x speed
    >counter measures have x processing time
    >make yourself x distance away from enemy to guarantee munitions can be destroyed
    THEN
    >munitions become faster
    >distance gets larger

    Star Wars is gay because their laser-based weaponry means they HAVE to get close, especially considering their laser bursts have a slow travel speed instead of travelling the speed of light. Their space fights should utilise maneuver tactics more especially since their space craft can travel fairly fast.

  32. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    kinetic force projectiles from thousands of miles away is realistic space battle

  33. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    think of what action movie gunfights are to real ones, thats what expanse fights are to what real orbital fights will probably be like.

    sure most of the stuff shown is possible but very unlikely to turn out this way because it's constructed for looking cool and maximizing cinematic tension.

  34. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >torpedos launchers
    >on the front of ship, with a flat and unangled surface
    you know what design i'm talking about

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      CCA has some of the best tactics I've ever seen in any movie
      I know it's WW2 fleet battles in space but it does a better job than most actual WW2 fleet battle movies

  35. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    I would also be curious on how a military vessel would go about detected forms of propulsion that do not match their own? For example, could you use a form of propulsion that does not give away a heat signature? Maybe pressurized air? Not to mention, due to the properties of space- all you have to do is build up momentum. Unless you are traveling in close enough proximity to something that has lots of mass, then you shouldn't get pulled towards that planet or object.

    You could theoretically build up speed for a certain length of time, reach the desired speed and then coast to your target after turning off your means of propulsion. So now picture this, you have a giant swarm of what look to be meteorites that appear to just be floating along an area in space where it makes sense for them to be.

    You plan your trajectory to avoid the asteroids and debris, oh shit, it wasn't debris. They have launched a surprise attack and were able to predict which direction you were traveling in, you don't realize it wasn't asteroids until their volley of tungsten projectiles have already penetrated into your fleet.

    Possible or impossible, if so, why?

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      pressurized air could be potentially useful as low observable station keeping but in no way is it practical as a main propellant, you are talking low double digits of ISP. by the time you had enough to do anything useful your massive farts will be visible anywhere in the solar system

      >dude just coast into a different orbital reference frame
      yeah it doesn't work that way

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >form of propulsion that does not give away a heat signature?
      gas thrusters could work, but the thrust they produce is minuscule. you're talking about months of travel time to i.e. attack an enemy fleet that's driving a speedboat while you're throwing rocks out of your canoe to get ahead. not practicable.

      >You could theoretically build up speed for a certain length of time, reach the desired speed
      and this is highly visible to EVERYONE. by knowing where you were a minute ago and knowing how fast you were going i know where you will be in a minute from now.

      >Unless you are traveling in close enough proximity to something that has lots of mass, then you shouldn't get pulled towards that planet or object.
      this is not how space or gravity works. you are under constant gravitational pull, which is why real spacecraft can't just make simply circular orbit adjustments like it's kerbal space program.

      >You plan your trajectory to avoid the asteroids and debris, oh shit, it wasn't debris.
      floating debris would A) be reported like it's a hurricane because of the threat it poses to all spacecraft. B) space is so vast you'd basically have to be in visual range of a port for your interplanetary roadblock to have an effect. Lastly you would still have to place your non-debris ships in the debris somehow.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >this is highly visible to EVERYONE
        There is always a limit to how far you can see. I think that would also be the limiting factor in long range attacks, however the weapon works that is launching them.

        Hard to believe that even an advanced space faring civilization would be able to see forever, basically. We can see great distances right now with our current equipment, but the speed at which we receive that information is in fact limited and it must take time to be developed and worked with before we can get any simple and reasonable conclusions out of said imagery. Of course this process would be sped up and materialize much faster if we were to the point where we were conducting true space warfare.

        The next limiting factor would be how fast you can get your projectile to travel, and how effective you are at predicting your enemy vessels position in space. I'm assuming that the limiting distances would be quite grand, but how do you really know where your enemy is going to be without first making some kind of guess based on their current trajectory?

        That trajectory can change depending on how long it takes that ship to adjust its course, how agile it is, how it is designed, etc. Sounds like it'd be a guessing game at best without self correcting munitions that have their own sensory equipment on board to see the enemy vessel, even hundreds of thousands if not millions of miles away.

        But the issue with that is that if your projectile can course correct, it's going to be easier to spot. If it can't course correct and it is a dumb projectile, think giant rods made of heavy metals and it can be sped up to such a speed that it will outpace the enemy vessel, then I would bet that it would have an easier time getting through.

        Maybe super massive volleys of telephone pole sized tungsten rods sped up to % speeds of the speed of light? You'd have to launch millions if not billions to have a chance at landing a hit at maximum sight distance.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >There is always a limit to how far you can see.
          Not in space there isn't. there is no horizon to protect you, there is no ocean to hide your wake in.
          We can TODAY take pictures of the entire sky. we can TODAY detect probes with miniscule cross sections and single digit wattage radios beyond pluto. We are tracking thousands upon thousands of asteroids and planetary bodies.
          We're talking about an amount of data that can be processed and analyzed using TODAY's tech. At absolute minimum this technology would both be improved heavily and be installed on spaceships, especially capital ships like the Donnager.

          the TL:DR is that everyone sees everything

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            So you can perfectly see behind the moon, right now? You can see behind the sun, right now? You can't see through solid mass. How about a giant gas cloud or a gas giant? Can you see right through a black hole? Light doesn't even escape a black hole. There are plenty of things to hide behind, they are just few and far between and dangerous to go anywhere near them- but you could hide directly behind them if you know exactly where your enemy is for some reason or another.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Also, yeah, you can see pretty far these days with the equipment we have available. But how useful is old data? It takes time for light to travel from place to place, to see things in the first place, light plays a vital role. If we're talking light years away, you no longer have good visual data. An entire quadrant of the universe could go dark and if it was far enough away we wouldn't know about it for however many light years it would take for that light to finish traveling from point A to point B.

            From Nasa's spaceplace.nasa.gov children's website: The next closest star to us is about 4.3 light-years away. So, when we see this star today, we’re actually seeing it as it was 4.3 years ago. All of the other stars we can see with our eyes are farther, some even thousands of light-years away.

            See the problem?

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              You don't see it. It takes a few seconds for light to reach the moon. It takes days for a rocket to get there. IOW, anything with realistic propulsion can never maneuver quickly enough to hide from a sensor seeing where it's maneuvering to.

              Crunch the math and you'll see this even applies to scifi RKKVs for interstellar bombardment.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Hope you like math class, because it's in session.

                https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-108

                The detection of this asteroid — which the team suspects to be the smallest observed to date by Webb and one of the smallest detected in the main belt — would, if confirmed as a new asteroid discovery, have important implications for our understanding of the formation and evolution of the solar system. Current models predict the occurrence of asteroids down to very small sizes, but small asteroids have been studied in less detail than their larger counterparts owing to the difficulty of observing these objects. Future dedicated Webb observations will allow astronomers to study asteroids smaller than 1 kilometer in size.“Our detection lies in the main asteroid belt, but Webb’s incredible sensitivity made it possible to see this roughly 100-meter object at a distance of more than 100 million kilometers.”

                Smallest thing we can see as of today is about the size of Romes coliseum about 62,137,119.2 miles away. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 km/sec). So, a light-year is 5.88 trillion miles

                588,000,000 1,000,000s fit inside of 5.88 trillion miles. Basically we can't see shit right now and you are vastly overestimating our capabilities. We see objects the size of Romes coliseum at a distance slightly over 0.001% of a light year. Because 5.88 trillion multiplied by 0.001% = 58,800,000

                For us to see things bigger than 100 meters in size roughly, further away, then they must be larger than 100 meters and that requirement only gets larger the further away we are looking.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                To put this into perspective, the universe is approximately 93 billion light-years and we can see 100 meter in length asteroids that are roughly 0.001% of a light year away.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Anon, a light year is 63,000AU, for reference Pluto's orbit is 50AU from the sun. We're not trying to detect enemy spaceships orbiting Alpha Centauri.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >visual resolution instead of drive plume
                Classic case of not knowing what you don't know.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Okay, so maximum drive plume is what? 10x bigger than the ship 100x bigger? Doesn't really help your case. Although something like that completely depends on the ship, how its designed, etc etc. Just saying "lel drive plume" isn't really an argument. That might still not be big enough to see beyond 80 million miles and we're talking 62 million miles in the example cited. I'm assuming that a super advanced space faring civilization would have the technology to utilize much more powerful telescopes or sensors or whatever the frick. Let's just say they'll be seeing 500 million miles away.

                Still not even close to the full length of one light year.

                Anon, a light year is 63,000AU, for reference Pluto's orbit is 50AU from the sun. We're not trying to detect enemy spaceships orbiting Alpha Centauri.

                >We're not trying to detect enemy spaceships orbiting Alpha Centauri
                What, in your opinion, is the maximum range of a potential attack, and the maximum potential speed of munitions we're theoretically sending? Maybe we are trying to detect enemy spaceships orbiting Alpha Centauri because they can attack US from that far away. Maybe we can attack THEM from that far away.

                Maybe its a lot easier to speed up a projectile to light speed than it is an actual ship with important people and things inside of it.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                First, obviously if humans live inside the solar system detecting weapons outside it isn't very important. Second, you'll have DECADES to detect a relativistic projectile coming even from the nearest solar system, CENTURIES from further away. Nuclear pulse rockets(detonating atom bombs as propellant) can reach a max of 10%c, while the fastest theoretical drive currently imaginable reaches 60% by accelerating basically a foil sheet with a giant laser, and thus wouldn't make a very good weapon.

                As for what you Do need to keep track of, even the longest ranged most powerful lasers you could imagine would only reach out a few hundred thousand kilometers against unarmored targets, or down to 10,000km or less against something with heavy anti-laser defenses. Until you've got deathstar lasers the size of moons or casaba howitzers that can shoot projectiles at 30%c a light second is more than enough, and even in those scenarios a light minute would suffice for direct combat engagement.

                So overall I'd say being able to track anything within ONE AU or ~500 light seconds would be more than enough tactically, and even strategically into the far future assuming we're not talking about FTL. And this doesn't have to be a single ship either, a network of satellites could easily keep track of eachother on that scale and even wrap around planets and moons to avoid any blindspots. Being able to see that far basically means being able to detect anything dangerous in the orbits of Mars(~1.8AU) or Venus(~1AU) from the Earth or Moon.
                For more conventional near future purposes, just being able to see everything in orbit of the same planet/moon as you would be plenty, and modern equipment is mapping fricking paperclips in LEO so I don't see any problems with that.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Just the space shuttles maneuvering thrusters can be spotted as far as the asteroid belt.
                https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.sf.science/c/-E6r2F8rgnQ/m/Ueui6xzQ9FQJ

                Look, a military spaceship will have sensors. It will have a high-sensitivity "tactical" IR sensor to catch things like missiles going live and blasting toward you. But it will also have a low-sensitivity IR sensor that looks for all the sneaky low-thrust burns - which take longer and can thus be caught by a full sky sweep that could take an hour or less depending on FoV.

                Then it will have radio detection. It takes literally less than a second to spot the Voyager probe. Which is emitting less power than a lightbulb.
                https://public.nrao.edu/news/vlba-spots-voyager-1/.

                Then we're looking at LIDAR/RADAR or even just a giant flashlight to do active detection. Yes, RCS and distance makes that difficult, but the ship will use all of its capabilities simultaneously. So instead of blindly firing signals those radar/lidar/lightwaves will be dedicated to a probable target that is suspected either visually or through IR.

                And everything your ship does to counter these efforts will reduce it's thrust, speed, payload, recon capabilities. Everything you want your spaceship to do basically. it's far more likely to have success by building a dedicated warship that has the thrust, the weapons and the sensors to effectively ID, target and destroy enemy ships than trying to build an invisible submarine.

                TL;DR the stealth ships in the expanse are moronic

  36. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    I really think it would be limited to saturation attacks, because if you have unbeatable CIWS or something like that then anything with a heat signature could probably be lasered or intercepted by your own faster traveling, smaller counter volley of missiles.

    So this is summoning up images in my mind of millions or billions of solid metal projectiles just being sped up to like 20-40-60% the speed of light or something. Just really heavy fricking rods being used in a massive volley to make sure that regardless of if the enemy ship changes course or does anything to try to evade the attack it will be hit by something. The distance is so great, and the enemy could go in so many different directions that you'd really have to fire a moronicly large volley in order to score a hit no matter what.

    Designing a destroyer that could launch that many projectiles at that speed, it would have to be absolutely humongous and have a tremendous engine, power plant for the projectiles, etc.
    Otherwise, perfect defensive systems would just stop regular missile attacks, no matter how big they are. Unless, I guess, you just fire more missiles than they have missiles to stop you with. Or I guess, if your missiles are faster than the missiles they are using to intercept your missiles.

  37. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    It wasn't too bad. They at least thought about it a little bit since it was initially supposed to be a RPG system.
    Any long range combat was done with missile spam. Very close engagements used railguns and PDC's.
    The two major issues I see with realism are:
    1. No directed energy weapons. For whatever reason they were never a part of the show or books except one time when they used the drum ship to try and cut the ring with a modified laser comms tower.
    2. AI. was completely absent from the show and books. this would be a massive change in planning, tactics, and crew resource management.

  38. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Stupid as frick. I would use my space battleship to lob gigaton nukes at you from the other side of the solar system. There is no reason for us to get that close to shoot machine guns.

  39. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150809-how-fast-could-humans-travel-safely-through-space

    I mean, theoretically the problem with space travel is the deceleration and acceleration portion. With certain designs for ship engines and enough fuel we could get close to the speed of light, but we may never actually want to go that fast.

    To speed a human up close to light speed would require tremendous amounts of fuel, as it is right now. It would have to be some kind of nuclear engine or nuclear fusion engine or something wacky like that. Or anti-matter or something but that's more theoretical at the moment, I don't think they have figured out a way to produce stable and usable anti matter. Research is needed to study the possible gravitational effects between matter and antimatter, However research is difficult considering when the two meet they annihilate, along with the current difficulties of capturing and containing antimatter.

    What makes the most sense with today technology is nuclear thermal propulsion, that you'd activate after the ship has left earth. With nuclear thermal propulsion you could, given enough time, reach speeds that are considerable % of the speed of light. The main danger to human beings inside is of course cosmic radiation and having to accelerate or decelerate too quickly. That's what will get you killed, with our technology, once you get going you cant stop too easily- otherwise you're fricked.

    So course correction would be difficult for space combat, to say the least, especially if you were trying to get anywhere in any meaningful amount of time. Designs could be different if you're just traveling through the solar system, but yeah idk what kind of funky technology you would need to do space rods attacks.

  40. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    The total global nuclear arsenal is about 15,000 nuclear warheads with a destructive capacity of around 1460 megatons.

    I figured out how much a 1 foot in radius and 20 foot in length tungsten dart would end up weighing in kilograms. Then I plugged that into pic related and figured out how many megatons of TNT we would need to accelerate it to 50% the speed of light instantaneously.

    The results speak for themselves. 114,011 megatons of TNT to accelerate even 1 rod from god as a ship hitting projectile. Whatever technology you would need to harness contain and direct the power of 1,171,345.89 nuclear warheads to instantly accelerate a tungsten rod to 50% the speed of light would be on a whole other level. Don't think we would be capable of that even 2 or 3000 years from now. Just in the advances in materials science alone, it might not even be possible.

  41. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Expanse wears the veneer of realism, but is literally Halo or BSG tier.

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