As a physics engineer, when I first saw the Expanse I found myself in awe with it all... "wow, Coriolis effect done right"... "wow, credible and doable gravity", "finally!!! no sound in space, no pew pew boom boom", and all that was mentioned in this video and then some (scarcity economy, not only water/air/food but pretty much everything, impact on human bodies throughout generations of living in space, etc).
There's a great line in the books (I don't know if it's in the show) where Amos says something like, "100 years ago I would have been a nuclear physicist, but today I'm just a mechanic." Also the ships are almost always accelerating or decelerating (it's the fastest way, accelerate halfway, then decelerate the other half of the journey) so they can always go at 1G or whatever the preferred gravity of the crew. That's why the controls on the Rocinante are oriented as they are: they're almost always accelerating. Combat and flight controls are oriented for 0G.
Something I really like is how the controls on ships designed to move fast and hard (ie: Roci) are on the armrests rather than on a console in front of the operator. As opposed, say, to a big plodding thing like the Canterbury. Depending on movement and acceleration, it could be impossible to reach a "traditional" console.
I think it was Holden telling Amos that he was a rocket scientist, then explaining that in the past rocket scientists were considered examples of high intelligence and that it was interesting that Amos did not think of himself as extremely intelligent. Holden was trying to get Amos to appreciate himself as something more than a mechanic. I'm pretty sure Holden left and Amos asked the other crew "What the $%^ was that about?"
If memory serves, they typically travel at .3 G, in part in deference to any Belter crew, who can't tolerate a full 1G. That's why it stands out that Martian Marines train at 1G. (Also in the books, a significant secondary character dies from a stroke during evasive maneuvers.)
@@AretaicGames If you haven't seen the show yet fully skip the next sentence: In the show Alex dies due to high G maneuvers over a very long time. Alex's actor got caught up in some stuff that made the show runners drop the character in a tasteful way.
I loved the series but I read the book. I am always under the impression that there is a lot I understand because I know the more detailed explanation from the books and that I would have missed or misunderstood what happened had I not read them.
@@kamilpotato3764 I hate to spoil it, but it is Jupiter and Saturn that make sense. Jupiter has the largest magnetic field in the solar system. In fact, it is by far the largest magnetic structure in the solar system. It has a stronger magnetic field than the Sun. Saturn has a weaker magnetic field, but at our ratios (that is, the ratios of Earther) is still strong enough to deflect the radiation. And what's even better? Saturn's magnetic field extends beyond its moons. Thus, its field protects them from radiation. Plus, you can probably add the shields and materials developed in the next two hundred and fifty years. So radiation yes. But not as you describe it.
On small ships, they actually depressurize the whole ship before combat because air is hard to come by in space. If pressurized when they took a hole in the hull, they would lose all the air and have no way of re-pressurizing the ship. They would actually store the air in multiple small/strong containers more safe from damage so they can re-pressurize after patching holes from combat.
Also, in smaller ships, all those holes with air coming out could act as unintended thrusters and start moving them all arround. I think I saw somewhere that there were also incendiary rounds, so depressurizing the whole ship could also prevent fires from those rounds. Great writing all around
One detail they've missed to explain why the rail guns range isn't greater since technically the projectile will go nearly forever until it hits something is that the railgun projectiles are "dumb" missiles that cannot change their direction of travel. This means that if you shoot at a ship from far enough with the railgun the ship will have the time to detect it and change course to dodge the shot. This is a well-thought explanation that I think deserved to be mentioned.
Yup, extremely fast, but at long range will only hit where they predict the target will be. Missiles/ torpedoes keep adjusting until they either run out of reaction mass or get holed by PDC rounds.
Well at larger range you could with multiple railguns coordinate the guns and shoot a salvo simultanously at the ship and its possible dodge paths at once; it is way harder to dodge a "wall" of projectiles than a single projectile.
The way i see it, the Expanse has "next generation" railgun - that shoots energy instead of projectile. I guess here's the need to charge the railgun and its exclusivity that not every ship has a simple magnetic rail that shoots any garbage at superspeeds :)
@@Igor369 a wall of projectiles would require a wall of rail guns. If a large ship has two rail guns that require large amounts of power, an array of rail guns doesn't seem feasible. Of course the rail guns could be smaller thus being less power hungry but also less powerful. But what I think would make more sense is to have different types of rounds for the larger rail guns making them effectively "rail shotguns" as well. The drawback either way will be smaller projectiles with less mass that are less powerful on impact.
@@MaxKissler Not only do they require power to fire but also power to counteract the kinetic energy imposed on the ship and it's course by the actual firing of the projectile. I think this was touched on briefly on the show when the Roci got the railgun; something Alex said about tuning the railgun to the Roci's drive.
You included the scene that sold me on The Expanse. Where as they escape to the Taschi (it wasn't called the Rocinante then) within the Donnager, the Donnie's drive cuts out and they start floating off the platform. Holden attaches himself to Naomi with a cable, then kicks against her to drive himself back to the platform where he can then stay in place with his magnetic boots while reeling her back to him. The physics was dead on.
Another good thing about the expanse is that they do exposure to a vacuum good. Assuming you have nothing to protect you, you'll suffocate from a vacuum long before radiation or the lack of pressure kills you, and at the start of a series, a guy even opens his helmet to space to fix something in his helmet.
Sebastian Lewis A good rock-hopper knows to exhale fully before opening his helmet to vacuum. Ultra-brief exposure isn’t that big a deal. Just ask folks who use pumps to engorge their genitalia!
@@PCLoadLetter 1) Yeah exactly. A few seconds wouldn't be an issue, but you'll still want a pressure suit because a few minutes in hard vacuum would feel like you took a bath in fire ants, but a few seconds is like dunking your head underwater 2) I wish you didn't mention the pumps.
Good point Sebastian and you say it well. But they don't, "do exposure to a vacuum good", they do it well. You need to be careful about that one when you write a resume or anything.
75% of comments: Actually, the simulated gravity is from acceleration 20% of comments: damn, that sudden deceleration was brutal 5% of comments: they’re f*cking ring binders
but the ring binders were emergency instruction manuals so it was kinda funny... The rough and tumble crew taking the bureaucratic navy's instructions and making something useful out of them. Definitely one of the best SCI-FI books I've read. I'm glad the TV series wasn't an embarrassment to the source material.
@@grantbarnes3678 tv show need have some fun in it, or you want to watch a mute show? Owo they would put a text up saying "your audio is working, it's just space that is silent. Please hold."
Weird to get so much right but miss the fact that the ships go everywhere under constant acceleration. whether its 1G or 1/3G the crew will be able to walk around normally with no need for mag boots. Half way to a destination they do a flip and burn and slow down at 1G. The ship decks and controls are laid out with this in mind. The mag boots are for when they aren't accelerating or are in orbit. Constant acceleration is also how they are able to get around the solar system so fast. A continuous 9.8 meters per second squared adds up REAL quick when you're flying for days and weeks. Even .3G (martian gravity) will get you anywhere in solar system very quickly. The Epstein drive that make this constant acceleration possible is the biggest bit of hand waving tech in the Expanse. (Excluding the proto-molecule of course.) .02
Humans always tend to predict the future tech incorrectly. Either falling short or thinking way ahead. But Epstein drive still feels like it is grounded in reality as all it does is work like jet engine. (As jet engines are now)
I figured they would coast at a peak velocity and burn later to save fuel because (judging by the ship's lack of tankage) they use smaller tanks to give more room for the myriad of other systems needed to keep us meatsacks alive. Just my theory little theory.
Before the Epstein drive they were using, according to the books, Torch drives which are fusion drives but less efficient. Also in the books many of the Belter ships still have the less expensive less efficient torch drives which involve burning for a few days, coast, flip and burn for a few days. This is why the Belters are natural "slingshot pilots" because it's how they make up for not having spiffy expensive Epstein drives. The show does it all under thrust because, well, they're filming in a studio in Toronto, not orbit. There's a lot of stuff in the books that just aren't sexy for a TV show.
@@sid2112 there is no peak velocity in space unless you are close to C, but for that you'd need to accelerate for a whole year at 1 g. It would be more profitable to burn at 3-5 g at the start and then wind down to .1-.3 to save fuel
According to the novels, only crew essential to fighting the ship gets the juice that lets them function; everyone else is strapped in their crash couches and sedated to their eyeballs.
I'm surprised you didn't also mention how the Expanse treats missiles. Instead of being fired out of a fixed mount, they're just "dropped" into space, then use their own directional thrusters to align themselves with the target, before hitting full burn. We've also seen missiles being used to fly in escort formation, a first for any sci-fi property!
Stations in the Expanse use centripetal force to simulate gravity. The ships do not. They, large and small, use thrust. As long as the ship accelerates/decelerates, occupants are pushed down toward the floor. That's why the ships are built in decks on top of the main engine. The mag boots are only ever used in the rare circumstance when no thrust is applied to the ship.
@@MeanLaQueefa It was a colony ship. It was designed so that the ship would accelerate to the desired speed, cut thrust, then spin the ship for gravity until they reached the destination star/ planet, several generations later.
The ships are oriented vertically, not horizontally, so the Rocinante is basically a small skyscraper in space and it is this way because of the Epstein fusion drive (this is perhaps the only case where Epstein actually did kill himself), which is supremely efficient and thus able to circumvent Delta V which is the primary limiter on real space flight, meaning one can accelerate 50% of the way to your destination before decelerating the rest of the way putting a constant G force on the body thus simulating gravity. As such it makes more sense to have the controls in an orientation that allows their use while under acceleration, ie typically how one finds such controls oriented here in the gravity well of Earth. In fact the only time such a ship might be under Near Zero G conditions is when it is moving slowly while trying to dock with a station. Now since evasive maneuvers are a thing even for civilian ships within the Expanse, as you can't possibly track every single particle of matter after all, most controls are also complete with the Juice injectors, as well as a harness to keep them restrained while High G maneuvers are being performed. After all we don't want a corpse ricocheting around the cabin turning into so much grisly shrapnel now do we?
You can go farther than 50%, you'll need a higher Gs to slow down without overshooting your destination. And depending on how long to Gs are sustained you could cut a significant amount of time off your flight.
The Expanse has numerous problems that prevent it from being anywhere close to realistic, or even science-y. Some examples: The Epstein fusion drives are basically souped-up ion engines. Extremely low impulse, extremely low Delta V. NASA has found that they're best used as maneuvering engines, NEVER main thrust. And such a drive engine CAN NOT get you to FTL, no matter how hard you try. This means the ships in this series, realistically, would all be battle stations like the Death Star of Star Wars fame, only without the interstellar capability. With the low impulse and Delta-V of an ion engine, even a souped-up one, they'd be lucky to fly past the Moon. It's impossible. Then you have massive freighters such as the Canterbury with the same kind of maneuverability as a fighter. That flip + burn maneuver like you see in the first episode would never happen IRL, you'd rip the entire ship apart. 100% casualty rate, no survivors. And this sort of crap is exactly why The Expanse should die. It's all 100% impossible. The Expanse has the exact opposite of the most realistic anything. And your claim of "realism" is complete and utter bullshit.
@@TheOneTrueDragonKing it's a science fiction, it is made it be interesting and entertaining, not perfect. Afterall, most people would not want to watch a ship fly though space for most of the season.
The idea of "mag boots" is where budget constraints come in. The decks alignment and g loading is an excellent idea while under power, but in orbit everone would just float because it's a lot easier to get around floating than "walking" on "mag boots", but who can afford to rent a 707 doing parabolic arcs over and over for a TV show. They did that in Apollo 13 because they had the budget.
@@tringalij The problem with floating is that you can never have any large compartments, because of the chance of getting "stuck" in the middle. With magboots you can push off a horizontal surface in a vertical direction - walking. Since the ships would be under power for most of the time spent in them, you'd build them with a floor where all the stuff is and a ceiling without much of anything, since you wouldn't be able to reach it while in transit. It'd be smarter to use the floorspace as efficiently as possible, so instead of building lots of walls or corridors for people to push off of, you'd have them walk around in magboots from thing to thing. Anything (large enough) in orbit permanently would probably be built with a spinning ring, since people (in the Expanse at least) stay in space for longer than today's astronauts and need some sort of gravity to stay healthy efficiently.
I think there is a gray area here; it is accurate to say that on the show the mag boot mechanic is used due to budget constraints because in reality, ship crew would probably use zero g quite often to get around the ship quickly, but they would also use mag boots quite often to anchor themselves when needed. I think people that spend the majority of their lives on these ships would be switching back and forth constantly. But filming zero g is problematic and expensive, so it is portrayed very minimally on the show.
Ships entering an engagement are often depicted as flying backwards for deceleration. The main reason the Donnager saw the stealth ships was the drive plume, then nothing. At the battle of Thoth Station, the Rocinante approaches dark but ‘heat her up’ spins and burns to quickly decelerate into the engagement.
FYI When you screw up regarding that Expanse ships use constant acceleration to provide standard G in ships… you can be grateful that the Expanse doesn't have _Inquisitors._
There's a "simple" answer for the way the decks are set up: thanks to their magical fusion drives, the ships are designed to operate under constant sub-1G thrust over long distances, which solves a SLEW of potential long term health issues as well.
@@thejurassicwarewolf3300 They're much more efficient and produce more thrust than any ion or electric drives we have right now, and indeed, than the Expanse inhabitants had before Epstein invented his drive.
@@lsq7833 I'm willing to give them that much. Think about car engine tech from 75 years ago until today. Back then computer controlled fuel injection and hybrid engines were the stuff of Science Fiction too.
The ships are oriented that way because they are usually employing simulated gravity through acceleration and deceleration. Quite simply, these ships are almost always in transit and enjoying a facsimile of gravity, while the ISS is stationary, and the designs of each are built around this distinction.
@@therealist3495 I believe what he is referring to is that the ISS is not accelerating under it's own power... it's falling around earth and therefore there is no net acceleration
They only have the simulated gravity under thrust. The 3rd season does a better job of trying to show the ship is oriented like a skyscrapper (thrusters are bottom floor). The engine thrust causes everyone to push into the floor in the opposite direction of thrust relative to the thrust strength. The Epstein engine was a game changer in the show/book because it allowed a ship to remain under thrust much longer than previous engines, which not only allowed for you to practically achieve speeds previously unheard of through constant acceleration, but also allowing for thrust gravity due to that constant acceleration as a result of Newtonian physics. That is why you hear them use gravity-centric terms to relative to how they describe thrust, ie 1g of thrust. The mag boots are for instances when thrust isn't being used, it is a very low level of thrust (fraction of a G), or for instances where thrust direction will change wildly (although they usually are in a crash couch when that is expected to happen).
@@therealist3495 I did not intend to imply that the space station was stationary at a set point in space, just that the design principles are different, between the Expanse ships and ISS, for very pragmatic reasons.
Gravity through acceleration is not actually simulated, that is real legit gravity. That is the whole basis behind general relativity and the "falling elevator" thought experiment.
@Blue .Barrymore no. The ISS is most definitely in motion and does occasionally use a boost from a docked Soyuz for altitude adjustment. Yes the ISS is in constant free fall, hence micro gravity.
The Expanse has changed the way I look at science fiction movies. It’s a brilliant show. I just wish it was on a different network. I don’t want to pay for another streaming service. Hopefully it will become easier for people to watch. It deserves to be see by a larger audience.👏🏿👏🏿
Honestly I was put off by the belters lack of pure human dna at first. But I realized being human is not about the length of your spine or the density of your bones... but the size of your heart.
@@GenerationFilms Pure HUman DNA? You are always what lineage you come form. there is no such thign as pure human DNA. You are alwauys a human, primate, ape, mammal, vertibrate, all the way back to single celled organnism. You are everything in your lineage all the wya upto your recent species' iteration. Even if in Ghost int eh Shell when all that is organic is your brain isnide a robot body your are sitll human............as long as you hasve DNA, that will always be a part of you. Beyond that, digital mind..............no ide ahow that would work.............but as long as ny organic part of you remains your DNA will always be human leading upto it or from it. You exclude Motoko Kusanagi form your potential war against alien scum then you are wasting proper assets. @humanityfirst Oh and Decelerate.......you don't fucking deACcellerate............accelerate and decelerate.
On the subject of dealing with acceleration, I remember reading a book by Piers Anthony, named "Macroscope", where the characters learn of a procedure to liquify their bodies so they can tolerate acceleration at and above 10g. Upon reaching their destination they can return to their normal state. Perhaps the only way to achieve such acceleration and survive.
That’s another thing they get right about pressuring a hull... it’s not that much pressure, just under 15 PSI, so a plastic binder is fine. We use stuff like paper or gloves to plug holes in jets around bad seals in the cockpit, which is only about 7.8 PSID at altitude. TV always has any little hole blow out like a rapid decompression. Score for the expanse again.
They were probably emergency procedure manuals, and one of the pages says "if there's a hole, use the cover of this manual, or any suitable flat metal."
This show has seriously the best character development in sci-fi history. Also, the space battles are like a battle between two modern jets cobra manuevering around each other until one of them dies, and that looks fucking badass.
in the Expanse almost all of the Space craft have a epstein drive which is a fusion reactor thus running efficently enough to preform a Constant-thrust trajectory (flipping half way). Because of this the ships internals are layed out like a sky scraper since while burning it is accelerating, typically at 0.3G
Almost all? In the books and even the show, they imply that only the newest, martian built ships have epstein drives. I'm fairly certain they even mention that earth ships that have them order them from Mars, they aren't allowed/no blueprints/what have you on Earth.
@@DarthObscurity "the epstein drive unlocked the belt, mass colonization of the belt wouldn't have been feasible without it." - Leviathan wakes (Expanse book 1) the epstein drive is somewhere around 150 years old by the start of the expanse. EVERYONE has them.
@@bemusedalligator there are still some old skool fusion torch ships though. i think the knight was one, and another ship you might see next season. its also stated in one of the books (drive maybe), that the epstien drive was offered up to earth to prevent them from attacking mars.
While yes, the budgets may have had a part in how everything is one way, it's also important to remember that all of the decks of the ship are vertical, like a skyscraper. This means that the acceleration from the ships epstein drive is used to create an artificial gravity. The epstein drive is extreamly efficient, so ships in the expanse are able to constantly accelerate towards their target at 1G of force, then flip and burn half way to their destination. This makes the travel times much shorter as well as creating artificial gravity for the crew.
9:15 Actually it makes perfect sense for the controls to be oriented the way they are. The deck is perpendicular to the engine, so thrust creates artificial gravity.
Babylon 5 was ahead of the curve on realistic space combat. First time I ever saw a fighter turn 180 and shoot the guy behind them or 90 degrees to strafe a ship.
quasa 01 I disagree. Fighters can be a great force multiplier. In the expanse they could used as scouts and raiders against pirates and poorly equipped OPA units. They could also serve as extra pdc’s for the big ships and extra launch platforms for anti ship missiles.
@@madrabbit9007 It depends a lot on the tech of the sci-fi. If you have very small energy sources, engines and life support, then it could make sense to have fighters. If you need a big fusion reactor, lots of reaction mass, or complicated life support, then your smallest ship is still pretty big. I believe that in the Expanse, the Rocinante is one of the smallest combat capable ships, just due to the amount of stuff you need to cart around to have an effective fighter. In something like Star Wars or Babylon 5, you can pack all that into a very small ship, thus fighters are practical.
@@madrabbit9007 Not really, anything a space fighter could do a drone or missile could do better. The simple fact is that space is big and pilots have a lot of requirements, but they are cool so I don't mind
@@harmen2456 why does the US army still have fighter jets instead of doing everything with drones and missiles then? And our Self-piloting tech is WAY better than the B5 computers, and there's not sign of good AI in the expanse either. And no you can't remote pilot drones in combat when they're at orbital distances, pro gamers have trouble with lag over 50 milliseconds, do you think the army would be okay with a 1 or 2 second control lag? Because I wouldn't.
I think I remember Holden saying how he didn't want to go on the juice because the withdrawal is so bad, I think it's just unpleasant to begin with and extremely unpleasant afterwards, so you don't get addicted, you just hate it.
your statement contradicts itself, the term "withdrawal" refers to your body's reaction when it is physically addicted to something and then it stops receiving it. perhaps you assume the word "addicted" only refers to mental addiction.
How they go about explaining artificial gravity in the expanse is that the ships are always accelerating at about 1 g. That along with the the fact that decks are laid out like floors in a tower rather than decks in a ship is the reason that the controls are laid out the way they are. The only time the magnetic boots come out are when they are not accelerating fast enough for their feet to be pressed to the deck. Aside from their "magic" reactors, the show is pretty spot on with its science.
9:26 I don't think they're built for gravity, they're built for acceleration. The decks are stacked vertically, with the "ground" being in the direction of the engine. I assume they do that because if you put someone on the wall or ceiling, then have to accelerate quickly, you run the risk of them being slammed into the deck with high force if their restraints fail. If you're already sitting on a chair on the deck, you only have to worry about how many G's you can handle.
@@tedarcher9120 That's true, but they are just words we invented and use to describe situations we find ourselves in. Language will change in time, that is relative.
Great video! Just one note: The ships in The Expanse are not built with floors on top of each other to the will of the film's budget, but to the will of gravity when accelerating and decelerating. This is how absolutely all ships are built in The Expanse universe. Even in books.
Ahem, allen, you got one thing wrong/forgot to mention. The reason all ships have decks the way tjey do is not due to budget but because all ships use thrust gravity. Building a ship like a skyscraoer with an engine straped to the bottom is enough when you can accellerate at a constant 1g. So it makes more sense to built skyscraäpüers in space instead of true 360° rooms
You can maintain 1g, but most ships in The Expanse maintain 1/3G in transit for fuel reasons, and for Belters/Martians to make it not hurt and feel awful. Similarly, the stations are spun up to 1/3G as well, at least on the upper levels, but closer to center gravity decreases. This also helps prevent bone density loss from constantly being on the float.
"So it makes more sense to built skyscraäpüers in space instead of true 360° rooms" Ya, imagine being in a combat situation, but half the control panels are on the ceiling, which you can't reach cuz you're strapped into a chair on the floor experiencing >2G. The Expanse got it right, for more than just budgetary reasons. Thank Naren Shankar, the show runner, for all the accuracy! He has a Ph.D in applied physics!
@@vickas54 imagine if you are floating in the middle of the control room, when the ship starts accelerating at 12 g to evade a torpedo. You will be pancaked. That's why you wear mag boots All The Time, and strap yourself when you sleep
@@axebearer Another point (but I'm sure the 12 colonies famous scientist that you are already knows this) is that even is people prefer 1g, the materiel stress this puts on a system is an order of magnitude greater than what 1/g would impose. Asteroids like Ceres or Eros would disintegrate if spun at 1g. Like wise building a ship that can take sustained 1/3g is much simpler than building one that can take multiple Gs.
@@tedarcher9120 Well if you're in the middle of the room connected to the floor with magboots alone in a sudden huge acceleration, sounds like either the boot seal or your leg is going to snap, and you're still going to be pancaked
"artificial gravity" in the expanse is provided by the engines - there's a bit of science magic in the universe of a super efficient engine that's able to run constantly for months or even years on end. Because they're always under thrust, they always have "gravity" - except for the midpoint in any journey where they cut the thrust, turn around, and suicide burn to slow down so they aren't going at relativistic speeds when they reach their destination. The magnetic boots are for use when the ship's not under thrust, which includes spacewalks.
hey don't expect too much from someone whose vocabulary doesn't seem to have the word deceleration in it, the word de-acceleration triggered me more than anything and English is not even my native language
The engine wouldn't be able to maintain 1g for months or years: constant acceleration of 1g for 3.5 days would put the ship's velocity at 1% of light speed (assuming a starting value of 0); ignoring relativistic mass increases, you would be at light speed in less than a year (353 days). Because you can't ignore relativistic mass increases, as the velocity reached significant fractions of the speed of light, the thrust/energy requirement to keep accelerating at 1g (or even at all) would increase beyond the capability of the engine.
@@xriex in the real world, yes. but the engine is the "science magic" that makes the world of the expanse work. ;) suspend your disbelief - the idea of an engine so efficient that it could run under pretty much constant burn for months or years before needing to be refuelled while still producing a meaningful amount of thrust for something as big as the roci or larger ships in the series is pretty absurd in the first place
@@xriex Well, yes they wouldn't maintain 1g for several months to years. But that's because of simple limits of how much propellant can be realistically carried, not because of relativistic mass increase making acceleration at 1g harder to maintain the longer you go. That's not how special relativity works. There is no preferred reference frame. Everything is relative (hence the name), and acceleration remains the same.* If you're at 99.99% the speed of light relative to some external observer and want to accelerate "forward" at 1g, you can do so just as easily as you could if you were going 0% c relative to that observer. To that external observer your mass will be increasing, your length will be changing, and your time will be slowing down (in effect making you appear to be accelerating slower than 1 g). You will appear to approach the speed of light, but will never reach it. To you everything will be normal. You will feel 1g of acceleration and your drive won't require any more power than it did when you started at 0% c relative to the observer (putting aside how you got to 99.99% c in the first place). You won't notice any weird changes in your ship's mass and everything will be the normal length. When you turn your engine back off, as far as you're concerned, you could treat things as if *the rest of the universe* is now moving the other direction at 99.99% c. *In special relativity, gravity and acceleration are treated as the same. I could go on, but honestly everything gets really weird because it's stuff we just don't encounter in everyday life, and even though I think I have a ok-decent grasp of it, it still hurts my brain lol
@@taragwendolyn - The Epstein Drive isn’t “Space magic”. It’s concept is grounded in reality and isn’t that far out there. It is much more realistic than the FTL travel most sci fi uses. Truth be told we will likely end up using something similar in the future.
8:56 @Generation Films: you got their artificial gravity dead wrong. Ships use constant acceleration to generate gravity. Space stations (and one-offs like the Nauvoo) use centripetal acceleration to simulate gravity. Heck, they even spun up an entire dwarf planet (Ceres) to simulate gravity inside it, and the low cost living areas (like where Miller and the other Belters live) have noticeable Coriolis forces as can be seen when he pours his whisky.
@@warmachine5835 True. Nauvoo was a spaceship tho. Supposed to take thousands of Mormons to the next star system. Then it was renamed Behemoth and was repurposed as the biggest warship in the system. Finally it did become a space station in the Slow Zone and was renamed Medina Station.
Umm.. actually... smaller ships tend to use what I would refer to as "thrust gravity" as in gravity produced by thrusting for prolonged periods of time at a certain rate of acceleration to get the level of gravity you want
For the last part; Ships in Expanse rely on artificial gravity by way of acceleration. So, think of the interiors of their ships to be laid out more like a building with the floors of each level pointing towards the engine. In other words, the lowest level or deck is the closest to the main drive. The top level or deck of ships like our hero’s Rocinante, is towards what we are used to calling the front or bow of the ship. It’s the big town or city sized stations that rely on artificial gravity by means of centripetal force.
The novels explain it all a lot more clearly. For a crossing where time isn't a factor, they maintain a gravity that's comfortable for most people all the way, up to the flip-and-burn halfway to their destination. For a crossing where speed is of the essence, they'll burn hard, 3-5G, for a few hours and then they'll ease off on the throttle for food, bathroom breaks, etc, and repeat the process.
The Expanse deserves all the love that it gets; even if the first half of the first season isn't anything special. Anybody supporting this wonderful show has my support
No it isn't. It is far more complicated - as you have no "full 3 dimensional" combat on the sea (well naval warfare has its own difficulties, with air to sea threats and submersible threats). But in reality it is closer to a naval combat, than to air to air combat. It is far more focused on beyond visual range, far more strategical compared to air-to-air combat.
It is somewhat advanced by the WW I standards. Only specs are better, the rest is the same, if not worse. Apparently, by the time of the expanse events, all the military knowledge that survived was in Dumas books and movies about Caribbean pirates. All they could come up with were bigger guns and longer knifes.
@@little_lord_tam Of course it's literally not that. It's a comparison. Naval ships attack in the same way. Linear strike paths with defensive guns for projectiles
previous to expanse star trek was my favorite kind a still is but expanse it was like a breath of fresh air in the genre and it was so realistic giving it all the much more favor with me.
Me! Maneo! Jung! ESPINO... *(Splat)* And thus Maneo became another victim in the long and sad saga of men doing blisteringly stupid things in the name of impressing his crush
@@weldonwin I mean who could've predicted that an alien structure would open a wormhole to a pocket dimension where a station can controll the speed limit
@@bartschaap6236 Well, that he couldn't have predicted, but he was risking just getting blasted out of the sky by the Martian and UN warships guarding the ring and assuming they didn't just vaporize him with a brace of torpedoes, he was likely going to jail for violating a quarantine zone, since they had no idea what the ring was, what it did, only that it was alien and made by some freaky blue stuff that ate a hundred thousand people alive, turned Eros into a hyper velocity missile and murdered a Mythbuster, so it was in everyone's interests not to go poking it with a stick
9:16 - in the books, it is explicitly stated that majority of time is spent either accelerating or decelerating, and because drive is below the floor - it creates artificial gravity through constant acceleration
Seats and controls on small ships are oriented for continuous thrust. A typical trip would thrust about halfway then flip and burn to slow down to the destination. Boots are for when times when no thrust is needed.
The orientation of the control panels is practical. They spend most of their time under power at 1G. And the decks are arranged vertically with the bottom level being the engine compartment and the bridge being the top floor. All ships in The Expanse are built this way (except for the Navu / Behemoth which is the only one shown to use a centrifuge design.
Wow.. Shocking that you showed the deceleration of the "Y Que" Belter ship entering the ring gate and doing the "sudden deceleration" and the belter (forget his name now) literally coming apart while observing the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy (an object in motion tends to stay in motion...)
There's one thing near the end that you appear not to understand, artificial gravity on the Rocinante and smaller vessels is generated by "thrust gravity"
That's not gravity that kills, but inertia. And removing gravity doesn't remove mass that create inertia, as inertia is equivalent to kinetic energy...
@@NefariousKoel Not even that...more like disslocation between elments body or chassis/vessel is build from. If they all would stop at the same time in orientation to one another there would be no damage what so ever. Thats why we have air bags and those are even use to "save" suicide jumpers, its not only about deacceleration, but lack of robust surface that would push "building blocks" into other turning body into pulp and spread resistance around body as much as possible... you could deaccelerate with hard metal springs and large metal plate the same as air bag, but that would break bones and crush internals, because deacceleration would be diffirent between contact point and the rest of body.
Since the decks are built perpendicular to the direction of thrust, and as for the first half of any voyage the ship accelerates, then at midpoint flips and decelerates, it makes sense that the command areas and other crew use heavy parts of the vessel are oriented in similar fashion to the modern jetliner. Just Sayin'. Love the video.
They use a mix of panels and whatever they can grab. In such an environment, it would make sense to make as many things usable like this as you can. Since a vacuum seal requires surprising little in the way of strength (look at the Apollo LEMs), and the Epstein reduces weight concerns, adding a .5mm sheet of aluminum into your binders isn't a big stretch.
This show is so good it’s the only one I don’t suggest to others because I feel if you didn’t find it organically then you won’t really understand the depth of the show. I watched the fist episode at least four times before I sat down and watched the whole season and that was over two to three years and I’m glad I did because it outpaces so many other shows easily in terms of plot, realistic application of the science of space as we know it, and multiple characters that you root for. Damn good show.
I really love how in the Expanse they take space serious. They have suits in in combat, they have things to repair breaches, compared to star wars, all the ships have bridges that are exposed and have 0 precautions as seen in the last jedi when the entire dridge crew are vented from 1 missile. Plus the weird designs of ships like the xwing where their are foils that radiate heat into the air, but space has no air.
To be fair to the x wing, radiator panels still work in space by emitting infra red radiation. This is not nearly as efficient as using air as a heat sink, but the physics there do check out, except that the x wing would need way bigger radiators so as to not slag itself under its internal heat production. X wings and tie fighters make limited sense with regards to this, most other ships in star wars do not.
Not that I like defending the physics of Star Wars, but some real spaceships have radiators. Look at the giant ones on the ISS, or the Parker solar probe.
One thing you have wrong: railguns can be mounted by smaller ships. Rocinante carries one as well, but it's only shown on screen in Season 4, but she had it installed shortly after the Eros incident.
supposedly they have the entire interior of the ship mocked up on a sound stage. the deck layout actually made that possible otherwise it would have eaten up too much floor space and greatly reduce the number of sets they could have. from a tv production perspective its a really innovative way to cut costs and make a better show.
09:35 They oriented the Ground of the ships perpendicular to the main thrusters, so people stand against the ship acceleration, half way you turn the ship have a short time of microgravity and can stand on the Ground again.
The thing about the rail gun it shouldn’t have a “range”. The max speed is reached at the time it exits the gun and doesn’t slow down due to gravity or friction.
Yes but the farther away you are eventually you will have enough time to see it coming and juke out of the way. The enemy ships need to close enough that they don't have time to dodge.
@@mickeyhage That’s true. I saw where modern rail guns fire at around 2 miles per second (8,000 MPH). Space battles can obviously occur at various distances. It’s hard to tell what the Expanse’s typical engagement distances were. But a rail gun due to its charging time is something you use from far away. 10km is a fair distance and is 6.2 miles so using modern rail guns that would be roughly 3 seconds to detect and evade. But since the rail guns are typically fixed weapons (can’t move independent of the ship) an enemy vehicle could evade my staying out of the front of it. Interesting anyways. The Expanse to me really is the most realistic space show or movie that I’ve seen.
@@EdwardRatliff One scene i remember shows the rocenante's railguns shoot at about 10km/s or 6 miles/s. The UNN orbital railgun platform has a range of 1-2 AU on the wiki so you would have to compensate for gravity wells when shooting targets near planets and the suns gravity. 2 AU is about 1000 light seconds or 300 million km (186 million miles) so when shooting a target 2 AU away it would take at least 1000 seconds to reach the target if the projectile was traveling near light speed. If it were 10,000km/s (6000 miles/s) it would take more than 8 hours to reach the target or 50 minutes at 100,000km/s (60,000miles/s). If the target could detect that you fired a shot they could easily dodge and eventually the trajectory would be uncertain at such large distances. Currently rewatching the whole show before starting the new season.
@@FinnyBc1 if it was traveling at near light speed you’d have to start worrying about relativity messing with things. Time dilation being one of them. I don’t doubt what crazy things we could do in the future but sending a bullet at near light speed would require huge amounts of energy. In reality micro meteorites traveling 10-15km/a can cause massive damage. You can imagine what a large projectile going that speed can accomplish. One benefit of launching projectiles from 1-2 AU’s away would be the challenge of detecting something like that. Especially with enough time to do something about it.
I'm glad you finally joined us has stepped aside from generation Tech to do this video. I will say this though the books have been around for nearly a decade I have read all of them except for the ones that have not yet been released they are difficult to put down once you get them.
Re: that last point about how the controls "should be oriented for 0 G" - one thing to keep in mind is that the tech of the Epstein drive allows for nearly continuous acceleration. Most travel time between is probably spent under about 1/3rd of a G. Obviously if they're then orbiting a planet or asteroid once they get there they'd be on the float. So from that standpoint the interior design makes sense. This is perhaps made more clear in the books than on the show.
Also, "oriented for zero G" means no particular orientation at all. You could pick any orientation and it'd be just as valid as any other. The enemies gate is down.
0:12 Going to have to totally disagree with you here but I understand your first impression. But these aren't cliche characters. Especially Amos Burton. Possibly the most unique and intriguing human character in all of film. Am I missing something?
Amos is an amazing character. And honestly the most realistic portrayal of a functional psychopath. His looking to first Naomi and then Holden as his moral compassion is literally something many psychopaths do to be able to function in life. So is his genuine but slightly removed affection for the rest of the crew and how that develops over time as the show goes on. As someone who is diagnosed with borderline psychopathy/ASPD, it's awesome to see cgaracter who is not a mass media distorted caricature of the disorder and isn't solely defined by it as a character.
The acceleration issue can be resolved the same way LCD screens and computer monitors work. We don't have motion, we have a sense of motion caused by a refresh rate. Basically a digital version of old school projector film. Each refresh is in a slightly different position. Thus, those inside are not actually moving, they are blinking into a new position in "space". In this was, a ship can appear to do wild manoeuvres that are impossible, while inside there is no actual movement.
KuraMad2000 well, at least in the actual lore, railguns can be used by lighter craft, but only kneel mounted ones as their maneuvering thrusters cannot provide enough acceleration to fight the recoil of any decently sized rail gun. However, large ships like the donnager were powerful enough that they could carry turreted railguns.
@@whitneylackenbauer9782 keel mounted wha? What are you talking about? You mean the linear electromagnetic propulsion system? That's something totally different. TOTALLY different. They even demonstrated it in the show twice. And that asteroid was completely at fault for getting in the way of the first test thrust
@@KuraMad2000 - He's referring to a "spinal mount". One that runs the length of the hull and points in the same direction as the vessel's main thrust capability.
@@NefariousKoel Im pretty sure he was joking around lol. Poking fun at the time they used the railgun in S4 for a specific maneuver. (dont want to spoil, i thought it was really ingenious)
I can see people really likes to clarify the ships are built vertically instead of clapping the Expanse to not generate gravity with air presure as that scifi korean series does.
Comment about the 'emergency panels'. The Roci crew, while prisoners, dealt with the holes when all they could find were the manuals, which were in binders that had metal covers. The liquid adhesive was more than just something to make things stick. It provided an airtight seal as well.
Yeah, that's not at all the same. Drone is the word you are looking for - much better and more reliable than a missile, but usually a bit bigger and more expensive. Definitely worth it though, they're monsters.
@@melanoc3tusii205 If you go back to episode 4 in the first season, CQB, one of the weapons officers remarks that the stealth ship missiles are evading their PDC rounds much better than anything they simulated against. The ability of a missile to actively evade layered AI-driven defenses indicates the missile is AI as well.
No that's not the same thing. I can't see a world where human pilots in space combat would be viable, computers offer far too many advantages in that domain. There will be AI piloted combat vessels, and they will probably be able to fire missiles with their own computers.
I guess you ARE new to the show. The decks are arranged vertically like a skyscraper, because the ship's engines are able to be on the entire flight, so there is acceleration "gravity" at all times. That's why they flip and burn halfway through the trip
They use a 1G acceleration drive, the ships are built vertically. As long as the Rossi accelerated at 1G you'd actually have one G as long as the engine is firing. Trust me it's spot on. 👍
The UNN ship Arboghast in Expanse Season 4 has two gravity pods spinning on one axis, but at different radii. I'm assuming that one is for 1G simulated, and the other is for something like 0.5G simulated, so various crews (such as people from Luna Colony) could work comfortably while in orbit of somewhere like New Terra?
Bruddah, you were cruising great getting this all right, then you broke the net at the end of your set. You may want to caption in manually a correction on this, or do an interrupt cut correcting yourself, you know something along the lines of a flickering screen and repost the video.
Yeah, whenever I see stupid questions like "why the ships go backwards??!!!" on movie sites, I know SYFY did it right. There are of course some stupid mistakes, especially in late season 3, but it's okay, orbital mechanics and space medicine are mostly fine there.
Very thoughtfully done. Thank you. The Expanse is probably the best Space Opera ever done, and that is with great and well-deserved respect for worthy predecessors. Some of the acting is off-the-charts good. This means you, Amos and Bobbie! But there is one glaring mistake, at least I think it is. And that is, for ships without centripetal force gravity simulation ability -- and after the Nauvoo, that's about all of them -- they produce gravity as G-force thrust. However, to make one G means acceleration, endless acceleration and it would not take too long, maintaining one G, to hit insane, impossible speeds approaching the speed of light. I think I read that even the Donneger used this method to provide gravity for the ship. And that just can't happen for very long. I know, I'm just a picker of celestial nits. The Protomolecule made me do it.
the decks are stacked on top of the engine like a building. there is gravity when thruster is running, the core clarktech is the epstien drive that lets them run the thing for days without being mostly fuel for mass
If you take a close look at repairing the holes, she uses a technical manual binder. Being a Damage Controlman in the Navy, I was very stoked at the enginuity, especially noting the vacuume seems more realistic than say, Aliens 4 where the vacuume was so high it pulled a whole body through a 3 inch hole lol. Pressure or vacuume pressure is largely dependent on the difference between 2 pressures and the size of a breach.
John Rubino On all ships except for the Nauvoo (or whatever it’s called) while it’s coasting or stationary-ish. And the Nauvoo isn’t an especially common design. It was designed to accelerate to an absurd fraction of C under thrust gravity, then flip (so its comm laser faces Earth), and coast most of the way to Tau Ceti under 1G of spin gravity, before decelerating under thrust gravity without spin. You can’t accelerate that far. It’d burn too much fuel, and more importantly, every spec of dust would hit with the force of a nuke. Then there’s the relativistic considerations. And because spin gravity makes you nauseous the faster the spin/RPMs, to simulate 1G, you need an absurdly wide drum to keep the RPM low. The belters only spun it to 1/3G for obvious reasons, which messed with agricultural drainage and other systems needed to support remote colonies. But nothing they couldn’t fix.
Thank you. When you have spacial orientation, it's maddening to see sci-fi or airplane dog fights created by people who don't have that type of intelligence.
As a physics engineer, when I first saw the Expanse I found myself in awe with it all... "wow, Coriolis effect done right"... "wow, credible and doable gravity", "finally!!! no sound in space, no pew pew boom boom", and all that was mentioned in this video and then some (scarcity economy, not only water/air/food but pretty much everything, impact on human bodies throughout generations of living in space, etc).
There's a great line in the books (I don't know if it's in the show) where Amos says something like, "100 years ago I would have been a nuclear physicist, but today I'm just a mechanic."
Also the ships are almost always accelerating or decelerating (it's the fastest way, accelerate halfway, then decelerate the other half of the journey) so they can always go at 1G or whatever the preferred gravity of the crew. That's why the controls on the Rocinante are oriented as they are: they're almost always accelerating. Combat and flight controls are oriented for 0G.
Something I really like is how the controls on ships designed to move fast and hard (ie: Roci) are on the armrests rather than on a console in front of the operator.
As opposed, say, to a big plodding thing like the Canterbury.
Depending on movement and acceleration, it could be impossible to reach a "traditional" console.
I think it was Holden telling Amos that he was a rocket scientist, then explaining that in the past rocket scientists were considered examples of high intelligence and that it was interesting that Amos did not think of himself as extremely intelligent. Holden was trying to get Amos to appreciate himself as something more than a mechanic. I'm pretty sure Holden left and Amos asked the other crew "What the $%^ was that about?"
@@andydouglass1374 You're probably right, it's been a while since I actually read the book.
If memory serves, they typically travel at .3 G, in part in deference to any Belter crew, who can't tolerate a full 1G. That's why it stands out that Martian Marines train at 1G.
(Also in the books, a significant secondary character dies from a stroke during evasive maneuvers.)
@@AretaicGames If you haven't seen the show yet fully skip the next sentence:
In the show Alex dies due to high G maneuvers over a very long time. Alex's actor got caught up in some stuff that made the show runners drop the character in a tasteful way.
Probably the best science fiction within the last decade, at least.
At the very.
I loved the series but I read the book. I am always under the impression that there is a lot I understand because I know the more detailed explanation from the books and that I would have missed or misunderstood what happened had I not read them.
Y'all forget interstellar
Great show when it comes to physics of space. Except one thing... Radiation. Sorry but base on Io? Prolonged stay near Jupiter or Saturn?
@@kamilpotato3764 I hate to spoil it, but it is Jupiter and Saturn that make sense. Jupiter has the largest magnetic field in the solar system. In fact, it is by far the largest magnetic structure in the solar system. It has a stronger magnetic field than the Sun. Saturn has a weaker magnetic field, but at our ratios (that is, the ratios of Earther) is still strong enough to deflect the radiation. And what's even better? Saturn's magnetic field extends beyond its moons. Thus, its field protects them from radiation. Plus, you can probably add the shields and materials developed in the next two hundred and fifty years. So radiation yes. But not as you describe it.
On small ships, they actually depressurize the whole ship before combat because air is hard to come by in space. If pressurized when they took a hole in the hull, they would lose all the air and have no way of re-pressurizing the ship. They would actually store the air in multiple small/strong containers more safe from damage so they can re-pressurize after patching holes from combat.
Also, in smaller ships, all those holes with air coming out could act as unintended thrusters and start moving them all arround. I think I saw somewhere that there were also incendiary rounds, so depressurizing the whole ship could also prevent fires from those rounds. Great writing all around
@@xXSgtJackXx : Yup. Fire is the biggest threat. Fire in zero G would be totally unpredictable.
@@Stabby_DaveThe ships never fight in zero g.
Not to mention explosive decompression, the air going out a hole suddenly could turn a crew member into tomato soup
One detail they've missed to explain why the rail guns range isn't greater since technically the projectile will go nearly forever until it hits something is that the railgun projectiles are "dumb" missiles that cannot change their direction of travel. This means that if you shoot at a ship from far enough with the railgun the ship will have the time to detect it and change course to dodge the shot. This is a well-thought explanation that I think deserved to be mentioned.
Yup, extremely fast, but at long range will only hit where they predict the target will be. Missiles/ torpedoes keep adjusting until they either run out of reaction mass or get holed by PDC rounds.
Well at larger range you could with multiple railguns coordinate the guns and shoot a salvo simultanously at the ship and its possible dodge paths at once; it is way harder to dodge a
"wall" of projectiles than a single projectile.
The way i see it, the Expanse has "next generation" railgun - that shoots energy instead of projectile. I guess here's the need to charge the railgun and its exclusivity that not every ship has a simple magnetic rail that shoots any garbage at superspeeds :)
@@Igor369 a wall of projectiles would require a wall of rail guns. If a large ship has two rail guns that require large amounts of power, an array of rail guns doesn't seem feasible. Of course the rail guns could be smaller thus being less power hungry but also less powerful. But what I think would make more sense is to have different types of rounds for the larger rail guns making them effectively "rail shotguns" as well. The drawback either way will be smaller projectiles with less mass that are less powerful on impact.
@@MaxKissler Not only do they require power to fire but also power to counteract the kinetic energy imposed on the ship and it's course by the actual firing of the projectile. I think this was touched on briefly on the show when the Roci got the railgun; something Alex said about tuning the railgun to the Roci's drive.
You included the scene that sold me on The Expanse. Where as they escape to the Taschi (it wasn't called the Rocinante then) within the Donnager, the Donnie's drive cuts out and they start floating off the platform. Holden attaches himself to Naomi with a cable, then kicks against her to drive himself back to the platform where he can then stay in place with his magnetic boots while reeling her back to him. The physics was dead on.
I was wondering if they got the physics correct on this scene, but it is the expanse so I should have assumed they had!
Another good thing about the expanse is that they do exposure to a vacuum good.
Assuming you have nothing to protect you, you'll suffocate from a vacuum long before radiation or the lack of pressure kills you, and at the start of a series, a guy even opens his helmet to space to fix something in his helmet.
Sebastian Lewis A good rock-hopper knows to exhale fully before opening his helmet to vacuum. Ultra-brief exposure isn’t that big a deal. Just ask folks who use pumps to engorge their genitalia!
@@PCLoadLetter 1) Yeah exactly. A few seconds wouldn't be an issue, but you'll still want a pressure suit because a few minutes in hard vacuum would feel like you took a bath in fire ants, but a few seconds is like dunking your head underwater
2) I wish you didn't mention the pumps.
Good point Sebastian and you say it well. But they don't, "do exposure to a vacuum good", they do it well. You need to be careful about that one when you write a resume or anything.
@@terr4onepseudonym571 most writers make simple grammatical errors like that
And let's not forget the time Naomi launched herself out an airlock in just a set of coveralls...that was nasty. Hard vacuum baby.
75% of comments: Actually, the simulated gravity is from acceleration
20% of comments: damn, that sudden deceleration was brutal
5% of comments: they’re f*cking ring binders
Dead on
but the ring binders were emergency instruction manuals so it was kinda funny... The rough and tumble crew taking the bureaucratic navy's instructions and making something useful out of them. Definitely one of the best SCI-FI books I've read. I'm glad the TV series wasn't an embarrassment to the source material.
I just find it disappointing that the guns make noise.
This is actually very helpful
@@grantbarnes3678 tv show need have some fun in it, or you want to watch a mute show? Owo they would put a text up saying "your audio is working, it's just space that is silent. Please hold."
Weird to get so much right but miss the fact that the ships go everywhere under constant acceleration. whether its 1G or 1/3G the crew will be able to walk around normally with no need for mag boots. Half way to a destination they do a flip and burn and slow down at 1G. The ship decks and controls are laid out with this in mind. The mag boots are for when they aren't accelerating or are in orbit.
Constant acceleration is also how they are able to get around the solar system so fast. A continuous 9.8 meters per second squared adds up REAL quick when you're flying for days and weeks. Even .3G (martian gravity) will get you anywhere in solar system very quickly.
The Epstein drive that make this constant acceleration possible is the biggest bit of hand waving tech in the Expanse. (Excluding the proto-molecule of course.)
.02
When asked how the Epstein drive works, the authors wisely said only, "Efficiency. They operate on efficiency." 🙂
Humans always tend to predict the future tech incorrectly. Either falling short or thinking way ahead. But Epstein drive still feels like it is grounded in reality as all it does is work like jet engine. (As jet engines are now)
I figured they would coast at a peak velocity and burn later to save fuel because (judging by the ship's lack of tankage) they use smaller tanks to give more room for the myriad of other systems needed to keep us meatsacks alive. Just my theory little theory.
Before the Epstein drive they were using, according to the books, Torch drives which are fusion drives but less efficient. Also in the books many of the Belter ships still have the less expensive less efficient torch drives which involve burning for a few days, coast, flip and burn for a few days. This is why the Belters are natural "slingshot pilots" because it's how they make up for not having spiffy expensive Epstein drives. The show does it all under thrust because, well, they're filming in a studio in Toronto, not orbit. There's a lot of stuff in the books that just aren't sexy for a TV show.
@@sid2112 there is no peak velocity in space unless you are close to C, but for that you'd need to accelerate for a whole year at 1 g. It would be more profitable to burn at 3-5 g at the start and then wind down to .1-.3 to save fuel
I like to call the juice that everyone uses in high-G maneuvers, G Fuel.
According to the novels, only crew essential to fighting the ship gets the juice that lets them function; everyone else is strapped in their crash couches and sedated to their eyeballs.
We just call it meth down here on Earth.
@@timesthree5757 😂
They call it acceleration drug.
@Benjamin McCann nope the cook and seller
Oh you mean the other guy.
I'm surprised you didn't also mention how the Expanse treats missiles. Instead of being fired out of a fixed mount, they're just "dropped" into space, then use their own directional thrusters to align themselves with the target, before hitting full burn. We've also seen missiles being used to fly in escort formation, a first for any sci-fi property!
Stations in the Expanse use centripetal force to simulate gravity. The ships do not.
They, large and small, use thrust. As long as the ship accelerates/decelerates, occupants are pushed down toward the floor. That's why the ships are built in decks on top of the main engine.
The mag boots are only ever used in the rare circumstance when no thrust is applied to the ship.
The ship Navoo aka The Behemoth was centrifugal gravity they spun up the drum to help with injuries
@@MeanLaQueefa It was a colony ship. It was designed so that the ship would accelerate to the desired speed, cut thrust, then spin the ship for gravity until they reached the destination star/ planet, several generations later.
The books really play on the differences among well gravity, rotational gravity, and acceleration gravity. They are experientially distinct.
The ships are oriented vertically, not horizontally, so the Rocinante is basically a small skyscraper in space and it is this way because of the Epstein fusion drive (this is perhaps the only case where Epstein actually did kill himself), which is supremely efficient and thus able to circumvent Delta V which is the primary limiter on real space flight, meaning one can accelerate 50% of the way to your destination before decelerating the rest of the way putting a constant G force on the body thus simulating gravity. As such it makes more sense to have the controls in an orientation that allows their use while under acceleration, ie typically how one finds such controls oriented here in the gravity well of Earth. In fact the only time such a ship might be under Near Zero G conditions is when it is moving slowly while trying to dock with a station.
Now since evasive maneuvers are a thing even for civilian ships within the Expanse, as you can't possibly track every single particle of matter after all, most controls are also complete with the Juice injectors, as well as a harness to keep them restrained while High G maneuvers are being performed. After all we don't want a corpse ricocheting around the cabin turning into so much grisly shrapnel now do we?
You can go farther than 50%, you'll need a higher Gs to slow down without overshooting your destination. And depending on how long to Gs are sustained you could cut a significant amount of time off your flight.
I thought about that Epstin joke too when I saw that episode :D
But that episode came out before that irl Epstin death I think.. right?
but epstein didnt kill himself, little does anyone know, his ship was named clinton
The Expanse has numerous problems that prevent it from being anywhere close to realistic, or even science-y.
Some examples:
The Epstein fusion drives are basically souped-up ion engines. Extremely low impulse, extremely low Delta V. NASA has found that they're best used as maneuvering engines, NEVER main thrust.
And such a drive engine CAN NOT get you to FTL, no matter how hard you try.
This means the ships in this series, realistically, would all be battle stations like the Death Star of Star Wars fame, only without the interstellar capability. With the low impulse and Delta-V of an ion engine, even a souped-up one, they'd be lucky to fly past the Moon.
It's impossible.
Then you have massive freighters such as the Canterbury with the same kind of maneuverability as a fighter. That flip + burn maneuver like you see in the first episode would never happen IRL, you'd rip the entire ship apart. 100% casualty rate, no survivors.
And this sort of crap is exactly why The Expanse should die. It's all 100% impossible.
The Expanse has the exact opposite of the most realistic anything.
And your claim of "realism" is complete and utter bullshit.
@@TheOneTrueDragonKing it's a science fiction, it is made it be interesting and entertaining, not perfect. Afterall, most people would not want to watch a ship fly though space for most of the season.
Rocinante's decks are orientated in the line of thrust. Thrust then substituting gravity. Nothing to do with 'budget constraints'.
Well... maybe not as much as _usual,_ but... still a TV show...
The idea of "mag boots" is where budget constraints come in. The decks alignment and g loading is an excellent idea while under power, but in orbit everone would just float because it's a lot easier to get around floating than "walking" on "mag boots", but who can afford to rent a 707 doing parabolic arcs over and over for a TV show. They did that in Apollo 13 because they had the budget.
@@tringalij The problem with floating is that you can never have any large compartments, because of the chance of getting "stuck" in the middle. With magboots you can push off a horizontal surface in a vertical direction - walking.
Since the ships would be under power for most of the time spent in them, you'd build them with a floor where all the stuff is and a ceiling without much of anything, since you wouldn't be able to reach it while in transit. It'd be smarter to use the floorspace as efficiently as possible, so instead of building lots of walls or corridors for people to push off of, you'd have them walk around in magboots from thing to thing.
Anything (large enough) in orbit permanently would probably be built with a spinning ring, since people (in the Expanse at least) stay in space for longer than today's astronauts and need some sort of gravity to stay healthy efficiently.
I think there is a gray area here; it is accurate to say that on the show the mag boot mechanic is used due to budget constraints because in reality, ship crew would probably use zero g quite often to get around the ship quickly, but they would also use mag boots quite often to anchor themselves when needed. I think people that spend the majority of their lives on these ships would be switching back and forth constantly. But filming zero g is problematic and expensive, so it is portrayed very minimally on the show.
The Canterbury burn scene followed by the debris field scene sold me on the entire franchise immediately
I think the words you're looking for are flip and burn
It hooked me too. Notice how they never revisited either of those things?
@@azazelRising72 why woudl they need to revisit? And indeed they do, they do a seriously high G slip and burn to evade the missile from the Behemoth,
Ships entering an engagement are often depicted as flying backwards for deceleration. The main reason the Donnager saw the stealth ships was the drive plume, then nothing. At the battle of Thoth Station, the Rocinante approaches dark but ‘heat her up’ spins and burns to quickly decelerate into the engagement.
Same. They managed to make a glorified dump truck look awesome.
FYI When you screw up regarding that Expanse ships use constant acceleration to provide standard G in ships… you can be grateful that the Expanse doesn't have _Inquisitors._
Magos, get the unguents
Its about .3g which would be standard for Mars.
Mars standard should be .6; the Belt is generally around .3g
Yep, smells like HERESY
@@gateauxq4604 Wut? Martian standard is 0.376g
There's a "simple" answer for the way the decks are set up: thanks to their magical fusion drives, the ships are designed to operate under constant sub-1G thrust over long distances, which solves a SLEW of potential long term health issues as well.
how are their fusion drives "magical"?
@@thejurassicwarewolf3300 They're much more efficient and produce more thrust than any ion or electric drives we have right now, and indeed, than the Expanse inhabitants had before Epstein invented his drive.
@@thejurassicwarewolf3300 Much more efficient than what should be physically possible.
@@Vasharan wouldn't it actually be unrealistic for them to be less or even just "equally" as efficient as ion or electronic drives?
@@lsq7833 I'm willing to give them that much. Think about car engine tech from 75 years ago until today. Back then computer controlled fuel injection and hybrid engines were the stuff of Science Fiction too.
Welcome to The Expanse....when I first saw the show I binged 3 seasons in two days....after watching the Expanse...it hurts to watch basic "Sci Fi"
The ships are oriented that way because they are usually employing simulated gravity through acceleration and deceleration. Quite simply, these ships are almost always in transit and enjoying a facsimile of gravity, while the ISS is stationary, and the designs of each are built around this distinction.
@@therealist3495 I believe what he is referring to is that the ISS is not accelerating under it's own power... it's falling around earth and therefore there is no net acceleration
They only have the simulated gravity under thrust. The 3rd season does a better job of trying to show the ship is oriented like a skyscrapper (thrusters are bottom floor). The engine thrust causes everyone to push into the floor in the opposite direction of thrust relative to the thrust strength. The Epstein engine was a game changer in the show/book because it allowed a ship to remain under thrust much longer than previous engines, which not only allowed for you to practically achieve speeds previously unheard of through constant acceleration, but also allowing for thrust gravity due to that constant acceleration as a result of Newtonian physics. That is why you hear them use gravity-centric terms to relative to how they describe thrust, ie 1g of thrust. The mag boots are for instances when thrust isn't being used, it is a very low level of thrust (fraction of a G), or for instances where thrust direction will change wildly (although they usually are in a crash couch when that is expected to happen).
@@therealist3495 I did not intend to imply that the space station was stationary at a set point in space, just that the design principles are different, between the Expanse ships and ISS, for very pragmatic reasons.
Gravity through acceleration is not actually simulated, that is real legit gravity. That is the whole basis behind general relativity and the "falling elevator" thought experiment.
@Blue .Barrymore no. The ISS is most definitely in motion and does occasionally use a boost from a docked Soyuz for altitude adjustment. Yes the ISS is in constant free fall, hence micro gravity.
The Expanse has changed the way I look at science fiction movies. It’s a brilliant show. I just wish it was on a different network. I don’t want to pay for another streaming service. Hopefully it will become easier for people to watch. It deserves to be see by a larger audience.👏🏿👏🏿
Who doesn’t have Amazon Prime? It’s not just for streaming.
I'd buy it on DVD, but ha haven't seen it for sale.
Mi pensa we got Allen beratna. He'll make a fine rock hopper yet.
Honestly I was put off by the belters lack of pure human dna at first. But I realized being human is not about the length of your spine or the density of your bones... but the size of your heart.
@@GenerationFilms Pure HUman DNA?
You are always what lineage you come form.
there is no such thign as pure human DNA.
You are alwauys a human, primate, ape, mammal, vertibrate, all the way back to single celled organnism.
You are everything in your lineage all the wya upto your recent species' iteration.
Even if in Ghost int eh Shell when all that is organic is your brain isnide a robot body your are sitll human............as long as you hasve DNA, that will always be a part of you.
Beyond that, digital mind..............no ide ahow that would work.............but as long as ny organic part of you remains your DNA will always be human leading upto it or from it.
You exclude Motoko Kusanagi form your potential war against alien scum then you are wasting proper assets.
@humanityfirst
Oh and Decelerate.......you don't fucking deACcellerate............accelerate and decelerate.
@@GenerationFilms What lack of pure human dna are you talking about? Their deformities are purely a result of growing up in low-g.
@Jerrystolk @Isq78 You two guys are new in this channel, I presume.
@@GenerationFilms take care gen films, what you say is heresy.
On the subject of dealing with acceleration, I remember reading a book by Piers Anthony, named "Macroscope", where the characters learn of a procedure to liquify their bodies so they can tolerate acceleration at and above 10g. Upon reaching their destination they can return to their normal state. Perhaps the only way to achieve such acceleration and survive.
I've read it too. It was very good.
Dude... Those weren't metal panels for sealing leaks. They were three ring binders.
As long as it works ^^
That’s another thing they get right about pressuring a hull... it’s not that much pressure, just under 15 PSI, so a plastic binder is fine. We use stuff like paper or gloves to plug holes in jets around bad seals in the cockpit, which is only about 7.8 PSID at altitude. TV always has any little hole blow out like a rapid decompression. Score for the expanse again.
Amos literally rips a metal panel off one of the storage bays and uses it to seal the hole behind the medic's now non-existent head
@@tringalij Also look up the skin of the space shuttle, it's not that thick. Or heck even a high altitude airplane or airliner for that matter.
They were probably emergency procedure manuals, and one of the pages says "if there's a hole, use the cover of this manual, or any suitable flat metal."
This show has seriously the best character development in sci-fi history. Also, the space battles are like a battle between two modern jets cobra manuevering around each other until one of them dies, and that looks fucking badass.
in the Expanse almost all of the Space craft have a epstein drive which is a fusion reactor thus running efficently enough to preform a Constant-thrust trajectory
(flipping half way). Because of this the ships internals are layed out like a sky scraper since while burning it is accelerating, typically at 0.3G
Almost all? In the books and even the show, they imply that only the newest, martian built ships have epstein drives. I'm fairly certain they even mention that earth ships that have them order them from Mars, they aren't allowed/no blueprints/what have you on Earth.
@@DarthObscurity "the epstein drive unlocked the belt, mass colonization of the belt wouldn't have been feasible without it." - Leviathan wakes (Expanse book 1)
the epstein drive is somewhere around 150 years old by the start of the expanse. EVERYONE has them.
@@DarthObscurity they were talking about a specific, higher performance model, not the Epstein drive in general.
@@bemusedalligator there are still some old skool fusion torch ships though. i think the knight was one, and another ship you might see next season.
its also stated in one of the books (drive maybe), that the epstien drive was offered up to earth to prevent them from attacking mars.
While yes, the budgets may have had a part in how everything is one way, it's also important to remember that all of the decks of the ship are vertical, like a skyscraper. This means that the acceleration from the ships epstein drive is used to create an artificial gravity. The epstein drive is extreamly efficient, so ships in the expanse are able to constantly accelerate towards their target at 1G of force, then flip and burn half way to their destination. This makes the travel times much shorter as well as creating artificial gravity for the crew.
9:15
Actually it makes perfect sense for the controls to be oriented the way they are. The deck is perpendicular to the engine, so thrust creates artificial gravity.
Babylon 5 was ahead of the curve on realistic space combat. First time I ever saw a fighter turn 180 and shoot the guy behind them or 90 degrees to strafe a ship.
that indeed is impressive, but the very existence of space fighter detract the realism of it though.
quasa 01 I disagree. Fighters can be a great force multiplier. In the expanse they could used as scouts and raiders against pirates and poorly equipped OPA units. They could also serve as extra pdc’s for the big ships and extra launch platforms for anti ship missiles.
@@madrabbit9007 It depends a lot on the tech of the sci-fi. If you have very small energy sources, engines and life support, then it could make sense to have fighters. If you need a big fusion reactor, lots of reaction mass, or complicated life support, then your smallest ship is still pretty big. I believe that in the Expanse, the Rocinante is one of the smallest combat capable ships, just due to the amount of stuff you need to cart around to have an effective fighter. In something like Star Wars or Babylon 5, you can pack all that into a very small ship, thus fighters are practical.
@@madrabbit9007 Not really, anything a space fighter could do a drone or missile could do better. The simple fact is that space is big and pilots have a lot of requirements, but they are cool so I don't mind
@@harmen2456 why does the US army still have fighter jets instead of doing everything with drones and missiles then? And our Self-piloting tech is WAY better than the B5 computers, and there's not sign of good AI in the expanse either.
And no you can't remote pilot drones in combat when they're at orbital distances, pro gamers have trouble with lag over 50 milliseconds, do you think the army would be okay with a 1 or 2 second control lag? Because I wouldn't.
I think I remember Holden saying how he didn't want to go on the juice because the withdrawal is so bad, I think it's just unpleasant to begin with and extremely unpleasant afterwards, so you don't get addicted, you just hate it.
ANything you use often enough will induce addictive qualities.
IF coming down from the juice onc eis badf..............imagine doing it regularly
Blue .Barrymore The one thing you will notice when they get the juice is it looks painful too. It never seems to “feel good”.
your statement contradicts itself, the term "withdrawal" refers to your body's reaction when it is physically addicted to something and then it stops receiving it. perhaps you assume the word "addicted" only refers to mental addiction.
@Law Dorherty read the original comment carefully, then read my reply again.
Kind of like methadone, keeps you alive but that's about all.
How they go about explaining artificial gravity in the expanse is that the ships are always accelerating at about 1 g. That along with the the fact that decks are laid out like floors in a tower rather than decks in a ship is the reason that the controls are laid out the way they are. The only time the magnetic boots come out are when they are not accelerating fast enough for their feet to be pressed to the deck. Aside from their "magic" reactors, the show is pretty spot on with its science.
9:26 I don't think they're built for gravity, they're built for acceleration. The decks are stacked vertically, with the "ground" being in the direction of the engine. I assume they do that because if you put someone on the wall or ceiling, then have to accelerate quickly, you run the risk of them being slammed into the deck with high force if their restraints fail. If you're already sitting on a chair on the deck, you only have to worry about how many G's you can handle.
According to Einstein, gravity and acceleration is the same thing
@@tedarcher9120 That's true, but they are just words we invented and use to describe situations we find ourselves in. Language will change in time, that is relative.
Great video! Just one note: The ships in The Expanse are not built with floors on top of each other to the will of the film's budget, but to the will of gravity when accelerating and decelerating. This is how absolutely all ships are built in The Expanse universe. Even in books.
Ahem, allen, you got one thing wrong/forgot to mention. The reason all ships have decks the way tjey do is not due to budget but because all ships use thrust gravity. Building a ship like a skyscraoer with an engine straped to the bottom is enough when you can accellerate at a constant 1g. So it makes more sense to built skyscraäpüers in space instead of true 360° rooms
You can maintain 1g, but most ships in The Expanse maintain 1/3G in transit for fuel reasons, and for Belters/Martians to make it not hurt and feel awful. Similarly, the stations are spun up to 1/3G as well, at least on the upper levels, but closer to center gravity decreases. This also helps prevent bone density loss from constantly being on the float.
"So it makes more sense to built skyscraäpüers in space instead of true 360° rooms"
Ya, imagine being in a combat situation, but half the control panels are on the ceiling, which you can't reach cuz you're strapped into a chair on the floor experiencing >2G.
The Expanse got it right, for more than just budgetary reasons. Thank Naren Shankar, the show runner, for all the accuracy! He has a Ph.D in applied physics!
@@vickas54 imagine if you are floating in the middle of the control room, when the ship starts accelerating at 12 g to evade a torpedo. You will be pancaked. That's why you wear mag boots All The Time, and strap yourself when you sleep
@@axebearer Another point (but I'm sure the 12 colonies famous scientist that you are already knows this) is that even is people prefer 1g, the materiel stress this puts on a system is an order of magnitude greater than what 1/g would impose. Asteroids like Ceres or Eros would disintegrate if spun at 1g. Like wise building a ship that can take sustained 1/3g is much simpler than building one that can take multiple Gs.
@@tedarcher9120 Well if you're in the middle of the room connected to the floor with magboots alone in a sudden huge acceleration, sounds like either the boot seal or your leg is going to snap, and you're still going to be pancaked
Did you know that the story started as a DnD campaign, but the healer couldn't participate anymore, so he pulled out.
"artificial gravity" in the expanse is provided by the engines - there's a bit of science magic in the universe of a super efficient engine that's able to run constantly for months or even years on end. Because they're always under thrust, they always have "gravity" - except for the midpoint in any journey where they cut the thrust, turn around, and suicide burn to slow down so they aren't going at relativistic speeds when they reach their destination. The magnetic boots are for use when the ship's not under thrust, which includes spacewalks.
hey don't expect too much from someone whose vocabulary doesn't seem to have the word deceleration in it, the word de-acceleration triggered me more than anything and English is not even my native language
The engine wouldn't be able to maintain 1g for months or years: constant acceleration of 1g for 3.5 days would put the ship's velocity at 1% of light speed (assuming a starting value of 0); ignoring relativistic mass increases, you would be at light speed in less than a year (353 days). Because you can't ignore relativistic mass increases, as the velocity reached significant fractions of the speed of light, the thrust/energy requirement to keep accelerating at 1g (or even at all) would increase beyond the capability of the engine.
@@xriex in the real world, yes. but the engine is the "science magic" that makes the world of the expanse work. ;) suspend your disbelief - the idea of an engine so efficient that it could run under pretty much constant burn for months or years before needing to be refuelled while still producing a meaningful amount of thrust for something as big as the roci or larger ships in the series is pretty absurd in the first place
@@xriex Well, yes they wouldn't maintain 1g for several months to years.
But that's because of simple limits of how much propellant can be realistically carried, not because of relativistic mass increase making acceleration at 1g harder to maintain the longer you go. That's not how special relativity works.
There is no preferred reference frame. Everything is relative (hence the name), and acceleration remains the same.* If you're at 99.99% the speed of light relative to some external observer and want to accelerate "forward" at 1g, you can do so just as easily as you could if you were going 0% c relative to that observer. To that external observer your mass will be increasing, your length will be changing, and your time will be slowing down (in effect making you appear to be accelerating slower than 1 g). You will appear to approach the speed of light, but will never reach it.
To you everything will be normal. You will feel 1g of acceleration and your drive won't require any more power than it did when you started at 0% c relative to the observer (putting aside how you got to 99.99% c in the first place). You won't notice any weird changes in your ship's mass and everything will be the normal length. When you turn your engine back off, as far as you're concerned, you could treat things as if *the rest of the universe* is now moving the other direction at 99.99% c.
*In special relativity, gravity and acceleration are treated as the same.
I could go on, but honestly everything gets really weird because it's stuff we just don't encounter in everyday life, and even though I think I have a ok-decent grasp of it, it still hurts my brain lol
@@taragwendolyn - The Epstein Drive isn’t “Space magic”. It’s concept is grounded in reality and isn’t that far out there. It is much more realistic than the FTL travel most sci fi uses. Truth be told we will likely end up using something similar in the future.
8:56 @Generation Films: you got their artificial gravity dead wrong. Ships use constant acceleration to generate gravity. Space stations (and one-offs like the Nauvoo) use centripetal acceleration to simulate gravity. Heck, they even spun up an entire dwarf planet (Ceres) to simulate gravity inside it, and the low cost living areas (like where Miller and the other Belters live) have noticeable Coriolis forces as can be seen when he pours his whisky.
tbh I think it's more accurate to call the Nauvoo a space station with engines rather than consider it a "ship" in the traditional sense.
@@warmachine5835 True. Nauvoo was a spaceship tho. Supposed to take thousands of Mormons to the next star system. Then it was renamed Behemoth and was repurposed as the biggest warship in the system. Finally it did become a space station in the Slow Zone and was renamed Medina Station.
Umm.. actually... smaller ships tend to use what I would refer to as "thrust gravity" as in gravity produced by thrusting for prolonged periods of time at a certain rate of acceleration to get the level of gravity you want
I would also like to note that the internals of the ships are oriented that way so that they can use the thrusters as artificial gravity.
Watched it all. AWESOME show.
For the last part;
Ships in Expanse rely on artificial gravity by way of acceleration. So, think of the interiors of their ships to be laid out more like a building with the floors of each level pointing towards the engine. In other words, the lowest level or deck is the closest to the main drive. The top level or deck of ships like our hero’s Rocinante, is towards what we are used to calling the front or bow of the ship.
It’s the big town or city sized stations that rely on artificial gravity by means of centripetal force.
Most ships are under constant thrust to generate gravity
The novels explain it all a lot more clearly. For a crossing where time isn't a factor, they maintain a gravity that's comfortable for most people all the way, up to the flip-and-burn halfway to their destination.
For a crossing where speed is of the essence, they'll burn hard, 3-5G, for a few hours and then they'll ease off on the throttle for food, bathroom breaks, etc, and repeat the process.
Man, I'm late for the hype train as well but this show is the best sci-fi I've ever seen.
The Expanse deserves all the love that it gets; even if the first half of the first season isn't anything special. Anybody supporting this wonderful show has my support
Just watched first 4 seasons in last 4 days after drinker recommends.
Welcome the Expanse! We have protomolecule cookies. Now You are one of us.
just dont ask amos for chicken.
So your telling me that space combat is just advanced sea battles.
No it isn't. It is far more complicated - as you have no "full 3 dimensional" combat on the sea (well naval warfare has its own difficulties, with air to sea threats and submersible threats).
But in reality it is closer to a naval combat, than to air to air combat. It is far more focused on beyond visual range, far more strategical compared to air-to-air combat.
@@Dominikmj The idea that during a space battle, you need to attack each other on a linear plane.
It is somewhat advanced by the WW I standards. Only specs are better, the rest is the same, if not worse. Apparently, by the time of the expanse events, all the military knowledge that survived was in Dumas books and movies about Caribbean pirates. All they could come up with were bigger guns and longer knifes.
Its litterly not that.
@@little_lord_tam Of course it's literally not that. It's a comparison.
Naval ships attack in the same way.
Linear strike paths with defensive guns for projectiles
previous to expanse star trek was my favorite kind a still is but expanse it was like a breath of fresh air in the genre and it was so realistic giving it all the much more favor with me.
I love Star Trek but I admit I enjoy The Expense even more. The first 2 seasons were the best imo although I did still love 3&4.
I always noticed the fire in space and the roaring sound of the reactors but didn’t mind. It was awesome and I’m looking forward to the next season!
Man, that sudden deceleration was brutal...
Me! Maneo! Jung! ESPINO... *(Splat)*
And thus Maneo became another victim in the long and sad saga of men doing blisteringly stupid things in the name of impressing his crush
I had to pause that part because I was laughing from the shocking quality of it.
I may have a problem.
@@weldonwin I mean who could've predicted that an alien structure would open a wormhole to a pocket dimension where a station can controll the speed limit
@@bartschaap6236 Well, that he couldn't have predicted, but he was risking just getting blasted out of the sky by the Martian and UN warships guarding the ring and assuming they didn't just vaporize him with a brace of torpedoes, he was likely going to jail for violating a quarantine zone, since they had no idea what the ring was, what it did, only that it was alien and made by some freaky blue stuff that ate a hundred thousand people alive, turned Eros into a hyper velocity missile and murdered a Mythbuster, so it was in everyone's interests not to go poking it with a stick
@@weldonwin you have a point
9:16 - in the books, it is explicitly stated that majority of time is spent either accelerating or decelerating, and because drive is below the floor - it creates artificial gravity through constant acceleration
I actually enjoyed season 1. Was some nice world(universe building). The detective was awesome.
Seats and controls on small ships are oriented for continuous thrust. A typical trip would thrust about halfway then flip and burn to slow down to the destination. Boots are for when times when no thrust is needed.
the panels used while they were in prison was binders. probably metal ones, but they were empty binders.
The orientation of the control panels is practical. They spend most of their time under power at 1G. And the decks are arranged vertically with the bottom level being the engine compartment and the bridge being the top floor.
All ships in The Expanse are built this way (except for the Navu / Behemoth which is the only one shown to use a centrifuge design.
0.3G actually, not 1G
Not to mention the seats/crash couches articulate on joints for directional movement.
Wow.. Shocking that you showed the deceleration of the "Y Que" Belter ship entering the ring gate and doing the "sudden deceleration" and the belter (forget his name now) literally coming apart while observing the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy (an object in motion tends to stay in motion...)
Manéo Jung-Espinoza aka Néo.
There's one thing near the end that you appear not to understand, artificial gravity on the Rocinante and smaller vessels is generated by "thrust gravity"
That's not gravity that kills, but inertia. And removing gravity doesn't remove mass that create inertia, as inertia is equivalent to kinetic energy...
It's not the fall that kills you, but the sudden stop at the end.
@@NefariousKoel Not even that...more like disslocation between elments body or chassis/vessel is build from. If they all would stop at the same time in orientation to one another there would be no damage what so ever. Thats why we have air bags and those are even use to "save" suicide jumpers, its not only about deacceleration, but lack of robust surface that would push "building blocks" into other turning body into pulp and spread resistance around body as much as possible... you could deaccelerate with hard metal springs and large metal plate the same as air bag, but that would break bones and crush internals, because deacceleration would be diffirent between contact point and the rest of body.
It's like Jeremy Clarkson said, Acceleration never killed anyone, it's suddenly coming to a stop that gets you.
Yeah, it's just that our bones are not really good at absorbing deceleration.
@@WaveForceful Stopping is acceleration in the other direction.
Since the decks are built perpendicular to the direction of thrust, and as for the first half of any voyage the ship accelerates, then at midpoint flips and decelerates, it makes sense that the command areas and other crew use heavy parts of the vessel are oriented in similar fashion to the modern jetliner.
Just Sayin'.
Love the video.
Emergency panels? You mean emergency binders? :P
They use a mix of panels and whatever they can grab. In such an environment, it would make sense to make as many things usable like this as you can. Since a vacuum seal requires surprising little in the way of strength (look at the Apollo LEMs), and the Epstein reduces weight concerns, adding a .5mm sheet of aluminum into your binders isn't a big stretch.
I agree, the binders are designed to double as repair panels in an emergency. I am sure most things on a ship has multiple uses if possible.
@@gnomeandgarden6157 And knowing mars they might also double as shurikens
Get the duck tape
This show is so good it’s the only one I don’t suggest to others because I feel if you didn’t find it organically then you won’t really understand the depth of the show. I watched the fist episode at least four times before I sat down and watched the whole season and that was over two to three years and I’m glad I did because it outpaces so many other shows easily in terms of plot, realistic application of the science of space as we know it, and multiple characters that you root for. Damn good show.
I really love how in the Expanse they take space serious. They have suits in in combat, they have things to repair breaches, compared to star wars, all the ships have bridges that are exposed and have 0 precautions as seen in the last jedi when the entire dridge crew are vented from 1 missile. Plus the weird designs of ships like the xwing where their are foils that radiate heat into the air, but space has no air.
To be fair to the x wing, radiator panels still work in space by emitting infra red radiation. This is not nearly as efficient as using air as a heat sink, but the physics there do check out, except that the x wing would need way bigger radiators so as to not slag itself under its internal heat production. X wings and tie fighters make limited sense with regards to this, most other ships in star wars do not.
Not that I like defending the physics of Star Wars, but some real spaceships have radiators. Look at the giant ones on the ISS, or the Parker solar probe.
@@davidthomas2870 @astropapi1 ah okay. Thanks for explaining.
@@neooblisk0084 np friend
One thing you have wrong: railguns can be mounted by smaller ships. Rocinante carries one as well, but it's only shown on screen in Season 4, but she had it installed shortly after the Eros incident.
The Roci has its decks stacked to use the thrust from the engine (which is always on either accelerating or decelerating) to simulate gravity.
supposedly they have the entire interior of the ship mocked up on a sound stage. the deck layout actually made that possible otherwise it would have eaten up too much floor space and greatly reduce the number of sets they could have. from a tv production perspective its a really innovative way to cut costs and make a better show.
09:35
They oriented the Ground of the ships perpendicular to the main thrusters, so people stand against the ship acceleration, half way you turn the ship have a short time of microgravity and can stand on the Ground again.
The thing about the rail gun it shouldn’t have a “range”. The max speed is reached at the time it exits the gun and doesn’t slow down due to gravity or friction.
Yes but the farther away you are eventually you will have enough time to see it coming and juke out of the way. The enemy ships need to close enough that they don't have time to dodge.
@@mickeyhage That’s true. I saw where modern rail guns fire at around 2 miles per second (8,000 MPH). Space battles can obviously occur at various distances. It’s hard to tell what the Expanse’s typical engagement distances were. But a rail gun due to its charging time is something you use from far away. 10km is a fair distance and is 6.2 miles so using modern rail guns that would be roughly 3 seconds to detect and evade. But since the rail guns are typically fixed weapons (can’t move independent of the ship) an enemy vehicle could evade my staying out of the front of it. Interesting anyways. The Expanse to me really is the most realistic space show or movie that I’ve seen.
@@EdwardRatliff the Railguns on battleships in the expanse have turrets and can pivot.
@@EdwardRatliff One scene i remember shows the rocenante's railguns shoot at about 10km/s or 6 miles/s. The UNN orbital railgun platform has a range of 1-2 AU on the wiki so you would have to compensate for gravity wells when shooting targets near planets and the suns gravity. 2 AU is about 1000 light seconds or 300 million km (186 million miles) so when shooting a target 2 AU away it would take at least 1000 seconds to reach the target if the projectile was traveling near light speed. If it were 10,000km/s (6000 miles/s) it would take more than 8 hours to reach the target or 50 minutes at 100,000km/s (60,000miles/s). If the target could detect that you fired a shot they could easily dodge and eventually the trajectory would be uncertain at such large distances. Currently rewatching the whole show before starting the new season.
@@FinnyBc1 if it was traveling at near light speed you’d have to start worrying about relativity messing with things. Time dilation being one of them. I don’t doubt what crazy things we could do in the future but sending a bullet at near light speed would require huge amounts of energy. In reality micro meteorites traveling 10-15km/a can cause massive damage. You can imagine what a large projectile going that speed can accomplish. One benefit of launching projectiles from 1-2 AU’s away would be the challenge of detecting something like that. Especially with enough time to do something about it.
I'm glad you finally joined us has stepped aside from generation Tech to do this video. I will say this though the books have been around for nearly a decade I have read all of them except for the ones that have not yet been released they are difficult to put down once you get them.
Re: that last point about how the controls "should be oriented for 0 G" - one thing to keep in mind is that the tech of the Epstein drive allows for nearly continuous acceleration. Most travel time between is probably spent under about 1/3rd of a G. Obviously if they're then orbiting a planet or asteroid once they get there they'd be on the float. So from that standpoint the interior design makes sense. This is perhaps made more clear in the books than on the show.
Also, "oriented for zero G" means no particular orientation at all. You could pick any orientation and it'd be just as valid as any other.
The enemies gate is down.
@@nutbastard not oriented is exactly what the guy meant
One thing you did not mention. When going into battle, small ships like Rocinante bent their cabins so that any holes from rounds won’t start a fire.
0:12 Going to have to totally disagree with you here but I understand your first impression. But these aren't cliche characters. Especially Amos Burton. Possibly the most unique and intriguing human character in all of film. Am I missing something?
The most complex and nuanced character I've ever seen. Throw into that the quality of the actor and Wow!
Amos is an amazing character. And honestly the most realistic portrayal of a functional psychopath. His looking to first Naomi and then Holden as his moral compassion is literally something many psychopaths do to be able to function in life.
So is his genuine but slightly removed affection for the rest of the crew and how that develops over time as the show goes on.
As someone who is diagnosed with borderline psychopathy/ASPD, it's awesome to see cgaracter who is not a mass media distorted caricature of the disorder and isn't solely defined by it as a character.
Amos's genuine concern for the welfare of children seems to indicate that his psychopathy is situtational, and learned rather than innate.
That's a very thorough analysis of one of (if not the) best sci-fi shows on TV
Stay away from te Aquaaa!! 🤣
The acceleration issue can be resolved the same way LCD screens and computer monitors work. We don't have motion, we have a sense of motion caused by a refresh rate. Basically a digital version of old school projector film. Each refresh is in a slightly different position. Thus, those inside are not actually moving, they are blinking into a new position in "space". In this was, a ship can appear to do wild manoeuvres that are impossible, while inside there is no actual movement.
".... only larger class ships will have railguns...." while only 10 seconds earlier shows footage of a small corvette firing a railgun.....
and they were surprised by it but you're right
KuraMad2000 well, at least in the actual lore, railguns can be used by lighter craft, but only kneel mounted ones as their maneuvering thrusters cannot provide enough acceleration to fight the recoil of any decently sized rail gun. However, large ships like the donnager were powerful enough that they could carry turreted railguns.
@@whitneylackenbauer9782 keel mounted wha? What are you talking about? You mean the linear electromagnetic propulsion system? That's something totally different. TOTALLY different. They even demonstrated it in the show twice. And that asteroid was completely at fault for getting in the way of the first test thrust
@@KuraMad2000 - He's referring to a "spinal mount". One that runs the length of the hull and points in the same direction as the vessel's main thrust capability.
@@NefariousKoel Im pretty sure he was joking around lol. Poking fun at the time they used the railgun in S4 for a specific maneuver. (dont want to spoil, i thought it was really ingenious)
Railguns are "TIGHT!" Great video, I should watch this show!
Is anyone else here watching these and comparing them to spacedock’s videos from a while ago hehe
I can see people really likes to clarify the ships are built vertically instead of clapping the Expanse to not generate gravity with air presure as that scifi korean series does.
im pretty sure they use acceleration of the ship thrusters to generate gravity
Comment about the 'emergency panels'. The Roci crew, while prisoners, dealt with the holes when all they could find were the manuals, which were in binders that had metal covers. The liquid adhesive was more than just something to make things stick. It provided an airtight seal as well.
“Wouldn’t it be better if these ships were remotely piloted or piloted by AI”
Yeah they have those, in the Expanse they’re called missiles
Plus emp rounds are still very much a thing in the Expanse, and need manual restart
Yeah, that's not at all the same. Drone is the word you are looking for - much better and more reliable than a missile, but usually a bit bigger and more expensive. Definitely worth it though, they're monsters.
@@melanoc3tusii205 those also exist in the expanse. The video was about space combat. A missile is a drone that explodes.
@@melanoc3tusii205 If you go back to episode 4 in the first season, CQB, one of the weapons officers remarks that the stealth ship missiles are evading their PDC rounds much better than anything they simulated against. The ability of a missile to actively evade layered AI-driven defenses indicates the missile is AI as well.
No that's not the same thing. I can't see a world where human pilots in space combat would be viable, computers offer far too many advantages in that domain. There will be AI piloted combat vessels, and they will probably be able to fire missiles with their own computers.
I guess you ARE new to the show. The decks are arranged vertically like a skyscraper, because the ship's engines are able to be on the entire flight, so there is acceleration "gravity" at all times. That's why they flip and burn halfway through the trip
1970 American: in 2020 we will live on Mars
2020 American: Hodor
I want to watch the video, but need to catch up first. Started watching, but there are clips I haven't seen. I'll come back to this.
They use a 1G acceleration drive, the ships are built vertically. As long as the Rossi accelerated at 1G you'd actually have one G as long as the engine is firing.
Trust me it's spot on. 👍
Mouzers1984 most of the time it’s 1/3G. No need to waste fuel, nor make things uncomfortable for those who live on Luna, Mars, or any belt station.
The UNN ship Arboghast in Expanse Season 4 has two gravity pods spinning on one axis, but at different radii.
I'm assuming that one is for 1G simulated, and the other is for something like 0.5G simulated, so various crews (such as people from Luna Colony) could work comfortably while in orbit of somewhere like New Terra?
Bruddah, you were cruising great getting this all right, then you broke the net at the end of your set. You may want to caption in manually a correction on this, or do an interrupt cut correcting yourself, you know something along the lines of a flickering screen and repost the video.
i got huge Mass Effect vibes from The Expanse. not so much from the story but from the Rocinante and its crew. family you could even say.
Yeah, whenever I see stupid questions like "why the ships go backwards??!!!" on movie sites, I know SYFY did it right. There are of course some stupid mistakes, especially in late season 3, but it's okay, orbital mechanics and space medicine are mostly fine there.
Very thoughtfully done. Thank you. The Expanse is probably the best Space Opera ever done, and that is with great and well-deserved respect for worthy predecessors. Some of the acting is off-the-charts good. This means you, Amos and Bobbie! But there is one glaring mistake, at least I think it is. And that is, for ships without centripetal force gravity simulation ability -- and after the Nauvoo, that's about all of them -- they produce gravity as G-force thrust. However, to make one G means acceleration, endless acceleration and it would not take too long, maintaining one G, to hit insane, impossible speeds approaching the speed of light. I think I read that even the Donneger used this method to provide gravity for the ship. And that just can't happen for very long. I know, I'm just a picker of celestial nits. The Protomolecule made me do it.
There's a game that has very realistic space combat and it's called Childreen of a dead earth it's preatty good .
the decks are stacked on top of the engine like a building. there is gravity when thruster is running, the core clarktech is the epstien drive that lets them run the thing for days without being mostly fuel for mass
Eve Online with personal drama and individual backstory.
If you take a close look at repairing the holes, she uses a technical manual binder. Being a Damage Controlman in the Navy, I was very stoked at the enginuity, especially noting the vacuume seems more realistic than say, Aliens 4 where the vacuume was so high it pulled a whole body through a 3 inch hole lol. Pressure or vacuume pressure is largely dependent on the difference between 2 pressures and the size of a breach.
"High speed joust" we are already seeing that with modern BVR combat
U forgot about the thrust gravity (which is why the ship decks are oriented like a building instead of a boat)
Well said, great video.
Excellent reading of the scientific adaptation way taken in the series.
Thumbs up.
"Gravity kills"
If I could teach my kids one lesson in life...
Also...
"Gravity kills"
Yeah, just ask anyone who's ever slipped on a banana peel.
[ _you can't, because they're all dead_ ]
@7:33 those are not 'metal plates' they are using to patch up the holes. they are actually S.O.P. manuals(binders).
They use Thrust Gravity on the smaller ships when possible.
John Rubino On all ships except for the Nauvoo (or whatever it’s called) while it’s coasting or stationary-ish. And the Nauvoo isn’t an especially common design. It was designed to accelerate to an absurd fraction of C under thrust gravity, then flip (so its comm laser faces Earth), and coast most of the way to Tau Ceti under 1G of spin gravity, before decelerating under thrust gravity without spin. You can’t accelerate that far. It’d burn too much fuel, and more importantly, every spec of dust would hit with the force of a nuke. Then there’s the relativistic considerations. And because spin gravity makes you nauseous the faster the spin/RPMs, to simulate 1G, you need an absurdly wide drum to keep the RPM low. The belters only spun it to 1/3G for obvious reasons, which messed with agricultural drainage and other systems needed to support remote colonies. But nothing they couldn’t fix.
Thank you.
When you have spacial orientation, it's maddening to see sci-fi or airplane dog fights created by people who don't have that type of intelligence.