The ship designs as shown are basically physically impossible. Even with extreme efficiency, for the thrust output described you'd instantly melt the ship if the fusion reaction were occuring wholly within the ship as shown, radiators or not.
This is the best math and physics deep dive I've seen into how a "real" fusion powered ship with near Epstein Drive-level performance and without giant radiator fins could work. Engineering practicalities aside.
The general point being that it doesn't look much like the Expanse ships. You need to launch and ignite the fuel pellets several hundred meters behind the actual ship to reduce the area the x-ray radiation and neutrons can hit to reduce the heat absorbed to just a fraction of a percent of the total output to even survive. And you'd still need a heat shield that would cover the entire rear of the ship which would be glowing white hot while absorbing over 2 gigawatts of heat. You couldn't run the drive within many, many kilometers of another ship or station without destroying the other ship or at least killing the crew. Any interruption of the magnetic field would cause a heat spike that would instantly vaporize the heat shield and the rest of the ship. You'd also run out of fuel even at minimal thrust in about 40 days, not the show's claimed "fuel supplies for 30 years". And if you ran a ship the size of the Roci at 12 g's, you burn through its entire 48 tons of fusion fuel in just 106 minutes.
SiliconStew on
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
Is that blog’s thing about ejecting the pellets 300 meters to the rear their own thing? For some reason I thought in the show version they were igniting pellets within the Roci
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Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
Heatsinks were mentioned at least once, regarding the Amun-Ra Stealth Ships from the first book / season. One of the main things that made them stealthy was that they did not vent anything. They could only run in stealth mode for so long before cooking the crew.
I guess I'm hoping that at some level everyone's agreed that some handwaving has to happen, otherwise we're tasking sci-fi writers with actually inventing the future.
I'm much happier with where the authors thought humanity could end up politically, in terms of realism. Humanity never tired of making Others out if itself.
Is that blog’s thing about ejecting the pellets 300 meters to the rear their own thing? For some reason I thought in the show version they were igniting pellets within the Roci
They do, the blog is doing it behind the ship instead to reduce heat buildup.
Oh, sorry, I was mostly setting up an argument for creating liquid H2 on a spaceship, at any sort of scale, was a slightly nightmarish concept, because one way or the other you're doing the hot side of an AC unit into the ship to compress/cool it to a liquid, with the second worst material possible.
Like, all of the entropy in there has to go somewhere, and that is the rest of your ship until it is radiated away by the outward facing surface area of your ship.
That was also my process for the occasional character dreams in earlier books as well. I don't think I've ever encountered a compelling dream description in a book. And the Expanse is not on the good end of that spectrum to me.
Maybe it is the fact that the basic premise of imagining the story is akin to dreaming and imagining someone's imaginary dream feels inutile. Or it's the tendency for book dreams to be premonitions and purple prose instead of somewhat universal manifestations of stressors and everyday activities.
But I also wonder if that's just an author trope thing that I just can't connect with. I have memorable dreams every few days; I basically never have nightmares regardless of stress or daily activities (maybe it's a superpower; I don't know). I have a couple friends who basically only have uncomfortable dreams bordering on nightmares that get progressively worse in high-stress situations. And I feel like a lot of authors seem to write from a basis of bad dreams emanating from bad situations.
The ship designs as shown are basically physically impossible. Even with extreme efficiency, for the thrust output described you'd instantly melt the ship if the fusion reaction were occuring wholly within the ship as shown, radiators or not.
This is the best math and physics deep dive I've seen into how a "real" fusion powered ship with near Epstein Drive-level performance and without giant radiator fins could work. Engineering practicalities aside.
The general point being that it doesn't look much like the Expanse ships. You need to launch and ignite the fuel pellets several hundred meters behind the actual ship to reduce the area the x-ray radiation and neutrons can hit to reduce the heat absorbed to just a fraction of a percent of the total output to even survive. And you'd still need a heat shield that would cover the entire rear of the ship which would be glowing white hot while absorbing over 2 gigawatts of heat. You couldn't run the drive within many, many kilometers of another ship or station without destroying the other ship or at least killing the crew. Any interruption of the magnetic field would cause a heat spike that would instantly vaporize the heat shield and the rest of the ship. You'd also run out of fuel even at minimal thrust in about 40 days, not the show's claimed "fuel supplies for 30 years". And if you ran a ship the size of the Roci at 12 g's, you burn through its entire 48 tons of fusion fuel in just 106 minutes.
Discovery One from 2001 and Venture Star from Avatar are what a non-technobabble based 'fast' spaceship would look like. A drive section full of angry stuff and covered with radiators with a lot of empty space between it and the payload section up front. Or in back in the case of the Venture Star, preventing buckling is heavy.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
God, when Avatar started and I saw that starship I was so happy. Thank you to whatever technology consultant was working with the artists.
That and when the super special ore was explained as being a room temperature supderconductor (yep, that'll definitely be worth the effort of interstellar mining operations) were my favorite moments of what's otherwise a fairly typical Pocahontas/Dances With Wolves/Last of the Mohicans/Last Samurai -in Space kinda thing. lol
God, when Avatar started and I saw that starship I was so happy. Thank you to whatever technology consultant was working with the artists.
That and when the super special ore was explained as being a room temperature supderconductor (yep, that'll definitely be worth the effort of interstellar mining operations) were my favorite moments of what's otherwise a fairly typical Pocahontas/Dances With Wolves/Last of the Mohicans/Last Samurai -in Space kinda thing. lol
I did like their ship design in 1. Remember when they apparently fired that consultant and had the interstellar ships with their massive radioactive torch drives enter atmosphere in Avatar 2? The atmospheric shockwaves from those engines would have torn the ships apart. The exhaust temperatures should have turned the landing zone to lava making it impossible to set the pods down. And the whole region would be a radioactive hellscape for who knows how many years afterwards making it a really stupid place to build their base. Not that they'd get that far because the reflected and reemitted radiation from running the engines in atmosphere would have cooked the crew before they made landfall.
SiliconStew on
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
I had such mixed feelings about unobtanium because on the one hand, did you seriously have people in universe decide to name the fancy substance that enables all their sci-fi gizmos after the jokey placeholder name used to describe a substance with impossible properties that enable sci-fi gizmos?
And on the other hand, we live in a reality where physicists named the subatomic particle that holds stuff together gluons and the Sonic Hedgehog gene is a thing.
I had such mixed feelings about unobtanium because on the one hand, did you seriously have people in universe decide to name the fancy substance that enables all their sci-fi gizmos after the jokey placeholder name used to describe a substance with impossible properties that enable sci-fi gizmos?
And on the other hand, we live in a reality where physicists named the subatomic particle that holds stuff together gluons and the Sonic Hedgehog gene is a thing.
The name is the only believable property of the substance. There's someone, somewhere, working on material discovery who's main concern is getting that name through lawyers, peer review, and whatever organization keep track of names.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
On the plus side, the ship's name was Manifest Destiny, because subtext is for losers.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
+6
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ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered Userregular
unobtainium is a "real" (tongue-in-cheek) term used in the real world to refer to things like materials with exceptional properties we haven't yet discovered, so i am totally sure were we to actually discover such a material that's what it would be called because physicists are dorks
I haven't seen the second movie but we also heard this name from the guys out in the field mining it, not a professor reading from a textbook. For all we know it's got a super serious proper name and this is just the industry jargon.
unobtainium is a "real" (tongue-in-cheek) term used in the real world to refer to things like materials with exceptional properties we haven't yet discovered, so i am totally sure were we to actually discover such a material that's what it would be called because physicists are dorks
x-rays, dark matter, dark energy, the entire naming system for quarks..yep.
I haven't seen the second movie but we also heard this name from the guys out in the field mining it, not a professor reading from a textbook. For all we know it's got a super serious proper name and this is just the industry jargon.
The 2nd avatar movie is fucking hilarious, but they never mention unobtainium and instead are killing whales to steal their brains
+3
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Zilla36021st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered Userregular
unobtainium is a "real" (tongue-in-cheek) term used in the real world to refer to things like materials with exceptional properties we haven't yet discovered, so i am totally sure were we to actually discover such a material that's what it would be called because physicists are dorks
x-rays, dark matter, dark energy, the entire naming system for quarks..yep.
I am a huge dork, so yup.
Although dark energy/matter has already been named & described/modelled by me (modified LQGP/VEC), other physicists disagree with my conclusions in peer review as their jobs would be threatened by the solution.
unobtainium is a "real" (tongue-in-cheek) term used in the real world to refer to things like materials with exceptional properties we haven't yet discovered, so i am totally sure were we to actually discover such a material that's what it would be called because physicists are dorks
NO. Just no. NO. No.
Nothing will ever be called unobtainium.
"But it's a real term" has been used an incredible amount and completely fails to understand that in that context it has a specific meaning that vanishes once you actually have a substance in hand.
If a guy named Myers Julian discovers a room temperature super conductor, it's going to be called "Julinium". Or if he's feeling particularly patriotic and is Danish then it might get called "Danium".
I want all writers, everywhere to do the tiniest fucking bit of actual world building and realize that it isn't clever or interesting to call something "unobtainium".
And while they're at it, scrub "ISDN" from your vocabulary about computers.
Tired: Calling your fictional material Unobtainium, missing the point of the term’s usag, and making it so you have to make up a new term to replace Unobtainium’s original use case Wired: Calling your fictional material Obtainedium, because now you obtained a heretofore theoretical exotic material with fantastic properties
Tired: Calling your fictional material Unobtainium, missing the point of the term’s usag, and making it so you have to make up a new term to replace Unobtainium’s original use case Wired: Calling your fictional material Obtainedium, because now you obtained a heretofore theoretical exotic material with fantastic properties
Then in the sequel set a few years in the future, it's now called Commonium.
unobtainium is a "real" (tongue-in-cheek) term used in the real world to refer to things like materials with exceptional properties we haven't yet discovered, so i am totally sure were we to actually discover such a material that's what it would be called because physicists are dorks
NO. Just no. NO. No.
Nothing will ever be called unobtainium.
"But it's a real term" has been used an incredible amount and completely fails to understand that in that context it has a specific meaning that vanishes once you actually have a substance in hand.
If a guy named Myers Julian discovers a room temperature super conductor, it's going to be called "Julinium". Or if he's feeling particularly patriotic and is Danish then it might get called "Danium".
I want all writers, everywhere to do the tiniest fucking bit of actual world building and realize that it isn't clever or interesting to call something "unobtainium".
And while they're at it, scrub "ISDN" from your vocabulary about computers.
Myers Julian would call it "unobtainium" in the hope that the rest of the academic world would switch to calling it "Julinium", but presumably he's enough of a dick that they're going to keep using his original term rather than replacing the intentional awful name with the latinised "Julian's element".
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ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered Userregular
unobtainium is a "real" (tongue-in-cheek) term used in the real world to refer to things like materials with exceptional properties we haven't yet discovered, so i am totally sure were we to actually discover such a material that's what it would be called because physicists are dorks
NO. Just no. NO. No.
Nothing will ever be called unobtainium.
"But it's a real term" has been used an incredible amount and completely fails to understand that in that context it has a specific meaning that vanishes once you actually have a substance in hand.
If a guy named Myers Julian discovers a room temperature super conductor, it's going to be called "Julinium". Or if he's feeling particularly patriotic and is Danish then it might get called "Danium".
I want all writers, everywhere to do the tiniest fucking bit of actual world building and realize that it isn't clever or interesting to call something "unobtainium".
And while they're at it, scrub "ISDN" from your vocabulary about computers.
Myers Julian would call it "unobtainium" in the hope that the rest of the academic world would switch to calling it "Julinium", but presumably he's enough of a dick that they're going to keep using his original term rather than replacing the intentional awful name with the latinised "Julian's element".
not to mention the long history of physicists adopting the name meant to be a joke about the thing
So, it's been kind of a whirlwind, but I started the books early September last year, and finished the short stories in early January, so 10 novels in ~4 months?
Then my fiancee and I started watching the show in mid January, and finished it off last week, so that was quite a ride.
I decided to get my own copy, and while I love the paperbacks my buddy has, I've chosen to force myself to slow down a little by getting the collector's editions. Well, the first one at least, though I'll get the second and third shortly.
Has anyone seen any hints as to when further CE's will release?
At least according to Google, it seems Leviathan Wakes was Sept 2021, with Caliban's War and Abaddon's Gate in Dec 2023, so I'm not expecting more anytime soon, more of an idle curiosity.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
A few things that stood out for me as we chewed through it all;
- for obvious reasons, the show's solar system feels smaller. The books aren't really shy about communications being hours or days apart, and while it's not all 'live' in the show, there were definitely some sections that allegedly had a 20 minute delay or something where it felt like in the books it wasn't nearly that swift a turnaround for a lot of it.
But I did marathon a lot of novels and then a lot of shows, so maybe it's more of a feeling than a fact.
- Similarly, while as noted pages ago, transit wasn't quite 'let's teleport over Westeros' levels of blatant, it did feel like crossing some large chunks of space really worked at the speed of plot. Which, again, I'm fine with. Especially for seasons this short, I'm not saying we needed to lose even a filler ep or two just to show them all gritting their teeth for an hour under medium/high G. The mag boots were a fine budget saver versus having everyone 'on the float' constantly, but while The Juice is called upon a few times, there weren't a lot of situations in the show (compared to the books where it feels pretty regular) that they seemed to spend extended times at mid/high G travel.
- Martian power armour, at least early on, feels way more like body armour than I envisioned. I think Bobbie's gets closer to it (at least in performance), but describing it as barely able to squeeze through some areas as they do in one of the books, I'd had something a bit larger envisioned.
- Similarly, I liked Frankie Adams, and I respect that even in the world of female body builders there aren't going to be many with the raw stature that Gunny Draper is described as having, sheer mountain of a woman that she is, but it was just something I had to do some reconciling all the same.
- Wes was similarly not quite what I expected, but really grew on me.
- As noted, ffs Anvar.
- Holden was properly insufferable at times. Strait was good, and also like 'this guy is basically the default MaleShep from Mass Effect, in terms of being generically handsome short brown(ish) haired guy.
- Dominique was great, though the books make a point of Naomi having mid/long'ish hair and hiding behind it constantly. I can adapt to change, I swear. Okay maybe I can't.
It was a blast reading through the entire thread. I'm tempted to go hit a prior one for something fun to read.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
Naomi (and belters in general) is supposed to be very tall. But I think the show's casting works well. They grabbed some unique-looking people. And also made Cara Gee into such a force that Drummer became a core part of the books (partially also because the writers were refining the book plot through the show).
I also appreciate how often the show does try to imply their are comm delays and slow transit, but it doesn't dwell on it. Like Miller spent a decent chunk of time getting to Eros but they don't have a montage of his cruise talking to Mormons and being bored in a berth.
The only weirdness there is so much of the combat being ridiculously close. But that's after they try to make it look visually spread apart. It's just hard to make space as big as space is (and still interesting for most viewers, apparently).
There is also that, but as is noted in the thread a few times, finding a ton of talented actors who also fit what they're looking for while being 6'6"+ is probably a bit of a tall ask, so I understood that was just how it was going to be.
Cara Gee is a real standout performance for sure. I liked how they merged some storylines to make that happen, and that she got such a prominent role in the series. She's not Michio Pa, but next time I re-read the books, I imagine that'll be the baseline I'm working from all the same.
The combat is also a fair point, but that's probably based on what viewers expect. Same way that Star Wars fights in 'space' are basically WW2 era dogfights (and I'm aware this is intentional), even though they can theoretically be happening at massive distances. Though I enjoyed one SW Extended Universe series that actually gave a good reason for ship to ship battles practically being knife fighting distance (the antagonist was intentionally setting them up that way).
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
+1
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obolon84Good news, everyone!I just blue myself.Registered Userregular
So, it's been kind of a whirlwind, but I started the books early September last year, and finished the short stories in early January, so 10 novels in ~4 months?
Then my fiancee and I started watching the show in mid January, and finished it off last week, so that was quite a ride.
I decided to get my own copy, and while I love the paperbacks my buddy has, I've chosen to force myself to slow down a little by getting the collector's editions. Well, the first one at least, though I'll get the second and third shortly.
Has anyone seen any hints as to when further CE's will release?
At least according to Google, it seems Leviathan Wakes was Sept 2021, with Caliban's War and Abaddon's Gate in Dec 2023, so I'm not expecting more anytime soon, more of an idle curiosity.
I think the plan for the future releases is to have them come out on the 10th anniversary of each book.
Posts
https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-drive.html?m=1
This is the best math and physics deep dive I've seen into how a "real" fusion powered ship with near Epstein Drive-level performance and without giant radiator fins could work. Engineering practicalities aside.
The general point being that it doesn't look much like the Expanse ships. You need to launch and ignite the fuel pellets several hundred meters behind the actual ship to reduce the area the x-ray radiation and neutrons can hit to reduce the heat absorbed to just a fraction of a percent of the total output to even survive. And you'd still need a heat shield that would cover the entire rear of the ship which would be glowing white hot while absorbing over 2 gigawatts of heat. You couldn't run the drive within many, many kilometers of another ship or station without destroying the other ship or at least killing the crew. Any interruption of the magnetic field would cause a heat spike that would instantly vaporize the heat shield and the rest of the ship. You'd also run out of fuel even at minimal thrust in about 40 days, not the show's claimed "fuel supplies for 30 years". And if you ran a ship the size of the Roci at 12 g's, you burn through its entire 48 tons of fusion fuel in just 106 minutes.
I'm much happier with where the authors thought humanity could end up politically, in terms of realism. Humanity never tired of making Others out if itself.
They do, the blog is doing it behind the ship instead to reduce heat buildup.
Like, all of the entropy in there has to go somewhere, and that is the rest of your ship until it is radiated away by the outward facing surface area of your ship.
then noticed nobody was actually suggesting it.
And then when I finally decide to read the dreamer chapters, I mostly just skim it because it's repetitive word salad and it kinda sucks?
I'm glad it was only in 2 or 3 of the books, but I wish it was in less
Maybe it is the fact that the basic premise of imagining the story is akin to dreaming and imagining someone's imaginary dream feels inutile. Or it's the tendency for book dreams to be premonitions and purple prose instead of somewhat universal manifestations of stressors and everyday activities.
But I also wonder if that's just an author trope thing that I just can't connect with. I have memorable dreams every few days; I basically never have nightmares regardless of stress or daily activities (maybe it's a superpower; I don't know). I have a couple friends who basically only have uncomfortable dreams bordering on nightmares that get progressively worse in high-stress situations. And I feel like a lot of authors seem to write from a basis of bad dreams emanating from bad situations.
I sort of agree but how else are you supposed to write from the perspective of a light-bound hive mind species?!
This is madness, the "it reaches out" scenes were some of the best bits of Cibola Burn
Not fantastic in Leviathan's End though
fuck
Discovery One from 2001 and Venture Star from Avatar are what a non-technobabble based 'fast' spaceship would look like. A drive section full of angry stuff and covered with radiators with a lot of empty space between it and the payload section up front. Or in back in the case of the Venture Star, preventing buckling is heavy.
That and when the super special ore was explained as being a room temperature supderconductor (yep, that'll definitely be worth the effort of interstellar mining operations) were my favorite moments of what's otherwise a fairly typical Pocahontas/Dances With Wolves/Last of the Mohicans/Last Samurai -in Space kinda thing. lol
I did like their ship design in 1. Remember when they apparently fired that consultant and had the interstellar ships with their massive radioactive torch drives enter atmosphere in Avatar 2? The atmospheric shockwaves from those engines would have torn the ships apart. The exhaust temperatures should have turned the landing zone to lava making it impossible to set the pods down. And the whole region would be a radioactive hellscape for who knows how many years afterwards making it a really stupid place to build their base. Not that they'd get that far because the reflected and reemitted radiation from running the engines in atmosphere would have cooked the crew before they made landfall.
And on the other hand, we live in a reality where physicists named the subatomic particle that holds stuff together gluons and the Sonic Hedgehog gene is a thing.
The name is the only believable property of the substance. There's someone, somewhere, working on material discovery who's main concern is getting that name through lawyers, peer review, and whatever organization keep track of names.
x-rays, dark matter, dark energy, the entire naming system for quarks..yep.
The 2nd avatar movie is fucking hilarious, but they never mention unobtainium and instead are killing whales to steal their brains
Although dark energy/matter has already been named & described/modelled by me (modified LQGP/VEC), other physicists disagree with my conclusions in peer review as their jobs would be threatened by the solution.
NO. Just no. NO. No.
Nothing will ever be called unobtainium.
"But it's a real term" has been used an incredible amount and completely fails to understand that in that context it has a specific meaning that vanishes once you actually have a substance in hand.
If a guy named Myers Julian discovers a room temperature super conductor, it's going to be called "Julinium". Or if he's feeling particularly patriotic and is Danish then it might get called "Danium".
I want all writers, everywhere to do the tiniest fucking bit of actual world building and realize that it isn't clever or interesting to call something "unobtainium".
And while they're at it, scrub "ISDN" from your vocabulary about computers.
Wired: Calling your fictional material Obtainedium, because now you obtained a heretofore theoretical exotic material with fantastic properties
Then in the sequel set a few years in the future, it's now called Commonium.
Myers Julian would call it "unobtainium" in the hope that the rest of the academic world would switch to calling it "Julinium", but presumably he's enough of a dick that they're going to keep using his original term rather than replacing the intentional awful name with the latinised "Julian's element".
not to mention the long history of physicists adopting the name meant to be a joke about the thing
Then my fiancee and I started watching the show in mid January, and finished it off last week, so that was quite a ride.
I decided to get my own copy, and while I love the paperbacks my buddy has, I've chosen to force myself to slow down a little by getting the collector's editions. Well, the first one at least, though I'll get the second and third shortly.
Has anyone seen any hints as to when further CE's will release?
At least according to Google, it seems Leviathan Wakes was Sept 2021, with Caliban's War and Abaddon's Gate in Dec 2023, so I'm not expecting more anytime soon, more of an idle curiosity.
Check this out! Action figures!
Good job being a creep, Anvar. You got bumped by the nameless CGI monster who was only in like 4 episodes.
I'm being told there is no other hand.
I agree though, you coulda been an Action Figure! Anvar.
Goddamn Space Texan
A few things that stood out for me as we chewed through it all;
- for obvious reasons, the show's solar system feels smaller. The books aren't really shy about communications being hours or days apart, and while it's not all 'live' in the show, there were definitely some sections that allegedly had a 20 minute delay or something where it felt like in the books it wasn't nearly that swift a turnaround for a lot of it.
But I did marathon a lot of novels and then a lot of shows, so maybe it's more of a feeling than a fact.
- Similarly, while as noted pages ago, transit wasn't quite 'let's teleport over Westeros' levels of blatant, it did feel like crossing some large chunks of space really worked at the speed of plot. Which, again, I'm fine with. Especially for seasons this short, I'm not saying we needed to lose even a filler ep or two just to show them all gritting their teeth for an hour under medium/high G. The mag boots were a fine budget saver versus having everyone 'on the float' constantly, but while The Juice is called upon a few times, there weren't a lot of situations in the show (compared to the books where it feels pretty regular) that they seemed to spend extended times at mid/high G travel.
- Martian power armour, at least early on, feels way more like body armour than I envisioned. I think Bobbie's gets closer to it (at least in performance), but describing it as barely able to squeeze through some areas as they do in one of the books, I'd had something a bit larger envisioned.
- Similarly, I liked Frankie Adams, and I respect that even in the world of female body builders there aren't going to be many with the raw stature that Gunny Draper is described as having, sheer mountain of a woman that she is, but it was just something I had to do some reconciling all the same.
- Wes was similarly not quite what I expected, but really grew on me.
- As noted, ffs Anvar.
- Holden was properly insufferable at times. Strait was good, and also like 'this guy is basically the default MaleShep from Mass Effect, in terms of being generically handsome short brown(ish) haired guy.
- Dominique was great, though the books make a point of Naomi having mid/long'ish hair and hiding behind it constantly. I can adapt to change, I swear. Okay maybe I can't.
It was a blast reading through the entire thread. I'm tempted to go hit a prior one for something fun to read.
I also appreciate how often the show does try to imply their are comm delays and slow transit, but it doesn't dwell on it. Like Miller spent a decent chunk of time getting to Eros but they don't have a montage of his cruise talking to Mormons and being bored in a berth.
The only weirdness there is so much of the combat being ridiculously close. But that's after they try to make it look visually spread apart. It's just hard to make space as big as space is (and still interesting for most viewers, apparently).
Cara Gee is a real standout performance for sure. I liked how they merged some storylines to make that happen, and that she got such a prominent role in the series. She's not Michio Pa, but next time I re-read the books, I imagine that'll be the baseline I'm working from all the same.
The combat is also a fair point, but that's probably based on what viewers expect. Same way that Star Wars fights in 'space' are basically WW2 era dogfights (and I'm aware this is intentional), even though they can theoretically be happening at massive distances. Though I enjoyed one SW Extended Universe series that actually gave a good reason for ship to ship battles practically being knife fighting distance (the antagonist was intentionally setting them up that way).
I think the plan for the future releases is to have them come out on the 10th anniversary of each book.