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  1. - Top - End - #181
    Orc in the Playground
     
    Ronnoc's Avatar

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    Default Re: Yora watches and reviews The Expanse

    Nuclear engineer hat going on.

    The momentum balance is the relevant part for the specific impulse your discussing but yes that is correct in most fusion torch designs you are leaking plasma onto a higher z substrate which is ablated into plasma and provides the reaction mass. The reason dropping core containment is enough to destroy the ship is because the epstein drive is almost pure space magic (don't get me started on waste heat management.) To get the accelerations depicted with any reasonable energy losses that ship is less like a standard reactor and more like a trapped nuclear detonation. Think someone using a Yamato cannon from starcraft as a pogo stick. In this case there is enough fuel being burned at any moment that if you drop the magnetic confinement the impulse off of the housing being converted to plasma is enough to wreck the ship.

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    This is also why season four pisses me off when it portrays the reactor as an inertial confinement model which is wildly unsuitable for any sort of continuous thrust generation or power for that matter
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  2. - Top - End - #182
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    Yora's Avatar

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    Default Re: Yora watches and reviews The Expanse

    Perhaps. It just annoys me that the show perpetuates false popular beliefs about fusion reactors being interchangeable with fission reactors and nuclear bombs. If they want to blow up their ships they surely can (though I really love it any time they have swiss-cheese-wrecks that have their internal machinery and crew shredded but still staying in one piece without fires). But with a show that aspires to a high standard of scientific plausibility, spreading misinformation about basic physics because it looks and sounds cool just doesn't feel okay.
    We are not standing on the shoulders of giants, but on very tall tower of other dwarves.

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  3. - Top - End - #183
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    Default Re: Yora watches and reviews The Expanse

    S3E10: Dandelion Sky

    Alex and Amos watch a message from Holden, telling them he' going to the center of the ring space, thanking him for all the work they did for him, and telling them not to try to follow him.

    Miller appears to Holden in space with just his jacket and suit, and Holden is talking to him like its a transformed version of the original Miller and not just an illusion through which the protomolecule is speaking with him. Holden wonders how he always gets into these situation, and Miller says they are both just following their programming, unable to do anything else.

    The UNN ship follows the others into the ring, with everyone being appropriately tense. Passing through it turns out to be pretty unspectacular, causing only a slight power fluctuation.

    The Martian ship is still trying to arrest Holden and Bobby is send out on the dropship to get him.

    Alex is pretty freaked out about the whole situation and worried that all of it might bring the end of humanity, but Amos is trying to calm him down with some well thought out sounding philosopical ideas about the inevitability of death.

    A guy on the UNN ship is acting suspicious, in a very similar way that Melba did, which makes me assume he's working with her and about to try destroy something. And as he leaves the room, the camera pans right to her. Which I guess confirms it. She is trying to find a way to get to the Rocinante.

    Ashford claims to be unhappy about Drummer letting Naomi go, as they could really use her help on the Behemoth right now, but I think he was the one who gave her the idea to leave in the first place.

    Bobby asks her superior if she can have a try talking to Holden and is told to go ahead. Holden responds to her call, but the Martians are looking worried while he's still talking to himself at the same time and then quickly cuts off.
    Holden reaches the sphere and a door opens in the floor under him. Miller tells him to go inside to find the information he seeks. Holden wants to get some more specific clues before he goes inside, and Miller tells him there used to be a civilization here but it's now empty. Miller also says he could stop the Martian dropship, but Holden tells him not to kill them.

    Suspicious UNN technicians keeps being suspicious, but simply shots himself. Maybe his task is to spread a contaminant on the ship.
    Melba can't reach the Rocinante and is considering blowing up the UNN ship to take Holden out in the blast.

    Diego tells Ashford that he should be captain of the Behemoth instead of Drummer. Ashford tells him to not entertain such thought in very clear terms.

    Miller tells Holden that he's part of the protomolecule construct, but that he doesn't have access to all the stored information.

    An officer comes to Anna to ask her if she would do a funeral for a crewman from her denomination, which of course she will. But she clearly does not believe that the cause of death was accidental weapon discharge. But maybe this will motivate her to keep a closer eye on Melba.

    Tilly, an apparently rich and arrogant civilian on the UNN ship, who did the bribery to get her and Anna a seat on the expedition inside the ring, runs into Melba and recognizes her as Clarissa Mao, but she runs off before she can talk to her.
    But she goes to Anna to tell her about it, who recommends Tilly should do what she feels is best.

    The Martian marines decide to follow Holden into the sphere. Holden reaches a central room that has survivable conditions for humans, but decides to keep his suit on anyway. A pedestal grows from the ground and Miller tells him that it is what will give him his answers. Holden does not trust him, though.

    Tilly goes to Clarissa Mao and is absolutely certain that it's her. Clarissa activates her super strength, presumably to kill her. But since it cuts away at this moment, this might very well be a fake-out.

    Holden gets Miller to talk about Julie Mao and how he went to find her, and the way he talks about her convinces Holden that it's really Miller and not a fake decoy. Bobby and the Martians arrive in the chamber, and she pleads with him to give himself up and come with them, so they can clear his name. The team leader warns Holden not to step closer to the pedestal and threatens him with his gun, but Holden of course ignores him and tries touching it anyway. Because he's Holden. The Martian's bullets then get stuck hanging in the air with the same purple glow that made missiles and probes slow down. He tries to use a grenade as a tentacle grows from a wall, and the sphere really doesn't like. It stops all the ships inside the ring, picks the officer up in the air, and then disassembles him to use to pieces of his suit and body to fix the hole that was blown into the floor.
    Holden puts his hand into the pedestal and has a vision backwards in time. He sees the space inside the ring having lots of exits, but with some of them starting to collapse one after another. The sphere in the center of the space then sends out a beam through one of the exits that hits a star and turns it blue. Then it explodes.

    --

    (Mostly my review from the first viewing.)

    Okay, that's interesting. Show starts getting better again.

    Alex, Amos, and Naomi seem to be in this episode only for contractual reason, having just enough screen time for a single scene to say they are in the episode. It makes Amos look smart for a minute, but that's it.
    Not really much more happening on the Behemoth either. Still not the slightest clue what Ashford really is trying to accomplish. Neither has Drummer, and that worries her.

    This episode is really all Holden and Anna.

    Holden is doing pretty well. He has a lot of talking with Miller, which now is actually getting pretty coherent.
    The vision at the end when Holden connects to the sphere forms a seemingly pretty clear picture for anyone who places space video-games in the late 90s to mid 2000s. Starcraft, FreeSpace, Halo, Mass Effect, and probably a number more: The sphere and the ring space that surrounds it are the hub of an intergalactic transportation system. There are many rings all over the universe that each serve as entrances into the ring space, and you can travel to lots of places by exiting the ring space through another ring. Then the creators probably died at some point and the rings started to fail over time. So the sphere send out a beam through one of the rings to turn a star into blue stuff, and it then exploded to spread the blue stuff all across the galaxy. Over billions of years, one of these blue stuff pieces ended up covered in ice and was captured by Saturn, where it was eventually found by humans, which led to Eros being converted to blue stuff, growing in size on Venus, and then building a new ring to create a new entrance into ring space.
    But if that is the case, then the ring space is currently a dead end, with there being only a single ring that connects to it. And at the time scales we are dealing with, it could take hundreds of million years until another ring is build somewhere else in the universe to connect to the ring space as well. I don't think the story would introduce us to an interstellar transport system and then never connecting to any other places, so there most likely is more to that.
    This now totally feels inspired specifically by Mass Effect, especially with how Holden touches the pillar to get a vision from the blue stuff. That's basically the inciting incident of the whole Mass Effect story.

    With Anna, I still feel that we're still at establishing character but there's not really much story there yet.

    I might be a bit different from most viewers of this show in this, being from a Lutheran pastor's family, but I've been wondering the whole time which denomination Anna is from. And I guess in America there's probably also a considerable number of viewers who are curious about that. Because you could easily kick a hornet's nest by how you decide to portray any specific denomination 300 years in the future.
    It turns out to be Methodist. Which seems like a good pick, as they are big on charity. Having looked it up, there appears to be an ongoing debate among American Methodists about same-sex marriage for pastors, with some regional groups being very much for it and others very much against. I suspect the writers here want their to put own opinion into the debate.
    We are not standing on the shoulders of giants, but on very tall tower of other dwarves.

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  4. - Top - End - #184
    Colossus in the Playground
     
    BlackDragon

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    Default Re: Yora watches and reviews The Expanse

    I always thought the guy shot himself purely because he couldn't handle the awe of being in the Ring-space? I don't recall anything else happening that would suggest otherwise. Anna regrets not speaking to him because she thinks she could have persuaded him not to kill himself.

    One other thing: as I recall, the "speed limit" calculated by the ships traversing the Ringspace is 18,000km/h. Seems like a very oddly precise value for an entirely alien device to choose, given both metres and seconds are fundamentally based on physical parameters of the Earth!

  5. - Top - End - #185
    Ettin in the Playground
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    Default Re: Yora watches and reviews The Expanse

    any word on finishing out the season?

  6. - Top - End - #186
    Colossus in the Playground
     
    BlackDragon

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    Default Re: Yora watches and reviews The Expanse

    Quote Originally Posted by Rakaydos View Post
    any word on finishing out the season?
    Yora posted a question over in Mad Science and Grumpy Technology concerning a vital exam he was doing, so I'm assuming that's what accounts for the delay here.

  7. - Top - End - #187
    Ettin in the Playground
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    Default Re: Yora watches and reviews The Expanse

    Quote Originally Posted by factotum View Post
    Yora posted a question over in Mad Science and Grumpy Technology concerning a vital exam he was doing, so I'm assuming that's what accounts for the delay here.
    Ah. Important things first.

  8. - Top - End - #188
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    Yora's Avatar

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    Default Re: Yora watches and reviews The Expanse

    Yeah, but I also noticed that this thread really only has two comenters and discussions are always only about plot-irrelevant technical details. It never actually took off to get any discussion going about story and characters. That just doesn't feel like a worthwhile use of my time, like it did for Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5.
    I guess this show is still just too obscure and niche interest.
    We are not standing on the shoulders of giants, but on very tall tower of other dwarves.

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  9. - Top - End - #189
    Colossus in the Playground
     
    BlackDragon

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    Default Re: Yora watches and reviews The Expanse

    Is it really a surprise that commentary on something which is touted as "realistic" sci-fi would have a lot of technical details in it? I don't think the characters in the Expanse are anything like as interesting as the ones in Babylon 5, for example, with the possible exceptions of Amos and Chrisjen. The lack of commenters I'll grant you, don't really understand why there hasn't been more people posting.

  10. - Top - End - #190
    Ettin in the Playground
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    Default Re: Yora watches and reviews The Expanse

    We could talk more about THE INVESTIGATOR, but there's a lot of season 4 stuff involved with that.

  11. - Top - End - #191
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Maquise's Avatar

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    Default Re: Yora watches and reviews The Expanse

    I just arrived, and haven’t had a chance to post much recently.

    Things get pretty interesting in the next couple episodes.
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  12. - Top - End - #192
    Bugbear in the Playground
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    Default Re: Yora watches and reviews The Expanse

    I've been following along without commenting. My problem is that I watched this show in bursts (it's one of the shows that I watch with my dad when I go visit him) and have trouble separating out specific episodes from each other in my head since it's a pretty ongoing plot. That makes it hard to know what to talk about or not talk about yet.

    I can kind of take or leave it as a show, so that may be part of the problem. My dad likes it and also decided to go and read all of the books, but I just don't feel invested in it particularly and don't find myself thinking about it when I'm not watching it.

    I think part of my problem is that I always kind of subconciously pick out a "main character" when I watch an ensemble show, and for whatever reason my brain picked Miller initially rather than anyone on the Rocinate. I would have enjoyed watching a bunch of small-time criminal investigations on Ceres a lot more than the plot we actually got, which was too big and had too many characters and conspiracies in it. (I usually like "small" shows that focus on a group of characters and their human-level problems rather than "big" shows that focus on world-changing forces, with the exception of Babylon 5.)

  13. - Top - End - #193
    Ettin in the Playground
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    Default Re: Yora watches and reviews The Expanse

    Yea, Holden is pretty clearly the central protagonist. Season 4 adds Bobby as a secondary protagonist, based on some side-story material that leads up to book 5, but Holden has always been the viewpoint character after the end of book 1.

  14. - Top - End - #194
    Colossus in the Playground
     
    BlackDragon

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    Default Re: Yora watches and reviews The Expanse

    Quote Originally Posted by Rakaydos View Post
    Yea, Holden is pretty clearly the central protagonist. Season 4 adds Bobby as a secondary protagonist, based on some side-story material that leads up to book 5, but Holden has always been the viewpoint character after the end of book 1.
    Which is a problem, because TV-Holden (no idea what the book version is like) just isn't a very memorable or likable character. The show is far more interesting whenever he's not onscreen.

  15. - Top - End - #195
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    Default Re: Yora watches and reviews The Expanse

    Yea, I’m also mostly lurking here cus I’ve found I just don’t enjoy a lot of the stuff in the show and don’t want to just post constant complaints, but I do enjoy reading you talk about it lol.
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