Too difficult to wear while sitting in an office chair, and a gladius-style sword is too short to be used as a pointer for a PowerPoint presentation. You should have made it telescopic with a gas spring action a 5W laser pointer on the tip, then find a contractor to supply it to you at $100k per unit with a minimum purchase of 500,000 units and a ten year service life support and preventative maintenance contract worth $8B. Call it the Personnel Recovery Interim Crew Knife System (PRICKS) and you’d be set for promotion, which you’ll want to do to get away from the utter disaster this program will become after Procurement down-selects to a combined team of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, United Technologies, and Fisher-Price to produce it.
Yeah. I suspect (though haven’t run the calculations) that nothing made of conventional matter and of that size would hold together spinning fast enough to get 1 gee
A look at this chart of breaking length Specific strength - Wikipedia suggests that if Ceres was made of carbon nanotube it would survive being spun up to 1 gee
Absolutely. I’ve ‘designed’ a rotating system made of carbon nanotube to surround Ceres while rotating at 7000kmph. I don’t suppose it will ever get built. By the time we could build something like this, we probably won’t need it.
In the books, Ceres is being rotated to generate ~0.3 g of radial acceleration, which is about 0.0025 rad/s and a linear speed of 1175 m/s. Assuming a density of 3000 kg/m^3 in a relatively thin shell, that gives a stress of ~4.1 GPa. The highest strength carbon fiber available today is about 6 GPa, and we can safely assume that in the space-jetting fusion-powered future of The Expanse they have probably managed to improve upon that; carbon nanotubes can have theoretical tensile strengths into the 100 GPa region. So as long as the bedrock shell is adequately reinforced (essentially making it a giant composite overwrapped pressure vessel slash flywheel) it would be feasible. It’s not physically impossible in the way that, say, Larry Niven’s Ringworld structure is (without hypothesizing a non-physical material, anyway), and it is actually the kinetic energy requirements that Dr.Strangelove noted above that actually make it implausible. It would be a poor choice, anyway; much easier to move, manipulate, and protect a bunch of smaller habitats, and the energy and tensile strength requirements are much less with a smaller diameter habitat even if it isn’t as efficient in terms of interior surface area per amount of material.
I often wonder–when I see gushing praise for the series–if I would have felt the same way if I hadn’t read the books first. That usually poisons my ability to enjoy a video adaptation. If it is loyal to the source material I’m rolling my eyes at the perfunctory ticking off of plot points and if it deviates greatly I’m being annoyed by the hack job. (I realize this isn’t especially rational.) There are rare exceptions to this for me, but The Expanse isn’t one of them. It is just this thing that is on TV.
Well, the Lightsaber can deflect blaster bolts. In the books, the daggers were used on Dune as the shields blocked anything faster- but then why not design a gun with slow bullets that explode inside the target? I thought the Klingon weapons were ceremonial?
Still, if your “blaster” is no better than a Colt 1911, then I have some doubts.
They used “Radium” rifles, “radium” here being a unstable material but not actually radium. And they had rules on who could use what weapon against whom. You couldn’t use a radium rifle vs a sword armed foe.
I think everyone agrees the whole thing didn’t make sense. But [puts on geek pedant hat], the Snap did include plants and trees. There was an empty courtyard in Avengers HQ. After the counter-snap, when characters are wondering whether it worked, one of the characters hears birdsong, and looks out into the courtyard which was visibly empty only minutes before to see it now has a tree with a couple of birds flitting around it. Granted, the movies weren’t consistent about depicting this aspect of the Snap, but, again, see everyone agrees it didn’t make sense.
The Radium is in the transparent bullet, and explodes when exposed to light. I don’t know if he ever says what provides the propellant force, but I’ve always assumed black powder. Certainly that appears to be what they use in the movie.
It’s been a while since I read the book - I had to look this up.
To each their own, but while I’m consistently disappointed by the various Star Trek series, watching in horror as the SyFy iteration of Battlestar Galactica went completely off the rails after a promising start, and couldn’t get past the wooden acting, soap opera plotting, and Video Toaster CGI of Babylon 5 enough to make it past the first series, The Expanse feels remarkably well-written and produced. The budget clearly ins’t that high but set and prop designers have done very well in making it look like a futuristic and lived in world, and the CGI and wire work is of cinematic quality (not quite Marvel Studios but then they’re working with about 2% of the budget per screen hour).
Having only read the first novel I can’t speak to how close or distant the later series have stayed to the books but the multithreaded storylines are pretty well balanced and they give room for each character to develop into more than just a single facet exposition tool. I would like to see a little more transhumanism in their technology to help explain how they live in space but they certainly portray an Earth, Mars, and Belt that have distinct cultures, competing political factions, and disenfranchised masses who are victims to the whims of powerful autocrats and oligarchs making self-serving or heart-hearted decisions intended to advance their own causes at the expense of ordinary lives. Nobody is wasting time pissing about a “Prime Directive” and then deciding to ignore it anyway.
And I’ll just say it; Wes Chatham‘s Amos is a better sociopath than Jayne Cobb. He kills it as “That Guy” in scene after scene.
Boy, people used to smoke in space all the time, especially in the 1950s. Have a look at the otherwise excellent It! The Terror from Beyond Space, the proto - Alien. Lots of people smoking there.
(They also had and used pistols and grenades – grenades!! – on the ship to try to kill the beastie. Why were they even carrying that stuff?)
Abuse of smoking privilege aboard a space ship with limited oxygen was even a plot point in Arthur C. Clarke’s story “Breaking Strain” (AKA “Thirty Seconds Thirty Days”) (1949)
I guess back then people assumed smoking was a necessary vice.
If the Snap took away half your gut bacteria, you’ll be in for a hurt until it resupplies back. and when it comes back, you’ll be in for a real worlkd of hurt.
B5: I couldn’t get past the first episode. They had a whole species of Grandpa Munster!
Characters: All of the books are formatted as short chapters, each chapter shifting the POV character. For example, Tiamat’s Wrath, the only book I have on my phone in front of me, is 52 chapters in a not-especially-long book.
Transhumanism: in the books the Belters are all very tall and lanky, but that would be difficult to cast.
