E8 wasn’t the strongest episode of the season IMO.
I thought that Naomi’s story here was fantastic for showing us how hard she struggled and how she worked out a solution with seriously limited tools and abilities. I appreciated the show-don’t-tell style (my favorite). But I also thought it plodded along and took up waaaaaaay too much of the episode.
Amos’ story amounted to:
Amos: Thanks for not killing me like you said would. We’re leaving; you wanna come with?
Eric: Yeah; alright.
It was maybe 4 minutes of screen time.
Camina’s story was another 4 minutes:
Karal: Haha! I am Marco’s eyes & ears on this ship and I am really in control here, not you!
Camina: Aaaaaaaaaargh!
It felt like the other 42 minutes was pretty much just Naomi sobbing and struggling.
The “convince Eric to leave” scene just seemed dumb to me. Eric seems like he’s probably best positioned to ride out the post-asteroid Baltimore area. Where’s he going to start over at that’s any better?
By far the biggest problem with the episode was that they talked about suborbital flights to the Moon. Travel to Luna by definition requires an orbital craft. Suborbital means you’re coming back to Earth.
Yeah, I took “sub-orbital” to mean a future colloquialism that just means “within your local gravity well”. Straight shot to the moon and back, but you’re not getting to Mars or anything.
It is silly (as I just mentioned). The problem is that in the show the strikes killed 2-3 million in local damage, while in the books they killed 20-30 billion–the majority of the Earth’s population–and effectively killed the whole planet. But the escape plot was lifted from the book anyway.
I think a lot of the travel between the planets and Luna is by ships that are not rated for atmosphere. For those, they use a suborbital shuttle to take off from Earth and dock with the interplanetary ship.
But the interplanetary ship would be in Earth orbit, and the suborbital ship would need to reach orbit to dock with it (at least, if the “docking” doesn’t happen at a relative velocity of 8 km/s, which would be very… messy).
Of course it is possible that the orbital ship slows down to suborbital speed, docks with a suborbital shuttle as it skips out of the atmosphere, then speeds back up before crashing - but that seems needlessly complicated and quite dangerous.
I forget: has it been established if the drive works in an atmosphere? Could be the suborbital hoppers only have a crappy chemical drive, just enough to get above the atmosphere. The interplanetary craft easily hovers there due to the efficient drive (which can go for days at 1 g, so a minute or two to dock is no big deal).
I assume so because we’ve seen relatively small crafts go in and out of orbit with no visible fuel tanks and no staging, which isn’t possible with known methods of chemical propulsion.
Well, getting back from orbit isn’t too bad, but you’re right, I think we’ve seen relatively small craft get to orbit.
Could be chemical rockets are still cheaper, and within the price range for well-off but not ultra rich folks. Like piston airplanes are available today to the reasonably wealthy, but jets are not.
Yes but didn’t the martian delegation a few seasons ago get both in and out of earth orbit on that small black shuttle? No way that thing could be an SSTO chemical rocket.
I am not sure if this is the exact picture but Avasarala got into orbit on a dropship that looked like this:
And the shuttles they used to get to the surface of the alien world looked too small to be chemical SSTOs too. Though I guess the atmosphere and surface gravity could have been different.
Yes. This clip shows the Roci entering the atmosphere, with more details around 2:20. The Epstein drive doesn’t appear to be used for the landing, but I don’t know if that’s because it wouldn’t work or some other reason. I suspect it’s somewhat to avoid slagging the ground. Previously, they’ve talked about turning on the drive immediately on take-off to destroy something.
In the first season, when the Canterbury was putting together a rescue crew, it was mentioned that they had three shuttles, one rated for atmosphere. Most shuttles only operate in space. I took it that a suborbital shuttle was a shuttle that could go down a gravity well or operate in atmosphere.
I other words, in the future orbital capacity is so common that ALL shuttles are orbital, and what sets a “suborbital” shuttle apart is actually its ability to LEAVE orbit? That actually makes a lot of sense.
