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They're analogues for SSBNs, the stealthy first strike weapon of choice during the second half of the cold war, Mars will still have the land based ICBM equivalents on the planet.ATP_Power posted:If those platforms were Mar's main deterrent threat, they're really bad at deterrence. A bunch of large missile platforms a long ways from Earth when you're the only power who has access to large amounts of stealth composites shows a real failure of imagination. The stealth ships have all so far been made from advanced sensor absorbent materials wrapped around angular designs that scatter returns, which means to me that parking one in near earth orbit is like having an F-117 orbit Baghdad at 100 feet in the day time, poo poo's gonna be seen. Plus there's the getting it there part, because stealth doesn't hide engine plumes, which would mean ejecting them in secret from civilian cargo ships passing by, by which point you might as well be saving money and using briefcase bombs.
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Apr 26, 2018 20:23
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ATP_Power posted:There's a lot in the show especially that doesn't make sense if you look too closely at it from a hard sci-fi perspective. The notion that the missile platforms could be hidden, and once found, be "lost" if they move makes no sense, same for the Roci somehow being able to "lose" the tracking of the UN or Mars, and then be compromised (except to the person they're communicating with) if they took or sent a tightbeam transmission. Nobody uses optical telescopes to track ships because they fell out of popularity after Transponders were standard. Going dark is as easy as turning your transponder off and not receiving or sending any emissions however if somebody knows where to look with ladar/optical then well you cant get around that Phi230 fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Apr 26, 2018 |
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Apr 26, 2018 20:45
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Seems like a really good reason to have telescopes.
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Apr 26, 2018 20:50
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Civilian traffic control is all transponder-based now, but I highly doubt that at least the militaries/intelligence agencies of Mars and Earth ever really turned off their optical tracking systems precisely because it makes sure you can always see a ship even if the other guy isn't running their transponder. As has been said like a trillion times, you can't realistically have stealth in space. You could probably hide a station that never has any traffic coming or going, or hide an object coasting dark on a ballistic trajectory, but a ship that moves around on its own power is never gonna be stealthy. BUT, it's TV show. I don't really give too much of a poo poo as long as it's internally consistent and fun to watch. Crazycryodude fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Apr 26, 2018 |
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Apr 26, 2018 21:08
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Again I'm just kind of assuming there's only a moderately silly explanation for it that is being compressed in order to make it a watchable show
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Apr 26, 2018 21:11
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Milo and POTUS posted:Semi-hard sci fi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRGQ-4Rj7xk
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Apr 26, 2018 22:12
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Optics are great if you know where to look. But looking everywhere in the solar system at once is just a wee bit harder of a thing to accomplish. "Go find an uncloked object the size of a cruise ship located somewhere between Earth and Jupiter's orbit" is a pretty daunting task. Space is big yo.
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Apr 26, 2018 22:24
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That's why you never take your eyes off it in the first place. You know where the shipyards are, you can keep eyes on that new battleship from the second it leaves the slip until it get scrapped. Also drive plumes are bright as gently caress, even if you can't keep high-resolution optical tracking on all ships in the system at all times, you can notice whenever something moves and if it's not running a transponder you can then focus in on it harder.
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Apr 26, 2018 22:34
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NTRabbit posted:They're analogues for SSBNs, the stealthy first strike weapon of choice during the second half of the cold war, Mars will still have the land based ICBM equivalents on the planet. Yeah stealth ships wouldn't be very useful for that kind of role (ignoring that stealth ships don't work in a realistic space setting), but those composites could be put on unmanned objects that could go dark and cold and be inserted into useful orbits by using decoy missions over a long period of time and eventually end up in orbits that would make them strategically useful in a doomsday scenario. Avasarala's concern in the first season about people who throw rocks speaks to the most obvious application: stealth composite coated asteroids (or similar large masses) thrown on hard to predict (or obfuscated) trajectories are going to be nearly impossible to find unless you know exactly where to look until it's too late to effectively destroy them - which kinda makes the whole idea of a first strike on the missile platforms not make much sense from the perspective of wanting to knock out Mar's main deterrent in a major planet-to-planet exchange. Getting them rolling without people noticing would be the tricky part, but in the setting as described, well within the bounds of possibility. Just in case anyone in here hasn't heard of the online bible of hard sci-fi Project Rho, here's their page on stealth in space which covers in great detail a lot of what's being discussed currently.
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Apr 26, 2018 22:53
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Crazycryodude posted:You know where the shipyards are. I don't think it's far fetched to think that just isn't true. You know where shipyards are yes, but you don't necessarily know where all of them are as there may be some covert ones out there. The Roci slipped into Ganymede sling shotting around moons undetected without out using it's epstein. You can argue they should of know where it was to start and should have been able to track it, but my point is they maneuvered without their drive giving their position away. So I don't think the absolute argument you are asserting is rock solid. It sure seems like if one tried hard to remain undetected there are ways such a thing could be accomplished.
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Apr 26, 2018 23:00
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You could fly a stealth composite coated ship teakettle everywhere and only dump waste heat in a direction you know nobody's watching from and technically get around stealthily, sure. It's even easier if you want a stealthy ELINT drone or something that doesn't have humans and life support to worry about hiding the emissions from. But flying teakettle instead of using Epstein torches takes years if not decades to get anywhere, even just moving between different moons in the same planetary system without an Epstein drive took Alex weeks in the books (although they cut that down a bit in the show). It's feasible to make stealthy spy ships (or drones more likely) that go on decades-long infiltration missions I guess, or a stealthed kinetic impactor, or stealthy cargo pods/deaddrops, or anything else inert that you're ok with taking years and years to get anywhere. But stealthed warships as presented in the show, basically space submarines, wouldn't really work. Crazycryodude fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Apr 26, 2018 |
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Apr 26, 2018 23:21
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The Expanse: Dying is the only way to get out of Baltimore
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Apr 27, 2018 00:52
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Crazycryodude posted:You could fly a stealth composite coated ship teakettle everywhere and only dump waste heat in a direction you know nobody's watching from and technically get around stealthily, sure. It's even easier if you want a stealthy ELINT drone or something that doesn't have humans and life support to worry about hiding the emissions from. But flying teakettle instead of using Epstein torches takes years if not decades to get anywhere, even just moving between different moons in the same planetary system without an Epstein drive took Alex weeks in the books (although they cut that down a bit in the show). There was a plot in Excession, a Culture series novel, that had something to do with a centuries-long infiltration mission. It was cool.
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Apr 27, 2018 01:07
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i've never much cared for jimmy but every scene involving Amos and his hellacious earther past is gold
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Apr 27, 2018 01:20
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I like how Bobbi is all 'hey this is nice" then sees the Mars flag Amos fixed and instantly gets in his face. Everytime someone starts talking about just slinging asteroids around I think about this Warhammer 40k posted:
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Apr 27, 2018 05:03
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I guess we've got faster than light rail guns and missiles now 
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Apr 27, 2018 18:21
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It would be a long project, but sticking drives on an asteriod to give it a more eccentric elliptical orbit would let you bring an outer object into the inner system at a very high velocity while operating away from someone who could stop you until it would be very difficult to redirect. That would represent a second strike deterrent capable of ensuring MAD in a two-power environment. Instead of burning spinward or counter-spinward to match orbits and velocity, you could burn up/down (relative to the sun) to make your ellipse more elongated until you crossed your desired inner object’s path, while giving you a very fast approach that would make you harder to intercept.
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Apr 27, 2018 18:26
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I too am annoyed that we didn't get to see the Secretary, Undersecretary, and the defense staff jawing about the sportsball results for 30 minutes while the railgun shells reached their targets, and another 30 minutes while the missile made the return flight. How dare the writers compress time from the perspective of the viewer for dramatic effect. After they refused to hire all of the active centres in the NBA and WNBA to play the parts of belters, this is the last straw.
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Apr 27, 2018 18:29
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NTRabbit posted:I too am annoyed that we didn't get to see the Secretary, Undersecretary, and the defense staff jawing about the sportsball results for 30 minutes while the railgun shells reached their targets, and another 30 minutes while the missile made the return flight. How dare the writers compress time from the perspective of the viewer for dramatic effect. After they refused to hire all of the active centres in the NBA and WNBA to play the parts of belters, this is the last straw. You're right, there's no way a writer or director could do anything interesting with the agonizing time between making a momentous decision and seeing its outcome.
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Apr 27, 2018 18:47
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I was somewhat surprised by the relatively small scale of the damage that one missile did. When they were introducing the MCR attack platforms or whatever I thought they said something like "each equipped with 20 planet busters" which gave me the impression that one of those missiles would at least be continent-scale devastation or something.
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Apr 27, 2018 18:53
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bawfuls posted:I was somewhat surprised by the relatively small scale of the damage that one missile did. When they were introducing the MCR attack platforms or whatever I thought they said something like "each equipped with 20 planet busters" which gave me the impression that one of those missiles would at least be continent-scale devastation or something. 10 missiles per platform, 20 MIRVs per missile - 1 missile launched, and 19 MIRVs were intercepted by point defences, with only one getting through, which is why the damage was so small. Every missile launched at once would be 50 missiles, with 1000 MIRVs, which would overwhelm the defences, and many would get through. NTRabbit fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Apr 27, 2018 |
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Apr 27, 2018 18:56
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bawfuls posted:I was somewhat surprised by the relatively small scale of the damage that one missile did. When they were introducing the MCR attack platforms or whatever I thought they said something like "each equipped with 20 planet busters" which gave me the impression that one of those missiles would at least be continent-scale devastation or something. They were explicitly MIRVs too now that I think about it.
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Apr 27, 2018 18:57
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That makes a bit more sense. They did show all those countermeasures as the thing got close to Earth but it wasn't clear to me what happened exactly.
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Apr 27, 2018 18:59
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Fister Roboto posted:I guess we've got faster than light rail guns and missiles now
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Apr 27, 2018 19:00
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The railgun rounds also looked like they broke up before impact to transfer more kinetic energy to the platforms instead of overpenetrating.
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Apr 27, 2018 19:01
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NTRabbit posted:I too am annoyed that we didn't get to see the Secretary, Undersecretary, and the defense staff jawing about the sportsball results for 30 minutes while the railgun shells reached their targets, and another 30 minutes while the missile made the return flight. How dare the writers compress time from the perspective of the viewer for dramatic effect. After they refused to hire all of the active centres in the NBA and WNBA to play the parts of belters, this is the last straw. The very idea is fascinating: "We know that in 30 minutes, a lot of our people will be dead. We can go for evacuation now, that means many of the dead will be trampled to death by their own relatives and everyone will die in panic and have plenty of time to get on Future Youtube and make accusatory videos about it just before they inevitably die, or we can just sit here and gulp and they will all burn up in a fraction of a second."
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Apr 27, 2018 19:38
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crazypeltast52 posted:The railgun rounds also looked like they broke up before impact to transfer more kinetic energy to the platforms instead of overpenetrating. Yeah, it seemed to do a last-second shotgun blast, which is not something railguns are 'traditionally' supposed to do in this universe. They just check pieces of tungsten very, very Fast. I suppose we can chalk it up to Earth's most hoighty-toighty MIC weapons getting to stretch their legs
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Apr 27, 2018 20:22
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Chard posted:Yeah, it seemed to do a last-second shotgun blast, which is not something railguns are 'traditionally' supposed to do in this universe. They just check pieces of tungsten very, very Fast. I suppose we can chalk it up to Earth's most hoighty-toighty MIC weapons getting to stretch their legs who says you can't make special warheads designed to be fired by railgun
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Apr 27, 2018 20:33
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Cingulate posted:Don't be silly. That could have been played quite well. Dunno how they'd evacuate. It's not like they have any idea about what was targeted besides just earth in general. Personally I had no problem with the time compression in that particular scene. It kept continuity and suspense rather than breaking the flow.
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Apr 27, 2018 20:43
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Im enjoying a lot to see Avasarala and Bobby hanging out with the plant-name ship crew
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Apr 27, 2018 20:45
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Cingulate posted:Don't be silly. That could have been played quite well. With more screen time they could have compellingly built up the tension from the delay more. Have Errenwright spend half an hour telling the General Secretary that millions of people probably wouldn't die. But I have no problem with what they did spend time on instead. The missile scene was still super tense. They didn't need to emphasize how maddeningly slow that tension would have been. Emphasizing the time would have broken the flow of the scene, dragging it out, when it already has the right emotional impact as it is.
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Apr 27, 2018 20:46
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I want to support this show but they sure don't make it easy. $30 on Prime to watch episodes a day after they air is pretty weak.
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Apr 27, 2018 20:49
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I can't recall the books ever giving railgun fire a more specific velocity than "a measurable fraction of c," which sounds to me like a few percent of light speed but leaves plenty of room for interpretation. My first thought for what they might do with a time lag scene is have Sorrento-Gillis go look to Anna for reassurance that he did the right thing, is a good person, etc. while the railgun rounds are en-route.
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Apr 27, 2018 21:22
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bloom posted:"I didn't always work in space" The look on Bobby's face was priceless.
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Apr 27, 2018 21:48
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NTRabbit posted:I too am annoyed that we didn't get to see the Secretary, Undersecretary, and the defense staff jawing about the sportsball results for 30 minutes while the railgun shells reached their targets, and another 30 minutes while the missile made the return flight. How dare the writers compress time from the perspective of the viewer for dramatic effect. After they refused to hire all of the active centres in the NBA and WNBA to play the parts of belters, this is the last straw. Alternatively they could have done something else to show that the SG is an easily swayed bobblehead, Errinwright is ruthless, etc. This whole sequence wasn't in the book at all, so it's not something that they had to make watchable.
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Apr 27, 2018 21:49
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Solkanar512 posted:The look on Bobby's face was priceless. she went through a bunch of different varieties of snickering as Avasarala tested her new dancing shoes and it was hilarious.
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Apr 27, 2018 22:20
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Preview for the next episode makes it seem like it's a new side-quest plot for Holden and company. As a book reader who knows where the plot is supposed to goz, I do think that they do better stories when they do character focused vingnettes rather than the grand plot points. My favorite episode in season one was an episode built into what was essentially just "and then they went to Eros" in the books.
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Apr 27, 2018 22:40
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I just want them to wrap up book 2 poo poo already and move on to the good stuff
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Apr 27, 2018 22:57
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Fister Roboto posted:Alternatively they could have done something else to show that the SG is an easily swayed bobblehead, Errinwright is ruthless, etc. This whole sequence wasn't in the book at all, so it's not something that they had to make watchable. More explicitly depicting the time delay does not add to the story at all. It would just require additional explanation, and additional scenes of anxious looking people doing nothing, which we already got our fair share of, as there was nothing for anyone in that room to do after the Secretary General made his decision to strike. I'm all for accuracy for the sake of accuracy. Every time I figure out why things are moving the non-intuitive way they are in this show is a delight. But one thing I'm totally fine with them glossing over is how boringly long everything takes. Transit times have always been abstracted- the Rocinante leaves Tycho, and next thing we know it's hijacking the Weeping Somnambulist outside the Jupiter system. Prax has been on the ship for days and days at least. We could have had a whole episode about the routine the crew develops, what they're anxious about, how they see their passenger. You could use that time for something. But they just cut it to get to the good stuff and had all the character development happen on Ganymede. That is the opposite of annoying to me. That's deeply appreciated. Same here. The people in the story would probably have a different experience than how it was presented to the viewer, but the way they presented it was snappy and to the point. It didn't miss anything with regards to plot or emotional developments, and got us to the next part of the story faster, which is on the whole way more interesting than examining the stressful tedium of watching helplessly for hours as events unfold.
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Apr 27, 2018 23:44
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But they could have done it in so many other ways. Like others said, they could have broken up the scene to imply the passage of time, rather than literally watching the projectiles cross the inner solar system in 15 seconds. Or they could have said that the Mars ships had managed to sneak inside of Luna's orbit. Breaking the laws of physics doesn't add anything to the story either, so why do it?
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Apr 27, 2018 23:59
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