|
Mars4523 posted:I didn't have a problem with Watney's internal dialogue but I also read him as significantly younger than Matt Damon. He's the lowest ranking member of the crew after all. It still works if you see him as a man child back in his 30s who following a midlife crisis buckled up and became an astronaut. All the geekiness is more of a coping mechanism to deal with the solitude of being marooned on Mars and knowing that there's a fair chance that he'll die alone. Eh, Matt Damon may be 44 but he as less than 40, and honestly, you're probably not going to Mars much younger than that. The youngest person to land on the moon was 36. People spend decades building up to this stuff.
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2015 08:22
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 20:10 |
|
|
I can't remember, does the book elaborate much on the overall design of the Hermes? The movie one doesn't seem to bear much resemblance to the current idea of what a Mars craft would look like (with a ring as opposed to spinning the whole ship or, if you did have a distinct centrifuge, two modules on very long sticks. The ring in the movie's small enough that you'd probably get nausea.) (And what's with all the solar panels? It's got a nuclear reactor. I guess the public expects solar panels.)
MikeJF fucked around with this message at 11:21 on Sep 28, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2015 11:08
|
|
|
Luneshot posted:I didn't look at it very closely, but they might be radiators instead of solar panels?  Those crinkly things sticking out alongside the rightmost set of solar panels are radiators. Come to think of it, why are the solars panels facing in two different directions.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2015 15:35
|
|
|
Luneshot posted:I love how the Hermes basically looks like it's cobbled together from bits of the ISS. According to the movie promotional materials, after this journey they're planning to retire it to become the new ISS. (The materials also say that it was assembled using SpaceX Station as the assembly platform, old ISS has been gone for a while). Book version is going to get refitted and keep going for a while. ryde posted:There is. It's set to 1/3 earth gravity, which is why it can be smaller without the nausea. Yeah, I just went and looked it up; the book seems to imply that the entire ship freely rotates in space without a zero-rotation section, which is basically the current favoured concept - the joint between rotating and non-rotating sections would be needlessly complex and a major point of failure, and dealing with friction would be a nightmare in design; just balance it so that the centre of rotation and mass are the same axis and put the engines there.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2015 18:07
|
|
|
zandert33 posted:I've seen PG-13 movies that have 2 (can't remember which off the top of my head), it can't be sexual though. You're allowed one gently caress, but a second gently caress is a case-by-case basis.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 1, 2015 14:55
|
|
|
How are u posted:I haven't read the book so I'll take y'alls word for it that it was all in there. My only point is that to me the China parts came across as some serious Transformers / Iron Man level pandering and it took me out of the film a little. The whole thing was that they needed a heavy rocket. There were plenty of normal rockets hanging around. We launch about two a week. But to get an appreciable mass to Mars rapidly you'd need a heavy. Russia's failed twice at heavies (N9 kept blowing up in the 60s and 70s, and in the 80s Energia ... well, they made it work once, but gave up on it) and there's no real reason they'd ever go back to building them. The entire Russian spaceflight program since the Cold War ended has basically been about just using the same rockets as they have since the 1960s. India's certainly not gonna be up to building something that large yet. China, on the other hand, has a superheavy in the planning pipelines now. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Oct 5, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2015 16:35
|
|
|
Madurai posted:I have exactly one quibble with the film: Yeah but The Enterprise Sorry, space film tradition.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 6, 2015 03:59
|
|
|
Demiurge4 posted:Nah. They'd respect a dead mans belongings. He on the other hand had a vested interest in finding anything he could use to survive. Also in not going totally nuts.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2015 13:28
|
|
|
Stereotype posted:Also how did they land the MAV for Ares 1? Automatically?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2015 11:46
|
|
|
Senor Tron posted:The book does specify that Martinez remote landed the Ares 4 MAV. I imagine that it's more reliable than an automated landing if you happen to have a pilot in orbit. So the first one was thrown there by a rocket and then later missions the Hermes drops off the next mission's MAV.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2015 14:19
|
|
|
Alternately, Ares I may have just carried two MAVs and enough fuel for their own to take off and taken a bit longer to get there.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2015 17:05
|
|
|
It might've just not been worth sending a manufacturing plant. They needed to haul most of the water with them to Mars anyway for the Hermes flight, and the recycler was pretty decent.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2015 03:03
|
|
|
Luneshot posted:As for real plans, there was a NASA design study released recently that plans for Phobos in 2033 and a crewed Martian surface mission in 2039 or the early 2040s. The Martian supposedly takes place in the 2030s, so that seems about right. Oh yeah, the plans exist and are in progress, are fairly easily achievable, and honestly don't cost that much as federal programs go. It's absolutely not going to happen. Without the spectre of the cold war big NASA projects and grand government spaceflight schemes are just incompatible with the cycle of government.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2015 10:29
|
|
|
old dog child posted:The MAV had to land on Mars, vessbot. To be fair, you'd expect it to dump the heatshield for weight on ascent.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2015 08:52
|
|
|
red19fire posted:Even if they did increase the budget eightfold, it would still be a drop in the bucket compared to military spending. It's infuriating. Hell, the military space program is four times that of NASA's full budget. And that's not counting the intelligence agency programs. NASA's gonna be sending up another space telescope eventually because of spysats that the NRO just happened to have lying around in a bucket somewhere and went 'ah well they're so old they're no use to us', pulled the instruments out, and gave to NASA on a whim instead of trashing. And for NASA that was a holy poo poo jaw-dropping thing they wouldn't be able to afford otherwise. They actually got two and a bunch of spare parts, but: "The two telescopes are identical, and we received them as a package deal from the NRO," Hertz said. "We don't, at this point in time, ever anticipate being rich enough to use both of them, but it sure would be fun to think about, wouldn't it?" MikeJF fucked around with this message at 10:58 on Oct 12, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2015 10:49
|
|
|
Woden posted:Those sats are pretty much the same poo poo as Hubble, I mean it'd be cool to have a few more Hubbles up there so more scientists can get access to that sort of tool but they're not really some new uber thing. They also weren't lying around in a bucket and were costing a lot of money to store, makes more sense that they off loaded them to NASA so they'd fit the bill for storing some legacy equipment than admit they'd totally hosed up on procurement I guess. Oh, I know they're not some uber new thing, but even an established technology one is something that NASA would wouldn't probably been able to afford otherwise for another decade - and even with this will only be able to afford fitting instruments into and launching one - whilst on the other hand the NRO can happily gently caress up and fully develop and outfit two or three they just aren't gonna use. Also, it won't be identical to hubble in terms of scientific use, they're fitting it for a use we aren't currently telescoping (wide field infrared) MikeJF fucked around with this message at 16:28 on Oct 12, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2015 16:23
|
|
|
I think his point was more that that'd be basically the first thing NASA thought of. They're all about slingshots.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 13, 2015 03:18
|
|
|
If they'd brought up the risks of the the circumsolar trip and close pass to the sun the guy who ruled against it would've seemed much more reasonable.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2015 05:57
|
|
|
One of the things I was sad they left out was the way Mark spent a bit of time every day of his 60-day trip taking samples, even though he knew he couldn't take them up on the MAV, just so that maybe some day in the future they might be able to come by and get them and have an opportunity to examine samples from a 3200km stretch. Also, here's a video of the Hermes' flight: http://www.galactanet.com/martian/hermes.mp4 MikeJF fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Oct 17, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2015 13:56
|
|
|
Yeah, the Hermes isn't designed to go that long and was having ongoing issues, but Weir has said he didn't want to take the focus away from Watney's struggle with another. The ship needed a bunch of things refitted after every journey that it didn't get, plus it wasn't designed to operate in the high-radiation environment in past Venus. Plus the crew got basically the same radiation dose a nuclear engineer would get over a lifetime. Also, an extra year and a half in the ship isn't just a bit of a detour.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2015 00:41
|
|
|
PerrineClostermann posted:The hab had three redundant communication systems. All of them used Hermes as a relay; two used the MAV as a relay. It's a little odd that the rovers couldn't talk to Hermes (and more importantly for this story, hacked to talk to the martian satellites), but plot, I guess. Taking to something in lowish orbits isn't hard at all.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2015 08:09
|
|
|
Chamale posted:I thought that instead of blowing up the whole lab, they just toned it down to a face-burning explosion. Nah, he's talking about the part where it didn't blow up, but Mark realises that he's filled the hab with hydrogen and has to run to the rover and panic about how he nearly exploded and how hosed he is.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 22, 2015 21:51
|
|
|
Weir's admitted he hosed that up due to not being good at chemistry.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2015 10:11
|
|
|
Ultimately, we may well end up with large open spaces on spacecraft and planets being produced as a result of inflatable modules. Much like the book Hab. A small inflatable technology test module is going up to ISS next year.
MikeJF fucked around with this message at 13:24 on Oct 29, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2015 13:20
|
|
|
Powered Descent posted:But speaking of book vs. movie endings... in the book, Watney says something like "If this was a movie, the entire crew would have met me at the airlock for high-fives." And sure enough, in the movie, they do exactly that. And I'm pretty sure Beck's smell quote there is the same as the book, so I figure it was a deliberate wink.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2015 13:13
|
|
|
Erwin posted:I don't remember if this is specifically addressed in the book, but I'm pretty sure he meant to collect them and then leave them on the surface for later retrieval. He is, after all, traveling to the landing site of Ares IV. Yeah, he says as he's doing it that he knows he'll have to leave them behind, but there's a small chance someone'll come and get them someday, so he does it just in case.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 3, 2015 03:44
|
|
|
well why not posted:Apologies if this has been handled already, but I have a question: Why would a botanist be sent to a planet with no plants or botanic organisms? He was both a botanist and mechanical engineer, in addition to his more critical role as engineer his scientific role was was to study the soil chemistry of Mars and do some growth experiments. Also he'd be doing zero-G plant experiments all the way there and back.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2015 12:18
|
|
|
NotJustANumber99 posted:I suppose they are all also kind of uber competent at everything. It wasn't so much that they couldn't open their email attachments as the file was an unrecognised binary text disguised as a JPG; Watney would've called Johanssen in the same case. That said, being Mechanical Engineering generally requires a decent bit of computer competence and basic programming at the very least. All the crew basically doubled up; Johannsen was the Systems Operator and also the Fusion Reactor Tech, Beck was Flight Surgeon and Biologist (bit of a gimmie there), Vogel was Astrophysics, Navigation and Chemistry, Lewis was Commander and Geologist, and Martinez was Pilot and... um. General astronaut dude. I don't know if Martinez had a specific secondary role. They would've all been given basic training in all areas and likely each would've also been specialised as the understudy for another crewmember in case of crew loss. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Nov 20, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2015 02:25
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 20:10 |
|
|
Cry Havoc posted:didn't see this mentioned earlier in the thread, but the part about the mav being too heavy and needing to be stripped seemed contrived, like wouldn't they have taken that into consideration before going ahead with the plan They did? Mark stripping it was always the plan.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2016 23:01
|
|