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If you like space (and you probably do if you're in this subforum) you really should check out the TV show The Expanse! Here are some worldbuilding highlights: - Takes place in 2350 - Traveling through space is pretty common and people schlep all around it on the reg - Humans have colonized Mars and it is now its own independent state called the Martian Congressional Republic, or MCR - The asteroid belt and moons of outer planets have also been colonized, mostly for mining, and are collectively referred to as The Belt - Earth, Mars, and The Belt all sort of hate each other It has its own thread here if you want to get into it but the headline is this: The Expanse features a lot of really cool scenes in space that actually respect Newtonian physics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bue6keWmJmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryrGPjyKhO4 There's only two physics things the show ignores: - There's a sci-fi invention called the Epstein Drive that makes traveling through space much cheaper to allow for colonization of the Belt. But even when using these drives, humans have to deal with the crushing Gs caused by constant acceleration. (see the above scene with THE JUICE) - They use sound effects in space scenes simply because it'd be weird without them  Five seasons of The Expanse are on Amazon Prime Video. Check it out! ----- Share scenes from TV and movies that depict realistic (aka "Hard") sci-fi, and recommend media that depicts cool space scenes. Also please don't post any spoilers for The Expanse beyond, let's say the first 5 episodes or so. You can share short scenes from later episodes, but they better be no-context, and viewers should click links at their own peril. For that matter, don't spoil any other shows or movies too much ITT in case people want to check them out. Share space scenes! timp fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Mar 10, 2021 |
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Feb 23, 2021 16:47
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 13:58 |
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I just caught up on the book series The Expanse is based on and mostly enjoyed it. Fast paced, lots of action, the way they try to keep things at least vaguely grounded in science is fun. My chief complaints would be that sometimes one of the non-crew viewpoint characters in a book will just be totally uninteresting to me, which makes those chapters a slog even if the overall plot is cool. Like without getting into spoilers, was anyone thinking “gently caress YES, another 30 pages of Praxidike Meng being a totally helpless nerd wallowing in self pity!” every time he came around? There’s also some pretty egregious deus ex machinas handwaved away by alien technology but that’s kind of to be expected. But yeah. Fun pop sci fi reads, would recommend. I do wish they would get a bit more into the two alien civilizations instead of just giving the barest peeks. But maybe that’s for the best. Sometimes the series that spend a lot of time trying to rationally explain how magic works or whatever end up being the cringiest.
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Feb 23, 2021 19:59
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If The Expanse wanted me to watch it there would be less James Holden in it
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Feb 23, 2021 23:24
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Amos and Drummer are the best.
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Feb 23, 2021 23:33
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timp posted:There's only two physics things the show ignores: Some exterior scenes are almost without sound though There's also bit more physics ignoring reactionless drives, see: magic space rock (Eros, also the squid that became of it) magic space portals probably everything about magic space aliens, unless our physics is terribly wrong, in which case anything goes  NickRoweFillea posted:Amos and Drummer are the best. 
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Feb 24, 2021 00:02
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Pretty good TV show and it elevates its source material. The books fall apart imo the further along you get.
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Feb 24, 2021 00:07
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I haven't been able to find if the later books were using the original RPG they were running as source material, does anyone know? Edit: Kind of feel like all of season 4/book 4 existed because the players just ate a poo poo-ton of bad table rolls.
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Feb 24, 2021 01:25
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There's also the whole physics-ignoring issue of 90% of the tension revolving around people not knowing where their enemies/friends are. This also ties into the idea of 'stealth' tech in space. Short answer: no, not happening - but also it's forgivably hand-wavey if it gets us a mostly-good space-show. The same could be said for the relatively 'close range' of most of the depicted combat engagements (even if there's far less of these than one might expect from the show so far). I think it's mostly forgivable, though, as it plays into giving a watchable spectacle.
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Feb 24, 2021 02:02
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I liked the expanse less and less the more weird they got with alien tech, a solid in solar sci fi drama series is interesting enough, imho. But The books are well written and it took me like 4 or 5 in a row to burn out on it.
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Feb 25, 2021 20:31
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There are two threads about the Expanse: This one's about the show itself. Do not post book spoilers here. Please don't try to even flirt with book spoilers here, like saying "If you think X is something, just wait and see what happens next season," many people will hate you. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3906760 Then there's the book thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3787256
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Feb 25, 2021 20:56
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gently caress dusters
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Feb 25, 2021 22:34
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PittTheElder posted:If The Expanse wanted me to watch it there would be less James Holden in it I liked S1 best when it was mostly a space noir.
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Feb 25, 2021 22:55
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Yeah I lost a lot of interest once Miller was no longer a central character, but I am a sucker for detective stories. Amos, Bobby, Ashford, and Drummer are great too, but not enough of them in the later seasons.
PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Feb 27, 2021 |
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Feb 27, 2021 18:47
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NickRoweFillea posted:Amos and Drummer are the best. I think you mean Miller.
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Feb 28, 2021 02:09
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Miller sucks, bunch of cool space stuff and there's a dude in a loving trilby pretending he's a detective in a 30's film noir. Love the series though, just finished series 5. Nothing but respect for MY Secretary General
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Mar 2, 2021 08:36
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It is a good show and is surprisingly true to the books. I read the first few books before the show aired, and I was real surprised by the casting choice for Holden. I'd pictured him being a bit older.
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Mar 3, 2021 05:42
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Can I shout out to 2001: A Space Odyssey here? Too bad I'm gonna This film still ranks among the most believable, realistic space scenes in film and they made it in 1967. Mind blowing. A friend of mine once said something like "in 200 years people will assume it was shot on location in space with a retro equipment aesthetic and wonder why it was only done in 2D"
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Mar 3, 2021 22:11
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alnilam posted:Can I shout out to 2001: A Space Odyssey here? Too bad I'm gonna there’s totally going to be a fashion of space houses looking like those sets
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Mar 3, 2021 23:24
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The Martian is also great for space realism. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are goons who hate it for whatever reasons, but I quite enjoyed it in theaters. Also I recently saw some new space movie with George Clooney called The Midnight Sky. I didn’t love it personally but there were a couple space walk scenes with some cool physics realism stuff. Recommend some more cool space scenes in movies!
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Mar 4, 2021 00:09
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calling the expanse hard sci fi is a stretch. maybe the setting the story begins in, but cmon. it has faster than light travel, stealth in space, aliens, and ghosts
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Mar 4, 2021 06:19
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getting into an argument about whether something is "hard" or "soft" scifi is the dumbest poo poo, it's all made up fairy tales the day-to-day minutiae of it is generally believable which is more than you can say for, i dunno, the culture books
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Mar 4, 2021 14:21
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It has a lot of things that are unrealistic but it also isn't Star Wars and while I do like my Star Wars I'm glad something is finally starting to undo this idea that people have that if it's not Star Wars space dogfights it's automatically boring. One of the unrealistic bits that is usually underappreciated by almost all hard sf - and I'm saying this as an observation of something that interests me, not as "IT'S WRONG!!!" - is the incredible amount of radiation that drives as powerful as scifi likes to have would put out. They would probably give you cancer from tens of thousands of kilometers away. The VISTA fusion rocket study recommended unshielded astronauts to be at least 36 000 km away, and that kind of relatively feasible fusion drive is pitifully low energy compared to the kind of drive you'd need to maintain 1 g accelerations for extended periods. Any sufficiently powerful ship would have a large radiation exclusion zone around it, and space traffic control would have a hell of a time slotting them in in any location with heavy traffic. I think you'd likely have to leave them on high orbit and use shuttles with lower power engines to load and unload them. Past some point, if you have enough traffic, you might actually start having an appreciable effect on the ambient ionizing radiation levels in the solar system. Elukka fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Mar 4, 2021 |
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Mar 4, 2021 19:46
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Engines like that would also double as powerful nuclear bombs, which more than anything else puts a damper on the "independent space trucker" and adjacent concepts necessary for fiction like Star Wars and The Expanse to tell their stories.
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Mar 6, 2021 10:06
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mediaphage posted:getting into an argument about whether something is "hard" or "soft" scifi is the dumbest poo poo, it's all made up fairy tales I mean, isn't hard scifi just extrapolations of things that could exist, no matter how fanciful? Like Niven's Integral Trees, vs Culture's Luxury Automated Trans-at-will Space Communism.
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Mar 6, 2021 17:28
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timp posted:Recommend some more cool space scenes in movies! It's lunar than spaceships, but Moon (2009) is an absolutely stunning film, and everyone should watch it. My favorite space scenes are actually the Apollo archive bits from When We Left Earth. It's crazy to watch that stuff, everything looks so unnatural manoeuvring in space, which is an effect no fiction has ever been able to create for me.
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Mar 6, 2021 19:31
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mediaphage posted:getting into an argument about whether something is "hard" or "soft" scifi is the dumbest poo poo, it's all made up fairy tales oh for sure, it's all a spectrum with no clear demarcation between. and you're right, the expanse went to great lengths to make a lot of small details make sense in ways that lots of scifi doesn't bother with. like the politics especially and (what snippets we get of them) the depictions of the day to day lives of ordinary people are fascinating and often brilliant. miller's phone having a cracked screen was the first thing i remember being like "oh yeah, that would happen, poo poo would break and you'd make do because everything is scarce in the belt, that makes sense"
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Mar 6, 2021 22:08
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Conspiratiorist posted:Engines like that would also double as powerful nuclear bombs, which more than anything else puts a damper on the "independent space trucker" and adjacent concepts necessary for fiction like Star Wars and The Expanse to tell their stories. not really, the exhaust is non-radioactive and the core is more like a fusor than a nuclear bomb if nuclear reactors blew up like fat man then there wouldn't be anything left standing for miles around chernobyl
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Mar 7, 2021 04:09
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We're talking hypothetical real engines not specifically the magical drives the Expanse uses.
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Mar 7, 2021 04:15
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We don't know what type of fusion the Epstein drives use and there are plenty of fusion schemes that do not generate significant numbers free neutrons; all their reaction products could be charged particles that can be directed out of the nozzle in a collimated beam, or shielded against with a magnetic field. Yeah, you could still kill people with them, because the better a rocket engine is at being a rocket the better it is at being a weapon, but it's not necessarily going to be a lethal radiation hazard for people thousands of kilometers away. The VISTA rocket was specifically D:T fusion, which is definitely not aneutronic.
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Mar 7, 2021 04:51
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i read somewhere that the numbers and functionality of the rockets in the expanse like up sorta roughly with the hypothesized output of gas-core nuclear rockets, and those are, albiet barely, within known science. although the books do say they're magnetic-confinement fusion, so who knows here's the atomic rockets writeup on it: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php#id--Fusion--(_Epstein_Drive_) also beware, atomic rockets is a serious time sink for anyone even a little interested in sci fi
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Mar 7, 2021 07:27
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Conspiratiorist posted:Engines like that would also double as powerful nuclear bombs, which more than anything else puts a damper on the "independent space trucker" and adjacent concepts necessary for fiction like Star Wars and The Expanse to tell their stories. The Killing Star is not a good book but it does constantly reiterate that if you can get a vehicle moving at 0.9c, then its kinetic impact is about the same as an antimatter bomb of the same mass, so for any relativistic engine whether or not it's also a nuclear bomb is practically penny pinching.
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Mar 7, 2021 07:38
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Tulip posted:The Killing Star is not a good book but it does constantly reiterate that if you can get a vehicle moving at 0.9c, then its kinetic impact is about the same as an antimatter bomb of the same mass, so for any relativistic engine whether or not it's also a nuclear bomb is practically penny pinching. They don't get up to relativistic velocities in the Expanse. The engines are in the particular spot the writers wanted to give humanity access to the solar system, but not to interstellar travel.
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Mar 7, 2021 16:44
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Phanatic posted:We don't know what type of fusion the Epstein drives use and there are plenty of fusion schemes that do not generate significant numbers free neutrons; all their reaction products could be charged particles that can be directed out of the nozzle in a collimated beam, or shielded against with a magnetic field. There is a fun trick you might be able to pull with D-T fusion that might actually make it one of the best fusion schemes for space propulsion: Spin polarization. If you can align the spins in your fuel, then pretty much all the neutrons will be emitted in one direction - typically away from your ship. Means your ship absorbs a whole less radiation, and outside the turbo-death cone behind you you're also less dangerous to others. Kazinsal posted:not really, the exhaust is non-radioactive and the core is more like a fusor than a nuclear bomb Also, these kinds of really powerful drives are less like a contained reactor and more like an uncontained nuclear explosion. It's just the nature of it regardless of the details of how it's done. If you want high isp and high thrust your power is high enough that it just can't really be fully contained. That said, you can also absolutely make a rocket that's just a nuclear reactor. That's called a nuclear thermal rocket, they work very well and we could be using them right now. Their performance is just way more limited than what you get with Expanse drives or even something much more realistic like the VISTA study I mentioned. Elukka fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Mar 7, 2021 |
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Mar 7, 2021 17:46
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Elukka posted:There isn't really any reasonable fusion reaction that doesn't make a lot of nasty radiation. D-T fusion is the worst in this respect, D-He3 is better but still produces like 15% or something of its energy in those nasty fusion neutrons. Then you've got hydrogen-boron, also known as proton-boron fusion, which produces almost no neutrons, but instead produces a massive amount of high energy x-rays alongside those charged particles. p:b11 fusion doesn't produce those x-rays directly from the reaction itself, but from Bremsstrahlung losses in the plasma, which can theoretically be suppressed by a sufficiently strong magnetic field strength which I'm willing to let them handwave into existence. I agree that it's definitely a magic drive, though. The most practical high-thrust high-specific impulse stuff we're likely to come up with is nuclear pulse propulsion (which we could have had working decades ago if we wanted to) or a NSWR.
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Mar 7, 2021 18:00
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Phanatic posted:p:b11 fusion doesn't produce those x-rays directly from the reaction itself, but from Bremsstrahlung losses in the plasma, which can theoretically be suppressed by a sufficiently strong magnetic field strength which I'm willing to let them handwave into existence. I agree that it's definitely a magic drive, though. The most practical high-thrust high-specific impulse stuff we're likely to come up with is nuclear pulse propulsion (which we could have had working decades ago if we wanted to) or a NSWR. 
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Mar 7, 2021 22:58
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The Revelation Space series by Alistair Reynolds is excellent science fiction. I would highly recommend picking those books up.
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Mar 7, 2021 23:17
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Glenn Quebec posted:The Revelation Space series by Alistair Reynolds is excellent science fiction. I would highly recommend picking those books up. I love how he hard commits to the speed of light as an absolute maximum travel speed and still makes interesting world spanning space operas. His shorter stories are great too. There's some free online: A Spy in Europa: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/europa.htm Spirey and the Queen: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/spirey.htm My favourite book from him, besides his short story collections, is the House of Suns. Also, if you got Netflix, there's animated shorts based on 2 of his stories in a scifi-anthology: "Love, Death and Robots". They're named 'Beyond the Aquila Rift' and 'Zuma Blue'. Both are great little stories. Issaries fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Mar 8, 2021 |
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Mar 8, 2021 23:22
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adhuin posted:I love how he hard commits to the speed of light as an absolute maximum travel speed and still makes interesting world spanning space operas. I enjoyed his books better than the Expanse, tbh. I would also recommend Blindsight and Echopraxia by ?? Watts? Something Watts. They are really interesting and not as far future as Alistair Reynolds. They are kind of the same book, Echopraxia being the sequel.
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Mar 9, 2021 02:11
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Peter Watts Pretty dark stuff.
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Mar 9, 2021 02:33
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 13:58 |
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I just finished The Forever War by Joe Haldeman and thought it was pretty good (although pretty dated in some respects, to be expected since it was written in 1974). Haldeman has a physics background so the book has a fair bit of realistic-ish physics. There is some handwaviness around collapsars (stargates) and some advanced tech, but nothing super-magical as in Star Wars. Special relativity is a huge plot driver. The strike forces still have to cover huge distances at significant fractions of the speed of light. This affects military strategy and really fucks with the troops, who come home hundreds of years after they left (this is all on the back cover so I'm not revealing too much). Haldeman is a Vietnam vet and the book is basically an allegory for the Vietnam war, so you can see how that fits, but it's an enjoyable read even not knowing that.
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Mar 9, 2021 03:22
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