The Expanse is the best space opera setting out there

Beltalowda Eros song

youtube.com/watch?v=hSNO0mB01aw

...

The synthetic creole that's used by Belters is quite fascinating and adds a lot to the setting. Here's the linguist who modified it for the show:

youtube.com/watch?v=Eupcy0lIjsk

conlangs are always fun.

>Devil To The Belt.
Never read it, so you tell me, pampaw. They've got rocket engineers and astrophysics professors consulting for the show though.

youtube.com/watch?v=b6CeDizcyC4

>Earth being united with the population size it has is a little farfetched

That's true. I imagine the UN has a shitload of national/ethnic/race politics going on behind the scenes but that had to be glossed over in the show in order not to overwhelm viewers with too much detail and to present a clear divide between two (three) sides in the conflict. I don't imagine the UN is any more unified than the European Union is today.

But then again the UNSC can launch interplanetary nukes and that's not nothing.

Another problem is that if present trends continue by the 23rd century most of the population of Earth would be black, which really isn't depicted int he show with a white UN president and vice-president.

>The Expanse is the best space opera setting out there.

I don't know much about the setting. How's the FTL work?

There is no FTL. Boom.

It's limited to the inner solar system.

Two books with the same characters, plots only kinda related. They both take place in the build up towards an interstellar war and while there's not 'fighting' in them, they focus heavily on the military industrial complex and industrial, uh... cutthroatness, maybe? And the politics surrounding them.

From what I saw of your clip the science is about as 'hard'. Haven't watched your 90 minute video yet.

The best spacecraft in The Expanse can do is a hard burn of 5-10gs for several hours (with bio-stabilizing intravenous drugs), meaning travel time between planets is days even at the fastest speeds. Acceleration, microgravity, etc. are handled realistically for the most part.

Well that's dull. How can it be the best space opera without FTL? You can't have good space opera when it takes you six months at minimum to go from Earth to Mars, or five years to get to Jupiter. I mean, sure, communication is much faster than that, but when you hear about something happening on Mars, you can't really DO anything but talk for six months. By the time you get to Mars, everything is over.

Thppppp.

>Earth being united with the population size it has is a little farfetched
I really hate being this variety of asshole, but... in the books, that's touched on a few times. Avasarala and Holden both pass comment on wars happening on Earth. It seems that, besides running most of the Solar System, the UN spends a lot of its time mediating between various factions on Earth.

I think it's brought up once in the show? Something a bout Avasarala going out to Asia when she was younger to negotiate a cease fire. It's been a while since I watched the show, so I'm a bit fuzzy on the details.

>drummer
>not amos

Get out

Belters deserve every single bad thing that happen to them for being the most retarded faction in the solar system

MCRN for a supreme sense of Aesthetics

Days, not months. The differential between communication delay and real-time events creates some amazing drama in the show, actually. The show writers specifically designed plot points around that and it makes for great viewing. Watch the show and you'll see.

And space battles and maneuvers are fucking amazing. A zillion times better than anything in Star Wars.

>TFW Mormon generation ship aimed at asteroid using a brachistochrone slingshot

youtube.com/watch?v=1FBDHudKsSg

>meaning travel time between planets is days even at the fastest speeds.

On average, Mars is about 225 million kilometers from Earth. To cover that distance in, say, 7 days, you'd need to be traveling something to the tune of 1.3 million kilometers per hour, which is about .12% the speed of light.

At present I believe the fastest man-made object in history is NASA's Juno spacecraft, which managed 25 miles per second of acceleration at one point on its journey to Jupiter - or about 144,720 km/hr, or .0134% the speed of light.

That "hard burn" to get up to the speed needed for interplanetary flight to be measured in days rather than months shouldn't be 5-10gs, it should be dozens of times that, and a certain death sentence for anyone on-board the spacecraft.

>Nauvoo

>Now, In April, 1839, Joseph Smith, surveying from a hill the wild prospect around Commerce, imagining what he could do with it, thought, "It is a beautiful site, and it shall be called Nauvoo, which means in Hebrew a beautiful plantation." B. H. Roberts comments: "The word Nauvoo comes from the Hebrew, and signified beautiful location: ‘carrying with it also,' says Joseph Smith, ‘the idea of rest.'"

Why is everything so blue?

>A zillion times better than anything in Star Wars.

That's debatable. I don't doubt that it's far more scientifically accurate, but what makes for good space battles is determined by cinematography, acting, and drama, not how few physicists have aneurysms while watching it.

It does have a breakthrough engine called the Epstein Drive which can travel at 0.05c and can accelerate 1g for days and whose fuel is unknown (possibly helium-3).

youtube.com/watch?v=JWZqp0QoXcw
youtube.com/watch?v=SIaGXcEnC74

The g-drugs used to resist crushing are a bit super-science though, but not impossible.

>Why is everything so blue?
b/c it's moving fast towards you lol

Do the maths dude, it works. While the drives are unrealistic, it does what all good sci-fi does: take a few less than realistic points, then build upon them realistically.

Should be noted this takes place 200 years in the future when Earth has a population of 30 billion people. It's entirely possible we would have invented a drive that can do 5% of lightspeed by then.

I want her to manhandle me like an uppity Belter.

Yet.

Fuck me, it really did start as a PbP game. That's pretty cool.

Props to MCR for still being a representative republic in a system full of corporate and bureaucratic autocracies.

Spacecraft in the expanse use a type of barely described nuclear fusion thermal drive called the Epstein drive which is both very powerful and also extraordinarily efficient allowing ships to accelerate constantly during trips usually at a constant rate of 1g sometimes more or less and then flipping and burning retrograde halfway through this allows them to move at very high speeds and also provides the sensation of gravity during trips.
Trips using this method
Earth to the moon: 3 hours
Earth to Mars: 3 days
Earth to Ceres: 1 week
Earth to Jupiter: 10 days
Earth to Saturn: 2-3 weeks
Earth to Uranus: a little under a month

It's honestly sad to me that the mainstream scifi genre is so sparse that simply considering basic elements like gravity and g-forces make for "hard scifi" or even decent scifi. I'm not knocking on the show but damn are the books horrendous. Filled with 1 dimensional characters whose development happen instantly or not at all and any major motivations are spelled out like a play. The politics are watered down simplistic representations of actual governing bodies and the military tactics are garbage. Why send the biggest ship you have by itself to do anything? Why does it carry its own escorts that aren't fighters? If you like show, don't read the books. It'll ruin the whole experience.

I didn't like the first book either but the show is superb. Is it sad, or more like typical? Very few things on tv or in the movies have any real science in them, so those that do really stick out. Most people have almost no understanding of even basic scientific or mathematical concepts unless they're specialists in a scientific field. And at the end of the day novels and tv shows are supposed to be entertainment, not grad textbooks.

So a good melding of basic science with good storytelling stands out.

I like that they use railguns and missiles as the primary weapon systems on spacecraft.

Too bad webms with sound aren't allowed on tg; the sound design in the show is excellent too.

Fair enough, but I honestly don't think the science or the storytelling is good. The MC is a caricature, in fact all the characters are. None of them need more than a sentence to fully capture their personality. Every element that people praise about the books is unfortunately very watered down so the average joe can understand it. It's more frustrating than sad when I see people who are clearly very, very new to scifi praise it as a hard scifi or a space opera. Kind of cheapens the standard for what those subgenres stand for.

Nah the tread is bait-shit
The Expanse is allrigth but the statement is stupid on the
>"BTL Sandwiches are the best ever"
level.
/sage'd

>BTL - putting the tomato next to the bacon

>not BLT - putting the lettuce inbetween to keep the bacon from getting wet from the tomato

Pleb. I mean sure, squeezing the tomato will reduce its water content a lot, but it's still going to get anything next to it wet.

Speaking of BLT heresy: one time, I found my last tomato had started to go bad, and consequently discovered that bacon/lettuce/salsa is amazing.

>You can't have good space opera when it takes you six months at minimum to go from Earth to Mars

It will take you two days with a torchdrive. Less if you are up to some 1+g acceleration journey.

Not realistic but a beautiful scene nonetheless, as the Rocinante does a gravity-assist slingshot across 7 Jovian moons:

youtube.com/watch?v=NGWgrI2p6R4

>Why is everything so blue?
It increases alertness. It's standard lighting on naval combat vessels on high alert.

Probably the most successful PbP in human history, then.

I mean, it seems that the military has much more sway than the civilian government So it's probably less than ideal.

>Service Guarantees Citizenship

Eh, on Earth, that would probably be true, but Mars is naturally inhospitable and the military and civilians share the same dream of turning it into another Earth, with that level of focus on an ideal in a culture, it may well not be so bad.

If you like the show, you're literally pic related.

>The best.

Nigger, it ain't no Lensman. Get outta here.

Eh, Slayers did the same thing.

Who?

Lensman ain't all that peerless. Great space battles, and can't be beat for that slowly growing vast sense of scale (provided you skip the first book which was a tacked on prequel and ruins all the big reveals) but beyond that it's kind of shit. Like any time the main character goes undercover somewhere it's time to skim over that shit or risk falling asleep.

I'd rank it below Asimov's Foundation, Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind, Niven's Known Space, Herbert's Dune, and Pohl's Gateway universe. (Not necessarily in that order)

Unless you mean like "to visit" or something, then yeah, Lensman jumps up several notches, while Foundation drops out for being a dull place that just spawned some great books.

Slayers wasn't a play-by-post, though. If you're gonna put "inspired by an RPG" in there then you've got a lot more company.

Everything is interesting and good except the main character and the private eye shit. So most of it.

Holden's okay. Miller is the most interesting character, augmented by based Thomas Jane's acting so I don't know what you're talking about.

I know Veeky Forums is emotionally conditioned to hate anyone who even tangentially reminds them of brown people but what have the Belters actually done? Other than a few of them turning into hardliners which is totally understandable since Earth and Mars routinely make it clear they have no problems murdering them or letting them get caught in the crossfire.

>I know Veeky Forums is emotionally conditioned to hate anyone who even tangentially reminds them of brown people

Nah, that's just bleedover from /pol/.

To be fair, many of them had sub-optimal oxygen and nutrition during childhood.

I really liked the duo of the grizzled PI and the naive flyboy but then they had to kill off the PI and now all I'm left with is a still naive gayboy who doesn't character develop in 2 books. Does he get his shit together in the third or does he continue his justice crusade and get millions more innocent people killed?

Holden does in fact grow more responsible as the series goes on. He's still a bit of a cowboy but in Book 3 he really pulls it together

The Outer Planets ain't free. The stations gotta be litterd with tu agua. Fred "Ubiquitous" Johnson aka Butcher is not my leader. He is war criminal and probbably UN plant as well :DD. The BELT and the outer planets not earth and MARS, sa a que? Remember the Cant.

>wellwalla bretany!

There must be a visual for this spurdo somewhere.

>Belter Spurdo sees Eros get oozed
>fuggg :DDD

>What system did they use to run it? Traveller? Eclipse Phase?
Googling it gave me an rpg.net post:
>For what it's worth, Ty Franck used heavily-houseruled D20 Modern for the campaign that inspired the novels.
>forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?772591-The-Expanse-What-system/page2
JFC

Running an ice mining operation off of human slave labor is retarded in a world where cheap automation should have been absolutely bog standard. That's what keeps me from getting terribly invested in the setting.

>Running an ice mining operation off of human slave labor

I don't recall this ever happening in the books or the show?

>D20 Modern

wut

Oh, I'm sorry, I meant "drastically underpaid and absurdly abused to the point of basically being slave labor."

It's a usable system.
Bad, to be sure, but usable.

Again, not ever really shown or implied. The mistreatment of Belters comes mostly from Earth and Mars strongarming their resources away rather than any forced labor. Don't rag on the work when you clearly know nothing about it.

Belters are literal scum though.
Prove me wrong
Pro-tip: You can't

Around Belters, run for shelter.

user, they are slaves in all but name. They have no other prospects and nowhere to go, are often too physically deformed to make it anywhere with stronger gravity, are utterly beholden to their corporate/government masters, and are barely kept alive because of cost cutting measures. Except none of that is necessary. In fact even dealing with a human labor force in space is completely retarded because a robotic workforce in that situation would be superior in every respect, including economically.

They're all out there because their ancestors moved there before large scale automation was possible. They control the facilities, and Earth and Mars arm wrestle over who controls them. This opens up plenty of interesting conflicts yet you're here whining because "lol robots can just do everything what retarded writers".

How about you complain how robots don't fly the X-Wings in Star Wars while you're at it?

This confused me as well, why are there so many white people on this show? Fuck, they’ve even got blondes, who would be even rarer.

>How about you complain how robots don't fly the X-Wings in Star Wars while you're at it?
Probably because Star Wars isn't trying to be hard sci fi, something which should be patently obvious to everyone.

Your explanation just opens up more questions. Why don't Earth and Mars just set up their own facilities if they can already project their military power that far out? If they can't bother to shoot some automated 'bots out there, then why aren't the Belters using their apparent monopoly to force better deals? Yeah I get that having humans out there is what enables the conflict, but that's the problem: They're only there for the sake of the story.

It turns out white people are willfully ignorant of their increasing irrelevance as a racial group, and will actively work to suggest there won’t be fewer of them in the future. They like to say “the future is brown” without considering this means their portrayal of white people still being around is false.

An early example of this in Western media is the Mighty Whitey, which is the belief that, while white people are no longer common, one white person is “worth” twenty of the brown people so it all balances out.

>Probably because Star Wars isn't trying to be hard sci fi

Neither does the Expanse, and the authors shoot down anyone suggesting it is.

>Expanse writers: 1
>anonymous sperg on the internet: 0

Did you just "upvote" your own post?

No.

Ah, I see. The intelligent response came from someone else. Makes sense.

Nope

>the politics are...a mixed bag. Mars being united makes sense- they're a transplanted population that continually expanded rather than emerging from competing nation-states. but Earth being united with the population size it has is a little farfetched. you'd think there'd be more civil unrest or a MUCH larger population of earth-born Belters.

...They sort of aren't. It's an endlessly papered over mess. National dissidents are a thing, one of them even gets elected the head of UN after a previous prison term for it (writing popular poetry).

>Another problem is that if present trends continue by the 23rd century most of the population of Earth would be black, which really isn't depicted int he show with a white UN president and vice-president.

Give people gene therapy control over their kids, watch the fair skin and blue eyes abound, user. I am *not* shitposting.

>Hollow out Ceres and spin it up to live on the inside of an asteroid.
>Rather than hollow out Ceres and use the materials to building O'Neill cylinders dozens of entire planet's worth of living space

Um ok.

The real reason is that once asteroids begin to be seriously mined and turned into habitats, the Earth will sink into insignificance in sheer population terms if nothing else. They had to fudge it to create the story they were trying to do.

It works via an ancient network of wormholes built by aliens, like on Stargate.
They haven't discovered those yet on thee show, but they're about to do so if they follow the books.

>How about you complain how robots don't fly the X-Wings in Star Wars while you're at it?

But... they kinda do.

>I am *not* shitposting.
You're not intentionally shitposting, user, but you are ignoring gene therapy is going to get so many government regulations shackled to it that the number of fair skinned children created will be minor at best, if not negligible. The future is black, and neither the Expanse nor most sci-fi that tries to sell itself as "realistic" represent that.

>once asteroids begin to be seriously mined and turned into habitats

Humanity is not going to expand into space for the simple reason that we have no reason to. Either we will slide into stagnation and decay through climate change, or birth rates will match death rates and the global population will level out. Either way, it's a future where Humanity does not have the capacity to populate a colony, much less multiple.

Is this the one where MC was in love in a nigger?
It was pretty shit novel desu

With suitable tech there's always more room to grow. Why wouldn't we do this? We always have. The tech isn't all that demanding compared to what we have now.

Now, user, don't get me wrong, The Expanse is great, and I really like it...

But it's not Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

user, this is a setting where the Big Bad was betrayed by his underlings because he dared to have reasonable logistics and he did not care about mommy issues. Rather than, say, because he killed 10 billion people for the lulz.

>Hey, women. We need you to have at least three children now.

>It turns out white people are willfully ignorant of their increasing irrelevance as a racial group, and will actively work to suggest there won’t be fewer of them in the future.
Since when are white people becoming more irrelevant in regards to space travel? Considering most of the exploration of the solar system has been conducted by Western, predominantly white nations, it's not much of a stretch to think this will still be the case in the future. A future as depicted in the Expanse with white people, Indians, and Asians in space isn't that unrealistic of a prediction.

That’s the feeling I got off of the MCRN chaplain when he had his rant about younger generations not knowing true hardship. Politics and service are one and the same for them.