A point I missed putting in is that the seats in the Rocinante lean back to change the acceleration from vertical to horizontal. Another cool attention to detail!
Fighter jets also have an angle in the seat to help with high Gs they are at usually ~115 degrees so that the height between your heart and head is lower.
Another interesting point when it comes to Gs and fighter jets is that historically the jet has a G limit which is lower than what the pilot can handle such as with the F18 being ~6.5G jet. The pilot can override the G limits in an emergency but this will require the maintenance personnel to throughly check the jet for issues from this. The first jet that actually is limited due to the pilots ability to remain aware while pulling high Gs is the F-22 which is a 12G jet. The F16 is a 10G jet all day so the design of the jet is a huge factor when to comes to the Gs the jet can pull without ripping the wings off or killing the pilots. This is one reason the pentagon is seriously considering remotely piloted fights but being in the seat allows you to “feel” the jet and if you are pushing it too far, however I believe our generation will be the last generation of fighter pilots to spend their whole career on the jet. The fighter community has a saying that describes this it’s “strapping the jet on your back” instead of saying I strapped into the seat.
Also a great attation to detail - i even whould say, using the physics to create tension - is this one scene, where they are in a battle and have to do hard manouvering and one locker for tools isn't tightly secured . so the tools get loose and nearly kill a crew member ! BTW did you now there is already a space station with spin gravity in the first stages of planning ( Its more like the Mars Society, but it is something :D : ua-cam.com/video/m50A-3OLGd0/v-deo.html&ab_channel=TheGatewayFoundation )
If I remember correctly another detail is that Rocinante type ships turn by 180 degree before starting to de-accelerate. This way the passenger's also de-accelerate safely and they still get pressed towards the floor with a force of 1g. Otherwise the passengers would f.e. crash into the ceiling of the floor they are at at that moment. Or in more extreme cases they would get ripped apart like the pilot of that little ship that suddenly got stopped in front of the ring gate 2 seasons ago.
i think if we managed to make ourselves into more machines, space travel would become way, way cheaper and easier. No need for food, oxygen, even light or other systems. Basically you can sit in a torpedo. But the coolest form of space travel i've seen is probably from altered carbon. They basically uploaded their consciousness into a digital form and then "beamed" it to another planet. Effectively traveling at lightspeed. Haven't seen that one before and that would be a really, really cool way to travel. Of course it assumes that we would be successful in transferring our consciousness into a digital form or if its even possible.
@@ollyhodges 1/3rd g is the standard belter and travel acceleration. However this is where the advantage of the UNN comes in, the average acceleration of "Earter" ships is higher then the MCR or OPA can normally match. It's a super cool thing that's actually covered in war in the books, that while the MCRN ships have better more efficient engines the UNN ships are still faster at their destination because the earth crews can sustain harder burns.
Hmm, at 1g constant acceleration wouldn’t you approach relativistic speeds within a few days. What effect would time dilation and the slowing of acceleration have. To keep the 1g acceleration would require exponentially more power or you would lose your “gravity”. Accelerate slower say 0.7G, some gravity is better than none and would take more than double travel time. Maybe as they are “limited” to the solar system nothing is ever far enough away to trouble Einstein.
2 issues with this. Magnetics assumes ferrous metals. Would not work on Aluminum, plastics or carbon fibers. 2nd is batteries to power said boots would be very heavy, then add in the weight of the electromagnets. It would be near impossible to move in them at 1g. Show assumes ferrous hulls and tiny, powerful batteries in the future, as well as tiny, powerful electromagnets. Future tech, gotta love it. Books also talk about this tech in the gloves and the series shows it in Bobbie's power armor when escaping the Guanshin (sp?).
@@Spearca They would have to be sized appropriately, a refrigerator magnet would not hold you on the hull of a ship under 1g thrust. If all you want to do is hold down a coffee cup, then yeah, small would be fine. Humans are bigger than coffee cups.
1/3 G is the default speed for pretty much everything in the Expanse unless there is a specific need for more, especially if there are Belters on board. All the spin stations like Tycho and The Behemoth, AKA Medina, I plus all the asteroids they’ve spun to make habitable are spun to 1/3 g.
They don't really cover it in the TV series, the books cover it better, but how many tv/movies are better than the books can be counted on 1 hand with fingers left over They allude to it in the series, but again covered better in books, they mention that MCRN Marines train at 1g since they see their primary enemy as Earthers even tho the gravity of Mars is 0.376G
@@artbrann Actually it is there but unspoken in the show. You constantly see that gravity is lessened when they are on stations. You see drinks poured and such, where the liquid falls into cups more slowly.
The only thing that is missing in the spaceships in the expanse is radiators because especially with their fusion drives which is very hot, they must need that to function realistically
I love the hard science fiction of the Expanse. I love Star Trek, but the force fields & ray beams get old after awhile. I think that’s why I loved Battlestar Galactica & Firefly so much, both who used bullets instead of light beams for weapons. I gave a pass at their respective gravity solutions, as they were the best SciFi in their respective eras, but The Expanse exceeds both!
IMO the expanse is "Real SciFI" becaues "Technology changes everything". This is what SciFi is about, inventing a technology and then as a mind game exploring what it would mean.. Star Trek (Albeit I'm loving TNG to death).. just isn't really, or just kinda. It's frozen in status quo... and often they discover something in one episode, that would be revolutionary in one way and another.. and forget about it the next week.
@@georgelionon9050 I know I'm late, but I fully agree with this. One thing that I really appreciate about the Expanse's tech, is that the authors & writers are able to explain the evolution of modern day tech into what we see in The Expanse. We don't have Epstein drives, or handheld terminals, but the writers can explain sensibly how we get from what we have today, to what they have in the show. That makes the entire universe feel so much more believable & grounded
@@andreabindolini7452 it's not even so much the fact that it's light beam, but the way it's often portrayed. These magical beams coming from random locations. Compare that to something like Ashford using the Behemoth's comms array to try & destroy the ring? It's the way the show was grounded in realism & believability that just was so enjoyable
@@Takhar7 The series is believable, not entirely realistic. For example the ring, AKA the wormhole, is depicted in a totally wrong way because, well, in a three dimensional space, the entrance cannot be a flat surface: it should be a sphere, as correctly depicted in the movie "Interstellar".
From someone who has experienced a trainer used for fighter pilots that spins you in circles while you are rotated to simulate pulling Gs in a jet 9gs positively it’s hard to keep aware as your vision narrows. This* is uncomfortable but manageable but negative Gs hurt like hell or you red out as the blood vessels in your eyes burst. This is why fighter pilots pull Gs rather than push them. I think you described these affects very well!
Not all fighters have reclined seats, this is not a design feature inherent to all jet fighters., If memory serves, the F-16 was one of or the first jet to have a reclined seat, but prior to that, they were pretty much all sitting straight upright or only very slightly reclined.
@@andreacianti6416 this is not true the pull of Earths gravity does go down with distance but you would have to be much further than the moon to escape the gravity well of the Earth. Astronauts do not experience 0G when in space they just perceive weightlessness due to their horizontal velocity canceling out the downward pull of Earth so the Astronauts essentially experience the same feeling as a skydiver in free fall while in orbit but avoid hitting the ground due to horizontal velocity causing them to “miss” the Earth. This is why suborbital flights such as Blue Origins current rocket can reach “space” or above 100km while only achieving max speeds of ~2500mph the crew will experience ~3 minutes of weightlessness even on that ballistic trajectory but the pull of Earth’s gravity does not change enough throughout the flight for it to have a noticeable effect. Sorry if I rambled on with this I am just very passionate when it comes to Physics, Aeronautical Engineering, and Orbital Mechanics.
@@Riceball01 I should have clarified that I meant modern fighters have the reclined seats to help with pulling Gs my mistake. I also did not mention the G suits that are used which were first used by the British in WWII.
@@andreacianti6416 G-forces are just an acceleration away from the previous straight line of velocity. This is because of Newton’s laws, all objects have inertia, Newton’s First Law. If you are going fast enough to experience G-forces. They would be the same because of how thrust works. Albeit there is a difference between space and air. The principles are the same. The only difference between space and air, is air resistance. Flying through the air is remarkably easier than flying through space. Space in a manoeuvring perspective is very similar to air. So the same principles of fighter jets and spacecraft apply to each other. G-forces are just accelerations away from the previous velocity.
One problem I have with the design of ships in the expanse is that the bridge is typically on the "top" of the ship, or the point furthest away from the engine. With the command crew's feet pointed towards the center of mass rapid rotational maneuvers would throw the crew into the walls and ceiling. It would be way better to have the bridge as close to the center of gravity as possible to minimize the effects of rotating the ship on the crew.
Also, the "bridge at center" tends to offer more protection from projectile weapons and radiation from nuclear explosions. The CIC "Combat Information Center" on a modern US Naval warship is the nerve center of the ship which is why it is deep in the most protected part of the ship.
Huh, really good points. Yeah, the Donnie bridge was iirc somewhere close to center, and basically floating inside a bigger space. I think....damn, now I'm getting paranoid. Google isn't helping, so I'm just gonna stand by it.
They are for the big big ships like the Donnie and Agatha king. For ships like the roci which aren't too big you'd want as much distance between you and your fusion engine since if they thing gets rail gunned you want to be shielded as much as possible from possible radiation dose once you eject the core.
I think the rotating seat assembly in the Razorback is called a gimbal, a roll cage is usually an external safty structure outside of vehicles, but that is just how I understand it.
+1 for gimbal, and these were and sometimes still are used on boats for stoves and dining tables so cooking and eating can happen in rough seas. (A quick worthwhile Wikipedia read for more applications) What I wonder about those in the razorback is whether they are servo-actuated or passive with dampers so you don't pendulum - the latter being what old boats have. I'd guess servo-actuated because if a person's weight distribution is slightly mismatched to the chair's designed center of mass, the passive orientation's resultant force vector error would be a big deal at 46G. On the other hand, "turning" (rotation + new linear acceleration) in space needs to be thought through carefully. Maximum off-main-engine-axis acceleration is limited by the steering/maneuvering thrusters which seem very weak even on the razorback; it can "turn" (rotate) quickly because it has a small moment of inertia. Pilot seats would logically be located nearest the ship center of mass to minimize the movement experienced by pilots, so dramatic gimbal rotations would seem unneeded BUT they would be in opposite directions unless both seats are (sub-optimally) forward of the ship center of mass.
The Expanse has a great feeling of authenticity about it. Have recently been rewatching the whole series again. Definitely my favorite sci fi show. Really enjoyed your video.
Question for you: do you ever get the slight impression that the writers treat the solar system as a neat line of planets like in a one of those Solar System wall posters? Reason for asking is really just the notion of 'outer planets' as a distinct region; there will be times when, say, Earth is closer to Ceres Station than Ceres is to Ganymede, when Ganymede, along with Jupiter, is the other side of the sun from Ceres. I just occasionally (not all the time) get the impression that the 'outer system' is written in such a way as being clumped together, far away from Earth and Mars.
Well that's more politically not travel time related. And the outer planets originally did not include stuff like Ceres but it was considered a part of earth's domain partially owned by the MCRN too. The OPA takes over Ceres in the wake of the MCRN/OPA war and the EMC civil war expanding the outer planets to be in this weird situation.
There are definitely times where it seems far too easy/fast for them to get to places, like with the ring gate. I think its probably unavoidable since it would probably become too tedious and hard to keep track of the relative positions of everything.
@@RyanRidden Probably the same as in Game of Thrones, where travel times weren't really apparent in the show, despite them potentially taking weeks or months. It's hard to somehow represent the boring weeks inbetween, but that doesn't need to imply that they're not there
A good point, but perhaps a result of us being used to looking at land maps. Think of the solar system as orbital shells around the sun that require using energy to transfer between them. This would mean Earth and Ceres are always closer in terms of transit energy than Earth and Ganymede, even if the opposite is true in a straight (as-the-space-crow-flies) line. Think of it like saying the International Space Station is always "closer" to the moon than the earth even though spatially that's not the case if they're on opposite sides of the earth. The attention to detail in this series is incredible, Stanley Kubrick would be proud.
Loved the practicality of the ships in the expanse. Even how railguns zipped their ballistic rounds right through ships and the crews wore space suits going into battle and also depressurised the ships when fighting. I would love to see more near-future sci-fi. The Martian is one of favourite films ever. Good solid science porn with engaging characters thrown in. Enjoyable video by the way. 👍
The writer seems to have so much insights over space engineerings, while most spaceship designs in Scifis were either 'space airplanes' or sea ships in space, and one of the most influential designs came from Leiji Matsumoto.
@@frankmueller2781 No worries, the stairs are only a problem on Earth... in most other situations in the Expanse, you'd be at about 0.3G or less, in which case stairs are not much of an obstacle. In fact, you'd probably benefit greatly from what little exercise the stairs provide if you do it enough! ;-] (Sorry, I've got Nerd Tourette's Syndrome...It's a tendency to blurt out unnecessary technical details whether they were requested or not... I'll be alright in a minute. lol)
The Behmoth is probably too small for an interstellar trip, even in the show atmospheric leackage was mentioned as an issue. Also the Interior would have more levels to minimize puncture damage and create more surface area.
It's not obvious in the show but the Navuoo isn't a hollow tube. Most of its living space is in the hull with several layers of decks hidden by the environment level at the center acting as a sort of massive park for recreation and farming.
@@outerheaven155 They even have a giant incandescene light in the drum axis to recreate the outdoor sun. Nobody, not even the Martians can afford that luxury in their domes
@@69Kazeshini The mormon church is about as rich as Bill Gates, and that's just church assets. The idea that such an organization could build a space program if it wanted to is not far off.
@@inventor121 You misunderstand the purpose of the LDS Church's funds if you call them "rich" like they can buy whatever they want (btw, they prefer to be called by their full title, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). It's generally for Church welfare, not spending as they please like the Catholics did in the Renaissance.
Also, don't forget the "Y Que" slingshot craft piloted by Maneo. It had a very minimal drive and relied on directional thrusters. Also, typically ships in the expanse only fly at 1/3g to make it easier on the belter crews and conserve reaction mass. Otherwise, this is a fantastic video I will be sharing with new fans of the show to help explain why they don't have "gravity plating" and "inertial dampers..."
A spinning drum is a lot harder to engineer than you'd think, as the static section isn't anchored to anything so they'll both just end up spinning in opposite directions, you would need sets of thrusters permanently firing in counter directions on the two parts of the ship. It's easier to make ome like the endurance from interstaller where the whole thing just spins, but that also makes its near impossible to dock, as we saw.
You just need to overcome whatever friction there is between the opposite spining modules, making it hold athmosphere is the more difficult task if you ask me.
Dunno about Tycho, but Behemoth had thrusters on the outside of the drum. Therefore no torque was applied to the center shaft, (the static part) of the ship. So it wouldn't need counter thrusters. The engineering deck was in zero G as we saw during Holden, Bobby and badass Drummers raid
Dr Ridden, "the ships can create gravity at 1 G while there is fuel". True, but from the story, the ships must not be burning at 1 G normally because Naomi (a belter who is not used to 1 G) cannot stand 1 G for long durations. The story bears this out in Season 4 on the plant Illus, gravity was slightly more than 1 G and Naomi can't handle it after a few days and had to return to the Rocci. Others have commented that the Rocci typically generates 0.3 to 0.5 G when accelerating and only occasionally does high G burns. Yes, yes, I only have a Masters Degree in Science.
Additionally, Star Trek ships also had inertial dampeners working in tandem with the gravitional plates to prevent people from being pushed against the back wall whenever the ship used thrust. Thus the forces exerted upon passengers of such ships work in both the X/Y axis AND the A/Z axis. So the ship can engage thrust at anytime allowing the passengers to walk upright simultaneously.
Unless you're Earth or Mars military, 1G is almost unheard of in The Expanse. Nearly everything runs at 1/3rd of a G. Partly to conserve reaction mass, partly because that's the most that Belters can really tolerate. Most rocks have very little gravity to speak of. The books suggested the Behemoth / Medina Station spins at 1/10th of a G. The Mormons wanted 1G because they're Earthers, so that's what the ship was designed to do. However, the Belters had zero intention of making their new home spin at 1G. It'd rip their people apart. It meant massive modifications to the drainage systems because the station needs to grow food in the slow zone, but water doesn't drain as easily in the agricultural area at 1/10th of a G. Even a little bit of spin or thrust means you can use the toilet without embarrassment (or needing vacuum attachments) (or having to sanitise and deodorise the air intake filters if something goes wrong like the pilot makes an unexpected course correction). I'm of the firm opinion that the ISS (or its replacement) needs a spin section - but definitely not at 1G. Just enough for a few cabins for people to shower, eat, do other minor stuff, possibly even sleep (if there are health benefits in being under gravity for at least some of the time). The lower the G the smaller the radius can be with tolerable coriolis.
Indeed! Also much of UA-cam video out there that calculate how big a station must be for 1G and what forces you'd need to withstand etc.. totally miss that already a small part would be a huge gain. No need for a full G.
My thoughts exactly! Mass Effect has perfect music for space. Especially when he said, "drawn by the music of cosmic harmonies". With the Mass Effect music playing then.... Perfect. Touches the soul.
A minor detail, but fighter pilots don't face forward because that's where most of the acceleration comes from. In fact, the most intense acceleration comes from maneuvering, which can be up to 9 gs depending on the jet and it's payload. Meanwhile, engines might give maybe 2 gs for short bursts at full power. In fact, if you look at some fighter cockpits closely you'll see the seat reclines significantly to give the pilot better g tolerances. Having the pilot laying flat would be the best, but would make flying the plane rather difficult.
Really glad I found this channel! Really interesting facts presented in a comprehensive way. Also, Mass Effect’s “Vigil” is always a welcome sensation!
I'm really enjoying the channel. Thanks you. A couple of comments. 7:50 Nice radian dodge. Well done. The show doesn't talk much about this, but the ships often accelerate at much less than 1g. I believe spinning stations like Tycho and the Behemoth would likely be around 0.3g. It's part of the reason why Belters struggle in 1g environments for extended periods.
Great video. Babylon 5 also featured more realistic and functional ship design, at least for the Earth Alliance. Some ships had rotating sections and those that didn't had layouts similar in some ways to the Roci .
It's interesting when you consider both ST and the Expanse take place in approx the time frame The Expanse is roughly 250 years roughly 23rd century. Star trek is depending upon whether its ENT,TOS,TNG late 22nd to 24th, While I wish the ST technologies were real I feel the Expanse is going to be much much closer to the mark.
Difficult to say, Just remember back Space Odyssey 2001.. we don't have super AI computer and are hardly space born.. but we have Smartphones, something the movie never seen anywhere near coming. We're generally pretty bad in predicting the future. I agree however that Expanse requires far fewer "miracle technology breakthroughs" than Star Trek and is thus more likely to be close. As engineer some things bug me tough: these transparent smartphone likes they have. Why the hell would you do them transparent? I do get the reason behind 3D holograms for course projections. These are great, but a 2D-Display that's transparent is just stupid and made to look superficially "futuristic". Also the shots on the tools, they have same old tools, tongs, pliers, I'd like to have a little creativity here (Star Trek does this much better). The wires look old tech even by todays standards. And from a philosophical standpoint, one main idea (a little more hidden) in Star Trek is society not evolving only technologically but socially.. in ST for example the characters hardly ever have grudges for a longer time, for me it looks even often unrealistic how easy they are to forgive. Well definitely not in the Expanse, the even got a bit more primitive than civilization today. But honestly that's just taste, no idea how it is going to be.
@@georgelionon9050 Society doesn't really evolve on it's own to much. It's rather function of economics. Expanse is the same old capitalism (with some small upgrades like very basic income on Earth), so society is almost the same.
@@georgelionon9050 That's largely because Earth united under a single banner in Star Trek. Picard even mentions in _First Contact_ that humanity has forgotten how to cuss by the time of Next Generation (a point which was completely ignored by the Abrams timeline, as evidenced with the Discovery and Picard shows). Because of long-term unity on Earth, society had evolved to become more polite, which is probably why they don't hold grudges. With The Expanse, humanity is still divided by race (Earth and Mars vs. the Belt) and ideology (Earth vs. Mars vs. the Belt).
Ryan: "Ships of the imagination. Time will tell" Me: "This closing feels oddly very Sagan-y to me..." *Video ends with a clip from the original Cosmos documentary* Me: :'')
@@Darilon12, actually most Belters spend the majority of their life "on the float" and since their biology was defined by more than 200 millennia under Earth's gravity they get ALL of the dysfunction and flaws with no benefits. Sucks to be them.
I like the expanse but revalation space by Alastair Reynolds takes most of the concepts from the expanse and cranks them up to eleven. There are interstellar ships called lighthuggers which move very close to the speed of light by just constantly accelerating at 1g for years. These ships are enormous, literally kilometer long constructs that are basically flying city states with armaments and storage capacity for hundreds of thousands of colonists. Similar to the expanse these ships are arranged vertically for in flight gravity but have rotating sections for in system gravity. The sheer scale of these ships is simply beautiful but it always reminds me of the expanse.
It's one of the best game series! I loved ME3, up until I had to choose a color... The upcoming legendary edition looks worthy of another play through!
@@RyanRidden I strongly recomend to be careful about the new edition. See here ua-cam.com/video/EEiJJFM7fnM/v-deo.html I instead recommend to stick to the old versions. Yes, they may not be as advanced in terms of graphics (ME1 in particular) but at least you get the version without nonsensical censoring. It is a sad reality that remasters tend to be dulled down in order to appease the ultra-puritan crowd on social media - and one of the main reason why I have largely checked out on "modern" entertainment.
If you mentioned it, I missed where you addressed “the juice.” Also, the crew regularly wear mag boots on the Roci, so the acceleration is something less than sufficient to maintain pull in one direction.
I'm one of those that occasionally pops in to see the station designs submitted to NASA's annual scholastic competition. All the orbital designs utilize centrifical force, but there was one I really liked for a loop ship. It's ring was segmented so that the sections could rotate based on the combination of spin AND engine thrust during it's boost, coast, and braking phases. I'm also surprised you did not mention Babylon 5. That was a show where you saw both near science solutions (the Earth Aliance ships, including B5 itself), and super sci (nearly everyone else).
Job well done! Glad to see more ppl noticing and appreciating the gravity of work that went into building The Expanse universe. It’s an even better series of novels I certainly recommend
Ryan, the Earth ships in the early seasons of Babylon 5 had spinning sections and the station itself was somewhat like an O'Neill cylinder, rotating around its linear axis.
@@RyanRidden probably the first popular scifi to show ships traveling in one direction while turning to fire in another. Not quite hard scifi but quite a bit crunchier than typical for the day. Unfortunately, they made heavy use of CGI and it was made in the 90s though, so... ouch. Special effects really don't hold up, but good storytelling too. And from a media standpoint, it was one of the shows in that era that helped sell the business types on the possibility of long-form storytelling in television.
@@RyanRidden You should. It was a great series. I quite disagree with Mr Fisher's comments. No "ouch" for me. Their starfighters were very well designed. Unlike most most sci-fi movies or TV shows that have fighters fly like airplanes, the Star Furies on B5 used thrusters to change direction. Some things, like inertia, haven't been solved, so as a physicist, you still have to suspend some belief and just enjoy the show.
@@brownro214 The only thing that always bothered me, they never invented a tech-explanation why an enemy force couldn't blow up Babylon 5 simply by opening a Jump point right inside the station from hyperspace. Same with planetary attacks. Attack a planet by opening jump points on the planet safely from hyperspace.. (they generally also didn't have guards within hyperspace). But it was my favorite show nevertheless.. PS: There are also some story discrepancies over the whole arc, as they kept changing the story on the fly due to real life issues of actors being replaced etc. (For example the prophicies for Lando, or the "do you know who I really am" visions for Ivannova etc.
Yes - at least in the books. In series - although I dont think specified- they move as in 1G - but that is reasonable expedient as opposed to SFX cost of trying to simulate 0.3g for entire series.
A: the razorback is a racing ship so it will be built differant, but it is also built vertically the seats can just turn any direction for fast turns B: the rocinante seats and other small frigates we see have their seats lean back for this
The shuttles were certainly a good step to reusability and an icon of space flight, but the amount of refurbishment they needed after each flight was almost like building one from scratch. The real power of the Space X boosters is that they are good to launch again almost right away.
Reusable and refurbished are two very different things though. If SpaceX changed all their engines on the Falcon 9 boosters then they could achieve must faster turnaround times than the Space shuttle. The reason the space shuttle had such high costs associated with reuse was more related to the tiles used handle reentry heating. The reasons his is such an issue is because the amount of reentry heating goes up by the power of 3 as your speed increases so if you double the speed your spacecraft will deal with 64x the heating during reentry.
@@RyanRidden the full flow staged combustion cycle of the raptor engines hopes to solve the issue of “rapid” reusability by lowering the combustion chamber temperatures and avoiding the coking from polymers formed in other longer chain hydrocarbon engines. If the Merlin engine did not have to have its turbines cleaned then all you would have to do is top off the ignition fuel (TTEB the green stuff on startup) and refuel the booster to launch again.
@@williamgorham7339 And SpaceX plans to solve the tile reusability issue in a few ways. Mainly with thickness, using the same interchangeable tile shape for 90% of the rocket and cheap automated tile placement/replacement.
2:24 "This canal-house idea is something I haven't really seen explored in science-fiction". I guess you never read the comics series "Tintin-destination moon" (French: Objectif Lune). It was written way back in 1953, and scientifically it was remarkably accurate, including the part where they actually explore the moon. The used rocket works according to the "Canal house" concept, and is also constructed as such. A "nuclear powered engine" continuously accelerates the craft at 1G, so that the travelers experience normal gravity. When they are half way, the craft reverses and starts to decelerate with 1G all the way to the moon. During the "reversal procedure", they are weightless as it should (and unfortunately, they also become weightless when Captain Haddock in a drunken stupor accidentally turns off the engine during flight). Considering this was written in 1953 even before Sputnik took to the skies, this is a remarkable realistic comic I can recommend! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destination_Moon_(comics)
Glad I checked the comments since this was what was going to mention (I was pretty late to watching The Expanse so only just finished it), but as you point out exactly the same process used in Tintin comics. Having read them as a kid immediately concluded that that was what was happening in this show when seeing their ships travelling in space as well as how it worked to create gravity within the ships. As you say, amazing to consider that those comics were from the 1950s and the concept seems to be rarely used in Sci fi since then.
There is a problem with spinning. If the spinning object is to small, a person on board gets confused whenever it moves. Also objects wouldn't fall completely strait to the floor.
Gravity is a hard mistress. One thing I don't like about the depiction though is that sometimes they'll flip a ship 180° and take off in a new direction lickity-split when all they would be doing is slowing their forward momentum. If you've been travelling at 1g for some time, it would take just as much to stop, forget about zooming back the way you came in seconds.
I think that's a perspective trick. The ship isn't zooming in the other direction, it's _the camera_ that doesn't decelerate along with the spaceship, so it flies ahead and the ship begins to lag behind.
I think one small problem with the thrust-based gravity is that you can't really change your trajectory very easy. Since you are accelerating with 1g all the time, you're velocity quickly becomes so big, that you can're reasonably change course. Normally in the middle of your journey, you need to turn around (how is the acceleration handled while turning?) to decelerate enough to come to a stand still at the point you need to reach. Maybe a normal ship would often alternate between accelerating and decelerating generally staying around a desired velocity?
You can't change your trajectory easily in space, regardless of how fast your ship is moving. But with higher accelerations it's actually easier to change the trajectory.
@@afriendofafriend5766 It's basic school physics. Something that accelerates at 1G perpendicular to the trajectory of movement will shift it's trajectory in a new direction faster than something that accelerates at 0.1G.
@@danielmoura9421 you speak the truth, but the character death was reasonable, and in the books was the same way that Fred dies, since they killed him in a different way on the show it was free to use for someone else to show the dangers of space even without fighting
You failed to mention the Coriolis effect and pseudo Coriolis forces that would be experienced by the crew of a rotating vessel. The reason we don't rotate space vehicles in reality is because of this effect and there are a variety of interesting studies that have been done on it. It regularly causes nausea and inhibits astronauts ability to perform basic tasks as their hand / eye co-ordination are thrown off depending on their orientation to the spinning body.
The first place, where gravity by constant acceleration was displayed was "the adventures of Tintin, to the moon" (1950) with an animated film made later, to be seen also here on youtube, minute 7:00 in the episode, the professor explains quite well, how this works; also the effects of acceleration, scarcity of oxygen and reduced gravity on the moon is discussed. Even magnetic boots and a nuclear propulsion were already in it. I was puzzled for decades, why Scifi shows kept ignoring that old masterpiece of SciFi :-) and then finally the Expanse came along! Great!
And the expanse ships 'flip' half way and decelerate to maintain 1G without overshooting. Also medical enhancements to allow more survivability to varied gravity explored in Expanse. Was interesting watching red bull air races, blackout at away from head G's and whiteout at to head G's, more about oxygen to brain which is carried by blood. They either hold breath or hyperventilate to prepare for next maneuver.
Magboots are more for the show. They rarely use them in the books and people seem to prefer to float around when not under acceleration. I think the heavy use of Magboots in the show is for budget reasons.
I hate that clicking sound. Also Amos boarded that shuttle on Earth, from a garage while in a fight, and he is IMMEDIATELY with a magboot. It's like any shoe have magboots on it :-\
@@duramirez Is he IMMEDIATELY, or is just not shown when he switches them on? I mean I don't want to throw out lame excuses, but it's the same as why hardly stories mention about protagonists going to the toilets. They show the viewer the highlights of a story instead of every second detail..
@@georgelionon9050 nah, it's quite immediately, its a tense situation they taking bullets in the airlock door closes the ship departures and then immediately CLICKING sounds :( I dunno, perhaps they don't show him changing but then anyway, where were the boots :-\ weird.
The Nuclear Fission Saltwater Engine designed by Robert Zubrin is a currently possible technology that basically gives a spaceship the same (or similar) efficiency as the Fusion drives from The Expanse. The problem with Zubrin's engine is that the exhaust spews deadly radiation. But as long as you don't point the exhaust at anything you care about most of the radiation is traveling at a speed that it will escape out of the Solar System. Definitely a space-only Spaceship. With this engine you could design spaceships that look exactly like the ones in The Expanse, and you will be able to maintain 1G of burn for hours on end (maybe even days).
@@cantdestroyher7245 That and of course the whole idea of "stealth" in space would completly disappear. Something as simple as fireing your RCS thruster around Pluto would end up on Avasaralas desk a few hours later.
Absolutely! I've once seen a video about estimating how space battles would turn out, and basically heat (and the ability to dissipate) would be the deciding factor... where the losing side would have heated so much up, they cannot act anymore and must surrender... I guess the expanse tech fiction is engines (and computers etc.) being soooo efficient, it isn't an issue...
Hi Dr Ryan. I've had an idea for a rocket engine based on a variation of the VASIMIR ion drive. If nitrogen were used as the reaction mass in the engine, then after being accelerated by the grid the nitrogen ions were neutralized and allowed to recombine into N2 wouldn't that chemical reaction add enough energy to the plasma to bring it close to Epstine Drive levels of efficiency? I'm assuming a fusion reactor driving the VASIMIR. I know it takes a LOT of energy to disassociate N2>2N but going from 2N to N2 is the basis of many hi-explosives. At least, this could allow practical single stage to orbit. It would be more efficient than a pure chemical engine and more powerful than an ion thruster. I'd love to hear any knowledgeable opinions out there. This idea has been knocking around inside my head for awhile now.
@@aysnov The VASIMIR ion drive is a fairly recent and original variation on the conventional ion thruster used on some current satellites. You can read more about it in wikipedea. I thought by using the bonding energy of the nitrogen molecule, you could dramatically increase both the thrust and specific impulse of the exhaust products, but I, myself, don't have the chemical background to calculate the changes that would occur .
I’m not a chemist or a physicist but I don’t think adding any kind of chemical reaction to your ion drive will get you anywhere near the efficiency you’d get from a fusion reaction. But how would the nitrogen recombining in the exhaust provide thrust? It doesn’t matter what happens to your reaction mass after you’ve already thrown it out of the back of your ship
@@oberonpanopticon Thank you for responding. I did not make myself clear. I wasn't thinking of travel through space. The idea was a better way to get from surface to orbit. The Idea is to use PART of the VASIMIR engine to ionize the nitrogen and then move the nitrogen ions to the combustion chamber where you give them back their electrons to neutralize them, allow them to recombine into a diatomic molecule giving off a LOT of energy in the process. Two nitrogen atoms release 946 MJ when they combine. Methane and oxygen release 890 MJ. Thats only 56 MJ but carbon dioxide and water are 2.2 times as massive as a diatomic nitrogen molecule so the resultant exhaust velocity would be much higher giving much greater efficiency. The fault is mine for not being more clear. The trick to the whole thing is to break the nitrogen bond then ionize the atoms to stop them from recombining until you want them to. Only a small part of the VASIMIR process would be used. That was the best way I could think of to break one of the strongest bonds in nature then deliver the ions to the combustion chamber in one continuous process. The purpose is to have a much more efficient earth to orbit system in order to increase the payload fraction of the ship. I hope I've made myself more clear this time.
The major issue with spin gravity is that the smaller the radius of the cylinder the more severe coriolis force will be. On a ship as small as Endurance you will probably have severe nausea all the time.
Captain John Stapp tested himself in some very severe deceleration tests sometime in the late 40s/early 50s. He demonstrated that a human can withstand 46g in the forward direction if properly harnessed. I don’t think they dared go higher! At one point stapp was the fastest man on earth as he rode a rocket sled to 632mph!
5:28 fun piece of trivia, we call it "red-out" when you fall unconscious due to blood rushing to the head. Black-out is usually for when the blood is rushing to the lower body.
You totally could. This is even kind of in the show of that space ship orbiting New Terra. They don't have a complete ring, but just a "ring fragment" they spin around. In practice with nowadays tough, there isn't a material that could hold that kind of strain... Steel certainly couldn't. Nanotubes maybe could, but cannot be manufactured in that dimension. There are some ideas that hold the centripetal force with magnetism..
They did that in season 4. They even had the two pods at different distances from the main hull, so that one pod would simulate less gravity for the belters, and the other pod would simulate heavier gravity for Earth people.
@@georgelionon9050 Of course we have materials for spin tethers. Crane cables can pull 200 tonnes in 1G, that means it would work fine for 600 tonnes in 1/3G. Cable stayed Bridges use way bigger and tougher cables. You can basically spin two starships no problem, if you want to.
Spinning drums and rings feel almost like gravity when you stand or sit still, but the down force will feel stronger the further you are away from the axis and weaker the closer you are to the axis. Which would likely cause severe dizziness and nausea if the ring is not big enough. It's estimated that a ring would need to have a radius of a hundred meter so that you can walk normally. The Behemoth is well above that size, so it should be pretty comfortable. The Discovery 1 is much too small though, and you'd probably be stumbling around a lot. What would feel even weirder to our sense of balance is that if you walk in a direction that makes you go around the axis faster, the down force would feel stronger. And if you move in the opposite direction, it would feel weaker. You'd have to train yourself to always start walking slowly and to not make sudden stops or turn around while walking. And trying to throw things like balls across the room would be super weird.
This is a good point. In The Expanse books, coriolis force is actually mentioned when the Behemoth spins up, making a character feel sick. The Discovery 1 would be impossible to live on. You'd be pulled to the side by different degrees along the length of your body, and be severely nauseous all the time. For a spinning space station like in 2001 A Space Odyssey, the ring would have to be hundreds of metres across for the force to feel like gravity caused by a mass.
@@DavidOfWhitehills Hmm I don’t know maybe. But my thought was that you could breathe compressed air, which matches the pressure around you. Similar to how scuba diving works. You can stay at three hundred meters underwater with water pressure around you being 30 bar and still be fine if the air is compressed to match that.
@@schmijo At first I would have said no, because the main issue is your heart pumping blood around and being in water wouldn't change that... However on the ohter hand, if you would put your body in high pressure situation (like a diver) the oxygen delivery does get more efficient... (and would become even problematic if not counter acted)... so in that case, it could work. But you'd have to maintain high G situation since you would have to maintain high pressure, thus not suitable to the combat situations like in the Expanse.
No it would not be better, 1) more pressure acting on you from the weight of the water when pulling G's 2) water is heavy and would cost a lot more fuel to move. 3) water doesn't counteract gforces. If you're pulling enough G's for your skull to cave in, it doesn't matter if you're in a water tank or not, the internal stresses on your body will simply cause things like your bones to crush, or your squishy bits to squish. Water won't stop that. For example, let's say you took a table rated for 300lbs and put it under water. Guess what....it would still only be rated for 300lbs, and still collapse when adding too much weight on it.
Fun fact, the original Enterprise was modeled after the burner ring on an electric oven. Then, it was further refined by an Air Force veteran using aircraft logic. They also liked how the ship came with a saucer section like a flying saucer.
I like that you went into how The Expanse uses it's ship design to generate gravity, but would have like to have heard more about if the efficiency of an Epstein Drive would even be possible. I've seen several things about an Epstein not being possible issue with "Heat Problems", Reactor fuel vs reaction mass, the exhaust/drive ploom would be so enormous that it would destroy anything traveling nearby...etc. I assume alot of these issues are based on how a modern understanding of how a hypothetical nuclear engine would/could work, and that within the lore of the novels/show are the problems that Solomon Epstein was able to solve to create his fictious drive... but still would like to know if those are even solvable problems by what we understand about nuclear physics.
There are existing nuclear engine designs. They do have extremely high ISP (how much bang you get per buck if fuel efficiency) but generally lower thrust. You can make high thrust nuclear engines and they can be quite efficient and give decent thrust. Its all a matter of energy efficiency and nuclear beats chemical ever time on that front. On the down side, reactors are very heavy so that can be am issue. Anti-matter being the perfect fuel for energy density reasons but just too damn hard to get a hold of. Don't understand why the exhaust plume would be an issue. Space is very big. Use conventional thrusters to move away from things and then have at it. There are tons of unconventional engine designs. I'd recommend Scott Manley if you would like some detail on them. He had made several vids on them.
The heat is the problem. You can’t get rid of heat, the only way to stop it from melting your spacecraft is to have enormous high temperature radiators. I think the Epstein drives would be producing something like half a terawatt of thrust power. Even if 99% of that became thrust and only 1% became heat, you’d still have to dissipate 5 gigawatts of heat energy. If you handwaved it away, then that’d mean disregarding the most basic laws of physics, at which point stuff like perpetual motion machines would become possible and then you’d be using those instead of a fusion engine.
The biggest problem with Expanse ships is lack of radiators, which would be necessary for vehicles with such strong drives falling into the category of torchships. They are riding literal thermonuclear explosions, of which only part of the heat is leaving the ship with exhaust, the rest goes into the ship. Heat is a big concern for any spaceship design with advanced drive, and even our projects of vehicles with fusion drives much weaker than Expanse ones require giant radiators
Agree, also radiators would be primary target in warfare, crew would just cooked with their own engine. Interesting design was also in Avatar at beginning.
@Kato Ho Ten Soeng But that's impossible since it requires a multi megawatt nuclear fusion reactor which cannot be 100% efficient. And it expels ultra hot plasma, which should radiate some of its heat into the ship. Even the heat from crew quarters should require a little radiator actually.
Guys, someone proposed a fusion desing that could work. Just type "ToughSF Epstein drive". It would look nothing like in the show, because the reaction would happen way behind the ship. Charged particles would be redirected by the magnetic field. That way only about
@@Matthew35333 yep, Matter Beam did good job on it, but it still would require quite big radiators if I remember correctly. ToughSF is great blog, I recommend visiting its discord for some hard sf discussions too. Also, nice to a fellow Pole interested in speculative futuristic drives, that's something rare!
Tabletop RPG "Star Frontiers": A lot of what I see in The Expanse could almost be mistaken for being ripped right out of that old roleplaying game (my favourite sci-fi RRTPG, btw). The only thing that Star Frontiers did was 'expand' out to being able to get to planets/systems light years away (short version: when a ship hits 1% the speed of light, it enters into a 'hyperspace' for a few days...ship doesn't go faster...it just sort of pops into a 'squished space' phenomenon, like a wormhole I guess?...sort of?). Still takes days or weeks to travel longer distances, and the ship has to keep accelerating, but it gives a fictional reason for being able to travel to a place 9 light years away (which would take 9 days, iirc; 1 day per LY; meaning if you wanna go 50k LY, that's 50k days....or 135'ish years!). ... When it's almost at the destination (roughly the half way mark), it has to do a "flip and burn" in order to decelerate; when it falls below 1% the speed of light, it "pops back into normal space".
There's so many little physics details In the expanse, like Miller pouring a drink in a bar on the inner levels of Ceres, or the 'gravity torture' and tanks used by Chrisjen Avasarala . And in the newest season Naomi takes medication to try to live safely in 1g short term but they don't work and she gets ill
I wish more sci-fi used real world science to its advantage. I can only think of Babylon 5 using realistic artificial gravity for Human ships and the station itself and Halo.
this. Real physics is epic. The Expanse battles are way more awesome than anything in conventional space opera. Because physics. Here is one of my bit things, say you have a ship that is built with a large weapon built to fire along its long axis, and engines at the back - with proper maneuvering burns it can fly around a target constantly shooting straight at the target, basically using the thruster to do the job of gravity and orbiting the target. You can't do that with space opera maneuvering.
@@j.f.fisher5318 totally agree.. however one thing I don't quite get.. with engines that efficient why aren't automated kamikaze ships way more a thing. Accelerate from other end of the solar system for days non stop... and it hit's it's target... even if it would get destroyed by a torpedo the debris would wreck havoc. And you could just outnumber your target's torpedo capabilities anyway. 10 automated ships on kamikaze max acceleration with several G.. accelerating for days on end... no defense against it, no?
@@georgelionon9050 You wouldn’t be able to make precise adjustments in case the targets change their course, there’s a ping for remote controlling them depending on the range, they are also easily detectable by sensors because of their propulsion signature and why would you use big expensive remote controlled ships that are easily detectable if you can just use a Torpedo/Missile with automatic tracking that’s cheaper, more powerful, harder to detect and are much more nimble
@@georgelionon9050 There's no stealth in space. They would be able to detect them from really far before they accelerated to such speeds and send some form of interceptor. If you destroy it, even though the debris is flying at immense speeds, it would have lost the guidance systems and trajectory of the original kamikaze ship, so it would likely miss its target. This is also assuming the target is stationary like a space station or a celestial body.
@@hoominbeeing Well in the expanse there is stealth, season 1 episode 1, the "mystery ship" was stealthed. Also season 4/5 the whole point of Marco doing with stealth coated asteriods was actually exactly this.
An excellent subject brilliantly presented bossmang! Everything about The Expanse was brilliant. It has supplanted Babylon 5 as the finest sci-fi series I have ever experienced. The plot, the production, the acting, the politics, the details, the gritty reality of surviving in space. Braking burn ffs!
I've been binging the Expanse and recently wondered why there was a roll cage design in the Razorback. I'm glad I clicked on your video! Not sure if you'll continue creating videos on ships, but I'd be interested in hearing you talk about Icarus II from Sunshine and the experimental engine from the Event Horizon which caused a rift in the space-time continuum!
Slight correction, longitudinal g's are insignificant when compared to centrifugal g's induced by jets turning alongside their lift vector. Pilot's sitting position has nothing to do with countering acceleration, in fact a more optimal position would be one where the pilot would lie along side the plane's direction of movement, thus being able to absorb more centrifugal force. This was in fact implemented on the F-16, where the seat is not set 90 degrees towards the plane of motion, but somewhat reclined backwards.
One thing about spin gravity is that people will experience motion sickness, I believe nasa did a article on it and said that you would need a ring of 10km or more to have comfortable gravity.
A point I missed putting in is that the seats in the Rocinante lean back to change the acceleration from vertical to horizontal. Another cool attention to detail!
Fighter jets also have an angle in the seat to help with high Gs they are at usually ~115 degrees so that the height between your heart and head is lower.
Another interesting point when it comes to Gs and fighter jets is that historically the jet has a G limit which is lower than what the pilot can handle such as with the F18 being ~6.5G jet. The pilot can override the G limits in an emergency but this will require the maintenance personnel to throughly check the jet for issues from this. The first jet that actually is limited due to the pilots ability to remain aware while pulling high Gs is the F-22 which is a 12G jet. The F16 is a 10G jet all day so the design of the jet is a huge factor when to comes to the Gs the jet can pull without ripping the wings off or killing the pilots. This is one reason the pentagon is seriously considering remotely piloted fights but being in the seat allows you to “feel” the jet and if you are pushing it too far, however I believe our generation will be the last generation of fighter pilots to spend their whole career on the jet. The fighter community has a saying that describes this it’s “strapping the jet on your back” instead of saying I strapped into the seat.
Also a great attation to detail - i even whould say, using the physics to create tension - is this one scene, where they are in a battle and have to do hard manouvering and one locker for tools isn't tightly secured . so the tools get loose and nearly kill a crew member ! BTW did you now there is already a space station with spin gravity in the first stages of planning ( Its more like the Mars Society, but it is something :D : ua-cam.com/video/m50A-3OLGd0/v-deo.html&ab_channel=TheGatewayFoundation )
If I remember correctly another detail is that Rocinante type ships turn by 180 degree before starting to de-accelerate. This way the passenger's also de-accelerate safely and they still get pressed towards the floor with a force of 1g. Otherwise the passengers would f.e. crash into the ceiling of the floor they are at at that moment. Or in more extreme cases they would get ripped apart like the pilot of that little ship that suddenly got stopped in front of the ring gate 2 seasons ago.
i think if we managed to make ourselves into more machines, space travel would become way, way cheaper and easier. No need for food, oxygen, even light or other systems. Basically you can sit in a torpedo.
But the coolest form of space travel i've seen is probably from altered carbon. They basically uploaded their consciousness into a digital form and then "beamed" it to another planet. Effectively traveling at lightspeed. Haven't seen that one before and that would be a really, really cool way to travel. Of course it assumes that we would be successful in transferring our consciousness into a digital form or if its even possible.
Belters are used to noticably less than 1g, so the behemoth would need to spin even less fast. Big thumbs up for the Mass Effect tune
Pretty sure in the episode with the behemoth they say they've achieved 1/3 gravity. Cool attention to detail
@@ollyhodges 1/3rd g is the standard belter and travel acceleration. However this is where the advantage of the UNN comes in, the average acceleration of "Earter" ships is higher then the MCR or OPA can normally match. It's a super cool thing that's actually covered in war in the books, that while the MCRN ships have better more efficient engines the UNN ships are still faster at their destination because the earth crews can sustain harder burns.
@@karlfranzemperorofmandefil5547 Thats an awesome detail. I really need to read the books to fill the void before season 6
Love the Mass Effect tune. If I were able to get to leave Earth in my lifetime, unlikely, I'd definitely bring the Mass Effect soundtrack with me.
Hmm, at 1g constant acceleration wouldn’t you approach relativistic speeds within a few days. What effect would time dilation and the slowing of acceleration have. To keep the 1g acceleration would require exponentially more power or you would lose your “gravity”. Accelerate slower say 0.7G, some gravity is better than none and would take more than double travel time. Maybe as they are “limited” to the solar system nothing is ever far enough away to trouble Einstein.
The Expanse also makes use of magnetic boots for their crew when they are not moving or are in orbit to conserve fuel. I thought that was brilliant.
A step up from the ISS having velcro strips everywhere!
2 issues with this. Magnetics assumes ferrous metals. Would not work on Aluminum, plastics or carbon fibers.
2nd is batteries to power said boots would be very heavy, then add in the weight of the electromagnets. It would be near impossible to move in them at 1g.
Show assumes ferrous hulls and tiny, powerful batteries in the future, as well as tiny, powerful electromagnets. Future tech, gotta love it.
Books also talk about this tech in the gloves and the series shows it in Bobbie's power armor when escaping the Guanshin (sp?).
In the book they use the mag boots a lot less and just float around. Saves budget too ;)
@@Dewydidit there are more types of magnetism than just ferromagnetism.
@@Spearca They would have to be sized appropriately, a refrigerator magnet would not hold you on the hull of a ship under 1g thrust.
If all you want to do is hold down a coffee cup, then yeah, small would be fine. Humans are bigger than coffee cups.
1/3 G is the default speed for pretty much everything in the Expanse unless there is a specific need for more, especially if there are Belters on board. All the spin stations like Tycho and The Behemoth, AKA Medina, I plus all the asteroids they’ve spun to make habitable are spun to 1/3 g.
I didn't know that, thanks!
They don't really cover it in the TV series, the books cover it better, but how many tv/movies are better than the books can be counted on 1 hand with fingers left over
They allude to it in the series, but again covered better in books, they mention that MCRN Marines train at 1g since they see their primary enemy as Earthers even tho the gravity of Mars is 0.376G
@@artbrann Actually it is there but unspoken in the show. You constantly see that gravity is lessened when they are on stations. You see drinks poured and such, where the liquid falls into cups more slowly.
@@peoplez129
It’s rarely mentioned specifically, only time I can think of is when they made the Behemoth spin to solve their problem
@@peoplez129 And they still rely on magboots all the time.
"It's possible to even survive a short burst of 46 g's of horizontal acceleration"
Alex Kamal would like to have a word with you
too soon
Uhhhhh
It wasn't the short bursts it was the sustained gs and the juice
Poochie died on the way to his home planet.
RIP
The only thing that is missing in the spaceships in the expanse is radiators because especially with their fusion drives which is very hot, they must need that to function realistically
I believe they have heatsinks which exchange excess heat with the void of space.
Heat sinks store heat, radiators are what exchange heat with space.
I love the hard science fiction of the Expanse. I love Star Trek, but the force fields & ray beams get old after awhile. I think that’s why I loved Battlestar Galactica & Firefly so much, both who used bullets instead of light beams for weapons. I gave a pass at their respective gravity solutions, as they were the best SciFi in their respective eras, but The Expanse exceeds both!
IMO the expanse is "Real SciFI" becaues "Technology changes everything". This is what SciFi is about, inventing a technology and then as a mind game exploring what it would mean.. Star Trek (Albeit I'm loving TNG to death).. just isn't really, or just kinda. It's frozen in status quo... and often they discover something in one episode, that would be revolutionary in one way and another.. and forget about it the next week.
@@georgelionon9050 I know I'm late, but I fully agree with this. One thing that I really appreciate about the Expanse's tech, is that the authors & writers are able to explain the evolution of modern day tech into what we see in The Expanse. We don't have Epstein drives, or handheld terminals, but the writers can explain sensibly how we get from what we have today, to what they have in the show. That makes the entire universe feel so much more believable & grounded
Direct energy weapons are getting reality now ... I see no reason why a "light beam" weapon should be less realistic than a ballistic one.
@@andreabindolini7452 it's not even so much the fact that it's light beam, but the way it's often portrayed. These magical beams coming from random locations.
Compare that to something like Ashford using the Behemoth's comms array to try & destroy the ring? It's the way the show was grounded in realism & believability that just was so enjoyable
@@Takhar7 The series is believable, not entirely realistic. For example the ring, AKA the wormhole, is depicted in a totally wrong way because, well, in a three dimensional space, the entrance cannot be a flat surface: it should be a sphere, as correctly depicted in the movie "Interstellar".
From someone who has experienced a trainer used for fighter pilots that spins you in circles while you are rotated to simulate pulling Gs in a jet 9gs positively it’s hard to keep aware as your vision narrows. This* is uncomfortable but manageable but negative Gs hurt like hell or you red out as the blood vessels in your eyes burst. This is why fighter pilots pull Gs rather than push them. I think you described these affects very well!
Not all fighters have reclined seats, this is not a design feature inherent to all jet fighters., If memory serves, the F-16 was one of or the first jet to have a reclined seat, but prior to that, they were pretty much all sitting straight upright or only very slightly reclined.
.. you know that the effects of acceleration -g- on a body do not have the same effects in SPACE as it does on Earth.
@@andreacianti6416 this is not true the pull of Earths gravity does go down with distance but you would have to be much further than the moon to escape the gravity well of the Earth. Astronauts do not experience 0G when in space they just perceive weightlessness due to their horizontal velocity canceling out the downward pull of Earth so the Astronauts essentially experience the same feeling as a skydiver in free fall while in orbit but avoid hitting the ground due to horizontal velocity causing them to “miss” the Earth. This is why suborbital flights such as Blue Origins current rocket can reach “space” or above 100km while only achieving max speeds of ~2500mph the crew will experience ~3 minutes of weightlessness even on that ballistic trajectory but the pull of Earth’s gravity does not change enough throughout the flight for it to have a noticeable effect. Sorry if I rambled on with this I am just very passionate when it comes to Physics, Aeronautical Engineering, and Orbital Mechanics.
@@Riceball01 I should have clarified that I meant modern fighters have the reclined seats to help with pulling Gs my mistake. I also did not mention the G suits that are used which were first used by the British in WWII.
@@andreacianti6416 G-forces are just an acceleration away from the previous straight line of velocity. This is because of Newton’s laws, all objects have inertia, Newton’s First Law. If you are going fast enough to experience G-forces. They would be the same because of how thrust works. Albeit there is a difference between space and air. The principles are the same. The only difference between space and air, is air resistance. Flying through the air is remarkably easier than flying through space. Space in a manoeuvring perspective is very similar to air. So the same principles of fighter jets and spacecraft apply to each other. G-forces are just accelerations away from the previous velocity.
One problem I have with the design of ships in the expanse is that the bridge is typically on the "top" of the ship, or the point furthest away from the engine. With the command crew's feet pointed towards the center of mass rapid rotational maneuvers would throw the crew into the walls and ceiling.
It would be way better to have the bridge as close to the center of gravity as possible to minimize the effects of rotating the ship on the crew.
Good point! Being at the centre of rotation would certainly help prevent blackouts from flipping.
Also, the "bridge at center" tends to offer more protection from projectile weapons and radiation from nuclear explosions. The CIC "Combat Information Center" on a modern US Naval warship is the nerve center of the ship which is why it is deep in the most protected part of the ship.
Aren't the bridges in the centre of the large warships, like the MCRN battleships?
Huh, really good points.
Yeah, the Donnie bridge was iirc somewhere close to center, and basically floating inside a bigger space. I think....damn, now I'm getting paranoid.
Google isn't helping, so I'm just gonna stand by it.
They are for the big big ships like the Donnie and Agatha king. For ships like the roci which aren't too big you'd want as much distance between you and your fusion engine since if they thing gets rail gunned you want to be shielded as much as possible from possible radiation dose once you eject the core.
I think the rotating seat assembly in the Razorback is called a gimbal, a roll cage is usually an external safty structure outside of vehicles, but that is just how I understand it.
Quite right! Good thing I'm not an engineer!
@@RyanRidden haha neither am I, no worries, love your channel!
Roll cages are bolted to the chassis, but inside the vehicle in most cases.
+1 for gimbal, and these were and sometimes still are used on boats for stoves and dining tables so cooking and eating can happen in rough seas. (A quick worthwhile Wikipedia read for more applications)
What I wonder about those in the razorback is whether they are servo-actuated or passive with dampers so you don't pendulum - the latter being what old boats have. I'd guess servo-actuated because if a person's weight distribution is slightly mismatched to the chair's designed center of mass, the passive orientation's resultant force vector error would be a big deal at 46G.
On the other hand, "turning" (rotation + new linear acceleration) in space needs to be thought through carefully. Maximum off-main-engine-axis acceleration is limited by the steering/maneuvering thrusters which seem very weak even on the razorback; it can "turn" (rotate) quickly because it has a small moment of inertia. Pilot seats would logically be located nearest the ship center of mass to minimize the movement experienced by pilots, so dramatic gimbal rotations would seem unneeded BUT they would be in opposite directions unless both seats are (sub-optimally) forward of the ship center of mass.
The Expanse has a great feeling of authenticity about it. Have recently been rewatching the whole series again. Definitely my favorite sci fi show. Really enjoyed your video.
I'm watching the series for the second time too. It's proving to be more enjoyable!
The books are amazing.
Question for you: do you ever get the slight impression that the writers treat the solar system as a neat line of planets like in a one of those Solar System wall posters?
Reason for asking is really just the notion of 'outer planets' as a distinct region; there will be times when, say, Earth is closer to Ceres Station than Ceres is to Ganymede, when Ganymede, along with Jupiter, is the other side of the sun from Ceres. I just occasionally (not all the time) get the impression that the 'outer system' is written in such a way as being clumped together, far away from Earth and Mars.
Well that's more politically not travel time related. And the outer planets originally did not include stuff like Ceres but it was considered a part of earth's domain partially owned by the MCRN too. The OPA takes over Ceres in the wake of the MCRN/OPA war and the EMC civil war expanding the outer planets to be in this weird situation.
u mean like how mercury is the closest planet to every other planet kinda thing?
There are definitely times where it seems far too easy/fast for them to get to places, like with the ring gate. I think its probably unavoidable since it would probably become too tedious and hard to keep track of the relative positions of everything.
@@RyanRidden Probably the same as in Game of Thrones, where travel times weren't really apparent in the show, despite them potentially taking weeks or months. It's hard to somehow represent the boring weeks inbetween, but that doesn't need to imply that they're not there
A good point, but perhaps a result of us being used to looking at land maps. Think of the solar system as orbital shells around the sun that require using energy to transfer between them. This would mean Earth and Ceres are always closer in terms of transit energy than Earth and Ganymede, even if the opposite is true in a straight (as-the-space-crow-flies) line. Think of it like saying the International Space Station is always "closer" to the moon than the earth even though spatially that's not the case if they're on opposite sides of the earth. The attention to detail in this series is incredible, Stanley Kubrick would be proud.
Loved the practicality of the ships in the expanse. Even how railguns zipped their ballistic rounds right through ships and the crews wore space suits going into battle and also depressurised the ships when fighting.
I would love to see more near-future sci-fi. The Martian is one of favourite films ever. Good solid science porn with engaging characters thrown in.
Enjoyable video by the way. 👍
The writer seems to have so much insights over space engineerings, while most spaceship designs in Scifis were either 'space airplanes' or sea ships in space, and one of the most influential designs came from Leiji Matsumoto.
Blood to the head is called "red-out", not "black-out"
"rocket canal house" will be my next home purchase
Does that count as immovable property?
@@georgelionon9050 More like a mobile home with much more range. I have an image of vertical trailer parks! lol
Relocate to anywhere in the solar system!
Yeah, but usually too small for a lift and then you're stuck with all those damned stairs!
@@frankmueller2781 No worries, the stairs are only a problem on Earth... in most other situations in the Expanse, you'd be at about 0.3G or less, in which case stairs are not much of an obstacle. In fact, you'd probably benefit greatly from what little exercise the stairs provide if you do it enough! ;-]
(Sorry, I've got Nerd Tourette's Syndrome...It's a tendency to blurt out unnecessary technical details whether they were requested or not... I'll be alright in a minute. lol)
When you mentioned ships spinning for gravity, I’m surprised you didn’t mention Babylon 5, with it’s giant O’Neill Cylinder.
The Behmoth is probably too small for an interstellar trip, even in the show atmospheric leackage was mentioned as an issue. Also the Interior would have more levels to minimize puncture damage and create more surface area.
It's not obvious in the show but the Navuoo isn't a hollow tube. Most of its living space is in the hull with several layers of decks hidden by the environment level at the center acting as a sort of massive park for recreation and farming.
@@outerheaven155 They even have a giant incandescene light in the drum axis to recreate the outdoor sun. Nobody, not even the Martians can afford that luxury in their domes
@@minhducnguyen674 Mormons know what they want
@@69Kazeshini The mormon church is about as rich as Bill Gates, and that's just church assets. The idea that such an organization could build a space program if it wanted to is not far off.
@@inventor121
You misunderstand the purpose of the LDS Church's funds if you call them "rich" like they can buy whatever they want (btw, they prefer to be called by their full title, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). It's generally for Church welfare, not spending as they please like the Catholics did in the Renaissance.
Also, don't forget the "Y Que" slingshot craft piloted by Maneo. It had a very minimal drive and relied on directional thrusters.
Also, typically ships in the expanse only fly at 1/3g to make it easier on the belter crews and conserve reaction mass.
Otherwise, this is a fantastic video I will be sharing with new fans of the show to help explain why they don't have "gravity plating" and "inertial dampers..."
A spinning drum is a lot harder to engineer than you'd think, as the static section isn't anchored to anything so they'll both just end up spinning in opposite directions, you would need sets of thrusters permanently firing in counter directions on the two parts of the ship. It's easier to make ome like the endurance from interstaller where the whole thing just spins, but that also makes its near impossible to dock, as we saw.
You just need to overcome whatever friction there is between the opposite spining modules, making it hold athmosphere is the more difficult task if you ask me.
My opinion has always been to have two cylinders spin in parallel next to each other.
easy: make two cylinders and have each rotate in opposite directions
Dunno about Tycho, but Behemoth had thrusters on the outside of the drum. Therefore no torque was applied to the center shaft, (the static part) of the ship. So it wouldn't need counter thrusters. The engineering deck was in zero G as we saw during Holden, Bobby and badass Drummers raid
Babylon5 also accomodated the gravity and acceleration issues very well too with fighter design, rotational sections and so on.
Who noticed Mass Effect theme in background ?
Was just about to comment at the 9:20 or so mark. It's the Vigil theme.
man who could forget that music.
I did.
First thing I noticed!
Dr Ridden, "the ships can create gravity at 1 G while there is fuel". True, but from the story, the ships must not be burning at 1 G normally because Naomi (a belter who is not used to 1 G) cannot stand 1 G for long durations. The story bears this out in Season 4 on the plant Illus, gravity was slightly more than 1 G and Naomi can't handle it after a few days and had to return to the Rocci. Others have commented that the Rocci typically generates 0.3 to 0.5 G when accelerating and only occasionally does high G burns. Yes, yes, I only have a Masters Degree in Science.
Additionally, Star Trek ships also had inertial dampeners working in tandem with the gravitional plates to prevent people from being pushed against the back wall whenever the ship used thrust. Thus the forces exerted upon passengers of such ships work in both the X/Y axis AND the A/Z axis. So the ship can engage thrust at anytime allowing the passengers to walk upright simultaneously.
Unless you're Earth or Mars military, 1G is almost unheard of in The Expanse. Nearly everything runs at 1/3rd of a G. Partly to conserve reaction mass, partly because that's the most that Belters can really tolerate. Most rocks have very little gravity to speak of.
The books suggested the Behemoth / Medina Station spins at 1/10th of a G. The Mormons wanted 1G because they're Earthers, so that's what the ship was designed to do. However, the Belters had zero intention of making their new home spin at 1G. It'd rip their people apart. It meant massive modifications to the drainage systems because the station needs to grow food in the slow zone, but water doesn't drain as easily in the agricultural area at 1/10th of a G.
Even a little bit of spin or thrust means you can use the toilet without embarrassment (or needing vacuum attachments) (or having to sanitise and deodorise the air intake filters if something goes wrong like the pilot makes an unexpected course correction). I'm of the firm opinion that the ISS (or its replacement) needs a spin section - but definitely not at 1G. Just enough for a few cabins for people to shower, eat, do other minor stuff, possibly even sleep (if there are health benefits in being under gravity for at least some of the time). The lower the G the smaller the radius can be with tolerable coriolis.
Indeed! Also much of UA-cam video out there that calculate how big a station must be for 1G and what forces you'd need to withstand etc.. totally miss that already a small part would be a huge gain. No need for a full G.
Hitting me with that mass effect music at the end. How dare you
Yea that was a high G turn
My thoughts exactly! Mass Effect has perfect music for space. Especially when he said, "drawn by the music of cosmic harmonies". With the Mass Effect music playing then.... Perfect. Touches the soul.
A minor detail, but fighter pilots don't face forward because that's where most of the acceleration comes from. In fact, the most intense acceleration comes from maneuvering, which can be up to 9 gs depending on the jet and it's payload. Meanwhile, engines might give maybe 2 gs for short bursts at full power. In fact, if you look at some fighter cockpits closely you'll see the seat reclines significantly to give the pilot better g tolerances. Having the pilot laying flat would be the best, but would make flying the plane rather difficult.
Really glad I found this channel! Really interesting facts presented in a comprehensive way. Also, Mass Effect’s “Vigil” is always a welcome sensation!
Thanks! Vigil is one of the best tracks!
I'm really enjoying the channel. Thanks you. A couple of comments.
7:50 Nice radian dodge. Well done.
The show doesn't talk much about this, but the ships often accelerate at much less than 1g. I believe spinning stations like Tycho and the Behemoth would likely be around 0.3g. It's part of the reason why Belters struggle in 1g environments for extended periods.
Great video.
Babylon 5 also featured more realistic and functional ship design, at least for the Earth Alliance. Some ships had rotating sections and those that didn't had layouts similar in some ways to the Roci .
I like the way they flip in order to slow down.
It's interesting when you consider both ST and the Expanse take place in approx the time frame The Expanse is roughly 250 years roughly 23rd century. Star trek is depending upon whether its ENT,TOS,TNG late 22nd to 24th, While I wish the ST technologies were real I feel the Expanse is going to be much much closer to the mark.
Difficult to say, Just remember back Space Odyssey 2001.. we don't have super AI computer and are hardly space born.. but we have Smartphones, something the movie never seen anywhere near coming. We're generally pretty bad in predicting the future.
I agree however that Expanse requires far fewer "miracle technology breakthroughs" than Star Trek and is thus more likely to be close. As engineer some things bug me tough: these transparent smartphone likes they have. Why the hell would you do them transparent? I do get the reason behind 3D holograms for course projections. These are great, but a 2D-Display that's transparent is just stupid and made to look superficially "futuristic".
Also the shots on the tools, they have same old tools, tongs, pliers, I'd like to have a little creativity here (Star Trek does this much better). The wires look old tech even by todays standards.
And from a philosophical standpoint, one main idea (a little more hidden) in Star Trek is society not evolving only technologically but socially.. in ST for example the characters hardly ever have grudges for a longer time, for me it looks even often unrealistic how easy they are to forgive. Well definitely not in the Expanse, the even got a bit more primitive than civilization today. But honestly that's just taste, no idea how it is going to be.
@@georgelionon9050 Society doesn't really evolve on it's own to much. It's rather function of economics. Expanse is the same old capitalism (with some small upgrades like very basic income on Earth), so society is almost the same.
@@georgelionon9050
That's largely because Earth united under a single banner in Star Trek. Picard even mentions in _First Contact_ that humanity has forgotten how to cuss by the time of Next Generation (a point which was completely ignored by the Abrams timeline, as evidenced with the Discovery and Picard shows). Because of long-term unity on Earth, society had evolved to become more polite, which is probably why they don't hold grudges.
With The Expanse, humanity is still divided by race (Earth and Mars vs. the Belt) and ideology (Earth vs. Mars vs. the Belt).
@@AdderTude That was largely my point, yes.
@@georgelionon9050 They had tablets in 2001. You could see them lie on their table as they were eating.
Got me with that Mass Effect tune! Mass Effect the best sci-fi video game and Expanse the best scif-fi tv series. A great duo.
Ryan: "Ships of the imagination. Time will tell"
Me: "This closing feels oddly very Sagan-y to me..."
*Video ends with a clip from the original Cosmos documentary*
Me: :'')
You can't beat the original! Sagan is the reason I got into science and scicom, something I think many astronomers have in common!
I was also all "did he just go full Cosmos?!" ❤️
Whoever thought out the physics of this show was a genius. great vid
Eh. Not really
With the exception of the UN Navy, ships in The Expanse tend to operate at about .3gs (or the surface gravity of Mars).
Doing my best belter impression: "Even our artificial gravity is defined by the inners."
@@Darilon12, actually most Belters spend the majority of their life "on the float" and since their biology was defined by more than 200 millennia under Earth's gravity they get ALL of the dysfunction and flaws with no benefits. Sucks to be them.
Compared to many other fiction films - The Exspanse - it’s done a little better, but there’s still a lot of film license.
a little ? :D
@@hansmuller1175 For real a little I think he meant to say a lot.
The Expanse videos so far have been awesome, would love to see more!
I like the expanse but revalation space by Alastair Reynolds takes most of the concepts from the expanse and cranks them up to eleven.
There are interstellar ships called lighthuggers which move very close to the speed of light by just constantly accelerating at 1g for years.
These ships are enormous, literally kilometer long constructs that are basically flying city states with armaments and storage capacity for hundreds of thousands of colonists.
Similar to the expanse these ships are arranged vertically for in flight gravity but have rotating sections for in system gravity.
The sheer scale of these ships is simply beautiful but it always reminds me of the expanse.
I hear you with that Mass Effect music! Great video, as always!
Yeah.. when I heard that I to was, like.. WHAT?
The moment I heard it I wanted to play the trilogy again. = D
@@SergioBQ87 I did just that a few weeks ago.
It's one of the best game series! I loved ME3, up until I had to choose a color... The upcoming legendary edition looks worthy of another play through!
@@RyanRidden I strongly recomend to be careful about the new edition. See here ua-cam.com/video/EEiJJFM7fnM/v-deo.html
I instead recommend to stick to the old versions. Yes, they may not be as advanced in terms of graphics (ME1 in particular) but at least you get the version without nonsensical censoring.
It is a sad reality that remasters tend to be dulled down in order to appease the ultra-puritan crowd on social media - and one of the main reason why I have largely checked out on "modern" entertainment.
If you mentioned it, I missed where you addressed “the juice.” Also, the crew regularly wear mag boots on the Roci, so the acceleration is something less than sufficient to maintain pull in one direction.
I'm one of those that occasionally pops in to see the station designs submitted to NASA's annual scholastic competition. All the orbital designs utilize centrifical force, but there was one I really liked for a loop ship. It's ring was segmented so that the sections could rotate based on the combination of spin AND engine thrust during it's boost, coast, and braking phases.
I'm also surprised you did not mention Babylon 5. That was a show where you saw both near science solutions (the Earth Aliance ships, including B5 itself), and super sci (nearly everyone else).
A bungalow type of ship would make more sense actually. No need for an aerodynamic slender hull.
I love the use of the Mass Effect soundtrack in the backgorund
Job well done! Glad to see more ppl noticing and appreciating the gravity of work that went into building The Expanse universe. It’s an even better series of novels I certainly recommend
I wish that they could have animated the show, but kept the same cast.
"Gravity of work..." I saw what you did there haha!
That Mass Effect music at the end brings back memories...
One thing the Expanse does handwave though is the radiation problem one would face in long distance and long term space travel.
I love the music from Mass Effect used in this video - there are so many comparisons to draw between Mass Effect and The Expanse and I love it!
What you have under 10k subs that's insane these videos are soo good
Ryan, the Earth ships in the early seasons of Babylon 5 had spinning sections and the station itself was somewhat like an O'Neill cylinder, rotating around its linear axis.
I've never seen Babylon 5, sounds like I should change that!
@@RyanRidden probably the first popular scifi to show ships traveling in one direction while turning to fire in another. Not quite hard scifi but quite a bit crunchier than typical for the day. Unfortunately, they made heavy use of CGI and it was made in the 90s though, so... ouch. Special effects really don't hold up, but good storytelling too. And from a media standpoint, it was one of the shows in that era that helped sell the business types on the possibility of long-form storytelling in television.
@@RyanRidden You should. It was a great series. I quite disagree with Mr Fisher's comments. No "ouch" for me. Their starfighters were very well designed. Unlike most most sci-fi movies or TV shows that have fighters fly like airplanes, the Star Furies on B5 used thrusters to change direction. Some things, like inertia, haven't been solved, so as a physicist, you still have to suspend some belief and just enjoy the show.
@@j.f.fisher5318 Special effects were quite good for the time...
@@brownro214 The only thing that always bothered me, they never invented a tech-explanation why an enemy force couldn't blow up Babylon 5 simply by opening a Jump point right inside the station from hyperspace. Same with planetary attacks. Attack a planet by opening jump points on the planet safely from hyperspace.. (they generally also didn't have guards within hyperspace).
But it was my favorite show nevertheless..
PS: There are also some story discrepancies over the whole arc, as they kept changing the story on the fly due to real life issues of actors being replaced etc. (For example the prophicies for Lando, or the "do you know who I really am" visions for Ivannova etc.
It's look like you forget to mention gravity juice that injected to the passenger when they accelerated or during high-g maneuvers.
I'm a simple man...
I saw EXPANSE in thumbnail and I clicked and subscribed
using 1G acelleration as false gravity was common in the Battletech science fiction.
Actually in the Expanse 1/3 g seems to be standard rate of efficiency and gravity compromise.
Yes - at least in the books. In series - although I dont think specified- they move as in 1G - but that is reasonable expedient as opposed to SFX cost of trying to simulate 0.3g for entire series.
A: the razorback is a racing ship so it will be built differant, but it is also built vertically the seats can just turn any direction for fast turns
B: the rocinante seats and other small frigates we see have their seats lean back for this
I marvel about how people forget about the space shuttle when talks about reusable rockets.
The shuttles were certainly a good step to reusability and an icon of space flight, but the amount of refurbishment they needed after each flight was almost like building one from scratch. The real power of the Space X boosters is that they are good to launch again almost right away.
Reusable and refurbished are two very different things though. If SpaceX changed all their engines on the Falcon 9 boosters then they could achieve must faster turnaround times than the Space shuttle. The reason the space shuttle had such high costs associated with reuse was more related to the tiles used handle reentry heating. The reasons his is such an issue is because the amount of reentry heating goes up by the power of 3 as your speed increases so if you double the speed your spacecraft will deal with 64x the heating during reentry.
@@RyanRidden the full flow staged combustion cycle of the raptor engines hopes to solve the issue of “rapid” reusability by lowering the combustion chamber temperatures and avoiding the coking from polymers formed in other longer chain hydrocarbon engines. If the Merlin engine did not have to have its turbines cleaned then all you would have to do is top off the ignition fuel (TTEB the green stuff on startup) and refuel the booster to launch again.
@@williamgorham7339 And SpaceX plans to solve the tile reusability issue in a few ways. Mainly with thickness, using the same interchangeable tile shape for 90% of the rocket and cheap automated tile placement/replacement.
@@RyanRidden When they don't blow up during the landing sequence..
2:24 "This canal-house idea is something I haven't really seen explored in science-fiction". I guess you never read the comics series "Tintin-destination moon" (French: Objectif Lune). It was written way back in 1953, and scientifically it was remarkably accurate, including the part where they actually explore the moon. The used rocket works according to the "Canal house" concept, and is also constructed as such. A "nuclear powered engine" continuously accelerates the craft at 1G, so that the travelers experience normal gravity. When they are half way, the craft reverses and starts to decelerate with 1G all the way to the moon. During the "reversal procedure", they are weightless as it should (and unfortunately, they also become weightless when Captain Haddock in a drunken stupor accidentally turns off the engine during flight).
Considering this was written in 1953 even before Sputnik took to the skies, this is a remarkable realistic comic I can recommend! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destination_Moon_(comics)
Glad I checked the comments since this was what was going to mention (I was pretty late to watching The Expanse so only just finished it), but as you point out exactly the same process used in Tintin comics. Having read them as a kid immediately concluded that that was what was happening in this show when seeing their ships travelling in space as well as how it worked to create gravity within the ships. As you say, amazing to consider that those comics were from the 1950s and the concept seems to be rarely used in Sci fi since then.
I love watching these before the new episode each week. Cant wait for your channel to blow up
There is a problem with spinning.
If the spinning object is to small, a person on board gets confused whenever it moves.
Also objects wouldn't fall completely strait to the floor.
That's why we need to build biiiiiig
If only we’d had vids like this when I was trying to get my head around equations to do with gravity at school
Gravity is a hard mistress.
One thing I don't like about the depiction though is that sometimes they'll flip a ship 180° and take off in a new direction lickity-split when all they would be doing is slowing their forward momentum. If you've been travelling at 1g for some time, it would take just as much to stop, forget about zooming back the way you came in seconds.
I think that's a perspective trick. The ship isn't zooming in the other direction, it's _the camera_ that doesn't decelerate along with the spaceship, so it flies ahead and the ship begins to lag behind.
Loved the Mass Effect music at the end.
Big fan of the expanse here, I gotta say what draws me to the series is the attention to detail and realistic science behind most of the series.
I think it would have been helpful to spend a bit more time explaining the flip and deceleration at 1g gravity for the second half of a journey too.
I think one small problem with the thrust-based gravity is that you can't really change your trajectory very easy. Since you are accelerating with 1g all the time, you're velocity quickly becomes so big, that you can're reasonably change course. Normally in the middle of your journey, you need to turn around (how is the acceleration handled while turning?) to decelerate enough to come to a stand still at the point you need to reach.
Maybe a normal ship would often alternate between accelerating and decelerating generally staying around a desired velocity?
You can't change your trajectory easily in space, regardless of how fast your ship is moving. But with higher accelerations it's actually easier to change the trajectory.
@@DarthBiomech How? That makes no sense.
@@afriendofafriend5766 It's basic school physics. Something that accelerates at 1G perpendicular to the trajectory of movement will shift it's trajectory in a new direction faster than something that accelerates at 0.1G.
So that’s why Alex died from stroke when trying to save Naomi. Blood attached the brain
More like the actor couldn’t controle his blood flow in reasonable ways
@@danielmoura9421 Too much blood flow in the wrong head.
@@danielmoura9421 you speak the truth, but the character death was reasonable, and in the books was the same way that Fred dies, since they killed him in a different way on the show it was free to use for someone else to show the dangers of space even without fighting
spoilers...
I guess also because he got the sack for pending criminal allegations so they had to kill him off sooner than expected.
You failed to mention the Coriolis effect and pseudo Coriolis forces that would be experienced by the crew of a rotating vessel. The reason we don't rotate space vehicles in reality is because of this effect and there are a variety of interesting studies that have been done on it. It regularly causes nausea and inhibits astronauts ability to perform basic tasks as their hand / eye co-ordination are thrown off depending on their orientation to the spinning body.
wow, what a timing. I asked about this topic yesterday!
The first place, where gravity by constant acceleration was displayed was "the adventures of Tintin, to the moon" (1950) with an animated film made later, to be seen also here on youtube, minute 7:00 in the episode, the professor explains quite well, how this works; also the effects of acceleration, scarcity of oxygen and reduced gravity on the moon is discussed. Even magnetic boots and a nuclear propulsion were already in it. I was puzzled for decades, why Scifi shows kept ignoring that old masterpiece of SciFi :-) and then finally the Expanse came along! Great!
The Expanse way more scientific than most shows
"most"? ALL of them! Even B5 was less scientifically accurate.
And the expanse ships 'flip' half way and decelerate to maintain 1G without overshooting.
Also medical enhancements to allow more survivability to varied gravity explored in Expanse.
Was interesting watching red bull air races, blackout at away from head G's and whiteout at to head G's, more about oxygen to brain which is carried by blood.
They either hold breath or hyperventilate to prepare for next maneuver.
You forgot to mention the magboots!
Magboots are more for the show. They rarely use them in the books and people seem to prefer to float around when not under acceleration. I think the heavy use of Magboots in the show is for budget reasons.
I hate that clicking sound.
Also Amos boarded that shuttle on Earth, from a garage while in a fight, and he is IMMEDIATELY with a magboot.
It's like any shoe have magboots on it :-\
@@duramirez Is he IMMEDIATELY, or is just not shown when he switches them on? I mean I don't want to throw out lame excuses, but it's the same as why hardly stories mention about protagonists going to the toilets. They show the viewer the highlights of a story instead of every second detail..
@@georgelionon9050 nah, it's quite immediately, its a tense situation they taking bullets in the airlock door closes the ship departures and then immediately CLICKING sounds :(
I dunno, perhaps they don't show him changing but then anyway, where were the boots :-\ weird.
@@duramirez I'd have to rewatch ;)
The Nuclear Fission Saltwater Engine designed by Robert Zubrin is a currently possible technology that basically gives a spaceship the same (or similar) efficiency as the Fusion drives from The Expanse. The problem with Zubrin's engine is that the exhaust spews deadly radiation. But as long as you don't point the exhaust at anything you care about most of the radiation is traveling at a speed that it will escape out of the Solar System. Definitely a space-only Spaceship. With this engine you could design spaceships that look exactly like the ones in The Expanse, and you will be able to maintain 1G of burn for hours on end (maybe even days).
Of course there is this one thing that the Expanse universe completly ignores: heat
Yes! Those ships would need massive radiators hanging off the side
@@cantdestroyher7245 That and of course the whole idea of "stealth" in space would completly disappear.
Something as simple as fireing your RCS thruster around Pluto would end up on Avasaralas desk a few hours later.
@@Chiggi0815 haha i love that. I could just imagine her reacting to that
Absolutely! I've once seen a video about estimating how space battles would turn out, and basically heat (and the ability to dissipate) would be the deciding factor... where the losing side would have heated so much up, they cannot act anymore and must surrender...
I guess the expanse tech fiction is engines (and computers etc.) being soooo efficient, it isn't an issue...
The writers acknowledge this. The fusion drives have non-realistic levels of efficiency.
Great video, and the nod to Carl Sagan at the end there was a beautiful touch.
Perhaps one day as in DUNA. folding the space, traveling without movement ...
Great video! Really enjoyed. And so good to hear Mass Effect at the end :)
Hi Dr Ryan. I've had an idea for a rocket engine based on a variation of the VASIMIR ion drive. If nitrogen were used
as the reaction mass in the engine, then after being accelerated by the grid the nitrogen ions were neutralized and
allowed to recombine into N2 wouldn't that chemical reaction add enough energy to the plasma to bring it close to
Epstine Drive levels of efficiency? I'm assuming a fusion reactor driving the VASIMIR. I know it takes a LOT of
energy to disassociate N2>2N but going from 2N to N2 is the basis of many hi-explosives. At least, this could allow
practical single stage to orbit. It would be more efficient than a pure chemical engine and more powerful than an
ion thruster. I'd love to hear any knowledgeable opinions out there. This idea has been knocking around inside my
head for awhile now.
@@aysnov The VASIMIR ion drive is a fairly recent and original variation on the conventional ion thruster
used on some current satellites. You can read more about it in wikipedea. I thought by using the bonding
energy of the nitrogen molecule, you could dramatically increase both the thrust and specific impulse
of the exhaust products, but I, myself, don't have the chemical background to calculate the changes that would
occur .
@@calderlane6623 Nice answer.
I’m not a chemist or a physicist but I don’t think adding any kind of chemical reaction to your ion drive will get you anywhere near the efficiency you’d get from a fusion reaction. But how would the nitrogen recombining in the exhaust provide thrust? It doesn’t matter what happens to your reaction mass after you’ve already thrown it out of the back of your ship
@@oberonpanopticon Thank you for responding. I did not make myself clear. I wasn't thinking of travel through space. The idea was a better way
to get from surface to orbit. The Idea is to use PART of the VASIMIR engine to ionize the nitrogen and then move the nitrogen ions to the combustion
chamber where you give them back their electrons to neutralize them, allow them to recombine into a diatomic molecule giving off a LOT of energy
in the process. Two nitrogen atoms release 946 MJ when they combine. Methane and oxygen release 890 MJ. Thats only 56 MJ but carbon dioxide
and water are 2.2 times as massive as a diatomic nitrogen molecule so the resultant exhaust velocity would be much higher giving much greater
efficiency.
The fault is mine for not being more clear. The trick to the whole thing is to break the nitrogen bond then ionize the atoms to stop them from
recombining until you want them to. Only a small part of the VASIMIR process would be used. That was the best way I could think of to break one
of the strongest bonds in nature then deliver the ions to the combustion chamber in one continuous process.
The purpose is to have a much more efficient earth to orbit system in order to increase the payload fraction of the ship.
I hope I've made myself more clear this time.
The major issue with spin gravity is that the smaller the radius of the cylinder the more severe coriolis force will be. On a ship as small as Endurance you will probably have severe nausea all the time.
Romain Grossgean experienced nearly 50 g s when he crashed , last year
Captain John Stapp tested himself in some very severe deceleration tests sometime in the late 40s/early 50s. He demonstrated that a human can withstand 46g in the forward direction if properly harnessed. I don’t think they dared go higher! At one point stapp was the fastest man on earth as he rode a rocket sled to 632mph!
5:28 fun piece of trivia, we call it "red-out" when you fall unconscious due to blood rushing to the head. Black-out is usually for when the blood is rushing to the lower body.
Couldn't you generate spin gravity with a long tether between two modules instead of having to build a giant ship?
Wouldn't something like that need constant thruster adjustments when the mass shifts about inside
You totally could. This is even kind of in the show of that space ship orbiting New Terra. They don't have a complete ring, but just a "ring fragment" they spin around.
In practice with nowadays tough, there isn't a material that could hold that kind of strain... Steel certainly couldn't. Nanotubes maybe could, but cannot be manufactured in that dimension. There are some ideas that hold the centripetal force with magnetism..
They did that in season 4. They even had the two pods at different distances from the main hull, so that one pod would simulate less gravity for the belters, and the other pod would simulate heavier gravity for Earth people.
@@georgelionon9050 Of course we have materials for spin tethers. Crane cables can pull 200 tonnes in 1G, that means it would work fine for 600 tonnes in 1/3G. Cable stayed Bridges use way bigger and tougher cables. You can basically spin two starships no problem, if you want to.
Spinning drums and rings feel almost like gravity when you stand or sit still, but the down force will feel stronger the further you are away from the axis and weaker the closer you are to the axis. Which would likely cause severe dizziness and nausea if the ring is not big enough. It's estimated that a ring would need to have a radius of a hundred meter so that you can walk normally.
The Behemoth is well above that size, so it should be pretty comfortable. The Discovery 1 is much too small though, and you'd probably be stumbling around a lot.
What would feel even weirder to our sense of balance is that if you walk in a direction that makes you go around the axis faster, the down force would feel stronger. And if you move in the opposite direction, it would feel weaker. You'd have to train yourself to always start walking slowly and to not make sudden stops or turn around while walking. And trying to throw things like balls across the room would be super weird.
This is a good point. In The Expanse books, coriolis force is actually mentioned when the Behemoth spins up, making a character feel sick. The Discovery 1 would be impossible to live on. You'd be pulled to the side by different degrees along the length of your body, and be severely nauseous all the time. For a spinning space station like in 2001 A Space Odyssey, the ring would have to be hundreds of metres across for the force to feel like gravity caused by a mass.
If you rotated your head on the discovery from up axis to down axis, the middle ear would know something horrible had happened.
@@glynwilliams4204 Try walking while looking up. That's already too much for the sense of balance to handle.
Would you be able to deal with higher g's if you were submerged in a sort of big fishtank?
Any thoughts are welcome :)
The weight of fluid on your chest might prevent you breathing. Gel couch is the way to go.
@@DavidOfWhitehills Hmm I don’t know maybe. But my thought was that you could breathe compressed air, which matches the pressure around you. Similar to how scuba diving works. You can stay at three hundred meters underwater with water pressure around you being 30 bar and still be fine if the air is compressed to match that.
@@schmijo At first I would have said no, because the main issue is your heart pumping blood around and being in water wouldn't change that... However on the ohter hand, if you would put your body in high pressure situation (like a diver) the oxygen delivery does get more efficient... (and would become even problematic if not counter acted)... so in that case, it could work.
But you'd have to maintain high G situation since you would have to maintain high pressure, thus not suitable to the combat situations like in the Expanse.
No it would not be better, 1) more pressure acting on you from the weight of the water when pulling G's 2) water is heavy and would cost a lot more fuel to move. 3) water doesn't counteract gforces. If you're pulling enough G's for your skull to cave in, it doesn't matter if you're in a water tank or not, the internal stresses on your body will simply cause things like your bones to crush, or your squishy bits to squish. Water won't stop that. For example, let's say you took a table rated for 300lbs and put it under water. Guess what....it would still only be rated for 300lbs, and still collapse when adding too much weight on it.
Fun fact, the original Enterprise was modeled after the burner ring on an electric oven. Then, it was further refined by an Air Force veteran using aircraft logic.
They also liked how the ship came with a saucer section like a flying saucer.
I like that you went into how The Expanse uses it's ship design to generate gravity, but would have like to have heard more about if the efficiency of an Epstein Drive would even be possible. I've seen several things about an Epstein not being possible issue with "Heat Problems", Reactor fuel vs reaction mass, the exhaust/drive ploom would be so enormous that it would destroy anything traveling nearby...etc. I assume alot of these issues are based on how a modern understanding of how a hypothetical nuclear engine would/could work, and that within the lore of the novels/show are the problems that Solomon Epstein was able to solve to create his fictious drive... but still would like to know if those are even solvable problems by what we understand about nuclear physics.
There are existing nuclear engine designs. They do have extremely high ISP (how much bang you get per buck if fuel efficiency) but generally lower thrust. You can make high thrust nuclear engines and they can be quite efficient and give decent thrust. Its all a matter of energy efficiency and nuclear beats chemical ever time on that front. On the down side, reactors are very heavy so that can be am issue. Anti-matter being the perfect fuel for energy density reasons but just too damn hard to get a hold of.
Don't understand why the exhaust plume would be an issue. Space is very big. Use conventional thrusters to move away from things and then have at it.
There are tons of unconventional engine designs. I'd recommend Scott Manley if you would like some detail on them. He had made several vids on them.
The heat is the problem. You can’t get rid of heat, the only way to stop it from melting your spacecraft is to have enormous high temperature radiators. I think the Epstein drives would be producing something like half a terawatt of thrust power. Even if 99% of that became thrust and only 1% became heat, you’d still have to dissipate 5 gigawatts of heat energy.
If you handwaved it away, then that’d mean disregarding the most basic laws of physics, at which point stuff like perpetual motion machines would become possible and then you’d be using those instead of a fusion engine.
One of your best videos ever, ending it with that quote that Niel Degrassi Tyson got from Carl Sagan gave me CHILLS!!!
I will never see the canal hous... i mean the Rocinante with the same eyes!
Secure the clogs!
The Mass Effect music at the end was a great touch 👌👌
The biggest problem with Expanse ships is lack of radiators, which would be necessary for vehicles with such strong drives falling into the category of torchships. They are riding literal thermonuclear explosions, of which only part of the heat is leaving the ship with exhaust, the rest goes into the ship. Heat is a big concern for any spaceship design with advanced drive, and even our projects of vehicles with fusion drives much weaker than Expanse ones require giant radiators
Agree, also radiators would be primary target in warfare, crew would just cooked with their own engine.
Interesting design was also in Avatar at beginning.
@Kato Ho Ten Soeng But that's impossible since it requires a multi megawatt nuclear fusion reactor which cannot be 100% efficient. And it expels ultra hot plasma, which should radiate some of its heat into the ship. Even the heat from crew quarters should require a little radiator actually.
Guys, someone proposed a fusion desing that could work. Just type "ToughSF Epstein drive". It would look nothing like in the show, because the reaction would happen way behind the ship. Charged particles would be redirected by the magnetic field. That way only about
@@Matthew35333 yep, Matter Beam did good job on it, but it still would require quite big radiators if I remember correctly. ToughSF is great blog, I recommend visiting its discord for some hard sf discussions too. Also, nice to a fellow Pole interested in speculative futuristic drives, that's something rare!
@Kato Ho Ten Soeng that's not how space drives work
Tabletop RPG "Star Frontiers": A lot of what I see in The Expanse could almost be mistaken for being ripped right out of that old roleplaying game (my favourite sci-fi RRTPG, btw). The only thing that Star Frontiers did was 'expand' out to being able to get to planets/systems light years away (short version: when a ship hits 1% the speed of light, it enters into a 'hyperspace' for a few days...ship doesn't go faster...it just sort of pops into a 'squished space' phenomenon, like a wormhole I guess?...sort of?). Still takes days or weeks to travel longer distances, and the ship has to keep accelerating, but it gives a fictional reason for being able to travel to a place 9 light years away (which would take 9 days, iirc; 1 day per LY; meaning if you wanna go 50k LY, that's 50k days....or 135'ish years!). ... When it's almost at the destination (roughly the half way mark), it has to do a "flip and burn" in order to decelerate; when it falls below 1% the speed of light, it "pops back into normal space".
Never clicked a video so fast!
There's so many little physics details In the expanse, like Miller pouring a drink in a bar on the inner levels of Ceres, or the 'gravity torture' and tanks used by Chrisjen Avasarala . And in the newest season Naomi takes medication to try to live safely in 1g short term but they don't work and she gets ill
I wish more sci-fi used real world science to its advantage. I can only think of Babylon 5 using realistic artificial gravity for Human ships and the station itself and Halo.
this. Real physics is epic. The Expanse battles are way more awesome than anything in conventional space opera. Because physics. Here is one of my bit things, say you have a ship that is built with a large weapon built to fire along its long axis, and engines at the back - with proper maneuvering burns it can fly around a target constantly shooting straight at the target, basically using the thruster to do the job of gravity and orbiting the target. You can't do that with space opera maneuvering.
@@j.f.fisher5318 totally agree.. however one thing I don't quite get.. with engines that efficient why aren't automated kamikaze ships way more a thing. Accelerate from other end of the solar system for days non stop... and it hit's it's target... even if it would get destroyed by a torpedo the debris would wreck havoc. And you could just outnumber your target's torpedo capabilities anyway. 10 automated ships on kamikaze max acceleration with several G.. accelerating for days on end... no defense against it, no?
@@georgelionon9050
You wouldn’t be able to make precise adjustments in case the targets change their course, there’s a ping for remote controlling them depending on the range, they are also easily detectable by sensors because of their propulsion signature and why would you use big expensive remote controlled ships that are easily detectable if you can just use a Torpedo/Missile with automatic tracking that’s cheaper, more powerful, harder to detect and are much more nimble
@@georgelionon9050 There's no stealth in space. They would be able to detect them from really far before they accelerated to such speeds and send some form of interceptor. If you destroy it, even though the debris is flying at immense speeds, it would have lost the guidance systems and trajectory of the original kamikaze ship, so it would likely miss its target.
This is also assuming the target is stationary like a space station or a celestial body.
@@hoominbeeing Well in the expanse there is stealth, season 1 episode 1, the "mystery ship" was stealthed. Also season 4/5 the whole point of Marco doing with stealth coated asteriods was actually exactly this.
Discovered your channel recently and I am really enjoying it. Keep up the good work!
This is so informative and we'll explained. I love the expanse and I love that I found this channel even more!
An excellent subject brilliantly presented bossmang! Everything about The Expanse was brilliant. It has supplanted Babylon 5 as the finest sci-fi series I have ever experienced. The plot, the production, the acting, the politics, the details, the gritty reality of surviving in space. Braking burn ffs!
"It's possible to even survive a short burst of 46gs of horizontal acceleration"
"How do we know that?"
"Because some mad mf tried it." :D
I've been binging the Expanse and recently wondered why there was a roll cage design in the Razorback. I'm glad I clicked on your video!
Not sure if you'll continue creating videos on ships, but I'd be interested in hearing you talk about Icarus II from Sunshine and the experimental engine from the Event Horizon which caused a rift in the space-time continuum!
Slight correction, longitudinal g's are insignificant when compared to centrifugal g's induced by jets turning alongside their lift vector. Pilot's sitting position has nothing to do with countering acceleration, in fact a more optimal position would be one where the pilot would lie along side the plane's direction of movement, thus being able to absorb more centrifugal force. This was in fact implemented on the F-16, where the seat is not set 90 degrees towards the plane of motion, but somewhat reclined backwards.
One thing about spin gravity is that people will experience motion sickness, I believe nasa did a article on it and said that you would need a ring of 10km or more to have comfortable gravity.