Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "The Drinker Recommends... The Expanse" video.

  1. I could explain Amos' psychology for you guys, but only in return for a can of chicken.
    9
  2. That's one thing that never made any sense to me, though. Whatever force slows the ship is acting on the whole ship and everything in it. It's not just some resistance the front of the ship runs into - you don't see the drive cone coming smashing through the ship, or the fuel in the tanks smash through them because it's still going 1000 miles per second when the ship stops. So the same force should act on the pilot as well - he should decelerate instantly and harmlessly just like everything else on the ship does. It should have been like when Eros did its little juke to avoid the Nauvoo and then accelerated faster than the Roci's crew could follow and still survive - the massive acceleration had the Roci crew pinned in their couches and ready to stroke out even with the juice, but inside Eros, Miller, proto-Julie, and everyone and everything else was completely unaffected because the force that was accelerating Eros was accelerating them along with it, acting on them directly and not just on the structure of the asteroid.
    6
  3. That guy, and not that guy.
    5
  4. There are a lot of things like that. They take a realistic time (weeks or even months) to get anywhere past Luna in ships. They generally run at a constant low G acceleration because that's comfortable for the crew, and they spend half the trip with the ship revered to shed the velocity they built up in the first part so they don't fly by the destination at a million mph. They have to match orbits, planets and asteroids aren't depicted as fix points. When the ship isn't accelerating, there's no gravity and they either float or walk using special magnetic boots. Anything they let go floats, and then when they accelerate again immediately falls toward the bottom/back of the ship. The ships are oriented vertically with the engines on the bottom. The ships don't move like airplanes the way Star Trek and Star Wars ones do.
    4
  5.  @SvenTviking  There are a few others, nothing is perfect, but you notice them because they make such a huge effort to get it right and 99% of the time they do. One of my favorite touches is at one point when Miller is up "high" in Ceres (meaning relatively close to the spin axis) and pours a drink and the liquid falls in a little spiral because that near the spin axis the spin-G is relatively weak and the Coriolis is relatively strong. They did start adding external sounds to the space battles at one point, it may have been when they went to Amazon. IIRC in the first couple of seasons when your viewpoint was on a ship in space you only heard sounds made by that ship or things that hit it and everything else was silent.
    2
  6. It wasn't because of a grudge, and the scientist was more like Dr. Mengele than von Braun. Miller was right factually if not morally; if he hadn't shot the guy he would never have been made to pay for his crimes because whoever had custody of him would want his knowledge. And that was not a professional commando team like Earth or Mars would have sent, it was a bunch of amateurs put together by a part-time terrorist/freedom fighter.
    2
  7.  @samblack5313  Exactly.
    2
  8. No, not at all. It's less about the political situation than it is about humans react to radical changes and other developments in history. There's an alien technology that serves as the McGuffin but again it's not about the tech, it's about people.
    1
  9. I love Firefly, but the Expanse is in a whole different league.
    1
  10.  @CheeseDanish85  The Epstein drive isn't mumbo jumbo, it's just fusion power coupled with a much more efficient way of turning that energy into acceleration - but it still obeys the laws of physics, it requires lots of reaction mass and the ship accelerates by pushing that mass out of its back end at a very high velocity. The alien tech is, of course, made up, but no one on the show has any idea how that actually works - they can affect what it does to a very limited extent, but they're like monkeys pushing buttons on a computer keyboard: give them long enough and they may learn that certain keys pressed in certain sequences will have a predictable result, but they'll never get even the slightest idea of why that happens or how the machine actually works. Anyway the alien tech is really just a McGuffin. The show is less about the alien tech than about how humans and our societies respond to its discovery.
    1
  11.  @CheeseDanish85  I would not call it fantasy. Fusion power certainly isn't fantasy. Scientists and engineers may argue about how far we are from practical fusion power, but I doubt you'll find many who say we never will, or won't have it 200 years from now. It has a very firm basis in known physical laws, it's just a matter of engineering. Same with the Epstein drive - it still obeys all known laws of physics, it propels the ship by Newtonian physics, creating thrust by pushing mass out the back of the ship very fast just like a chemical rocket does (but using fusion rather than a chemical reaction as an energy source). There's no fantasy in that, just next-level engineering. Fantasy is Star Trek's dechyon particle field phase emitters and dilithium warp core plasma conduits, which is pure mumbo-jumbo, tech-y sounding words strung together at random and heavily sprinkled with names of new fundamental forces and particles that they've just made up that have no basis in any known theory of physics. There's nothing like that in the Expanse - there is the alien technology, but no one even attempts to explain or even theorize how that works.
    1
  12.  @evertonporter7887  There's a scene in season 1 where someone high up in Ceres (meaning closer to the core) pours a drink and it not only pours more slowly, but it pours in a spiral due to Coriolis. They're also good with things like Newtonian reactions in zero-g and vacuum.
    1
  13. It's not really dystopian, unless you consider Dickens dystopian.
    1
  14. They did it right by casting an actress who looked like she could actually do the things her character was doing, instead of casting someone like Jennifer Lawrence and giving her unexplained superpowers that allow her to toss men twice her size around like dolls.
    1
  15. That's why God gave us Everclear.
    1
  16. Wow, thanks, it was driving me crazy trying to figure out where I'd seen her before.
    1
  17. Avasarala: "I'm a member of parliament, not your favorite stripper." Burton "You could be both."
    1
  18.  @cjones6403  There are serious drawbacks to running pure O2 at 1/3 atmosphere which is why no one does it anymore. The Expanse ships definitely aren't doing that.
    1
  19. There is no fact whatsoever in that movie, other than that there was a Scottish guy named William Wallace and he did fight the English and he did eventually get drawn and quartered.
    1
  20.  @travisransdell5211  I'm a random with a degree in history with a concentration in medieval Europe, and that movie is about as historically accurate as the one with John Wayne as Genghis Khan. Mel Gibson wouldn't know historical accuracy if it was shoved up his arse with a 2-handed claymore. Stirling Bridge without a bridge, impregnating a French princess who was 8 years old at the time and still in France, and the Scottish Wars of Independence starting over a jus prima noctis that never existed outside the lurid fantasies of repressed Victorians. Michael Bay couldn't have made a worse travesty. Of course it's par for the course for Gibson; at least it wasn't quite as absurd as the Patriot.
    1
  21. SyFy, not Netflix.
    1
  22. Naomi being female becomes pretty important to the plot in Season 5.
    1
  23. I totally disagree. It is not one of the best SF shows ever, it is THE best SF show ever.
    1
  24. The first season was decent, the second was a little less so, neither of them was nearly as good an adaptation as the Expanse is.
    1
  25. Fury was great until the last battle, then it just got silly.
    1
  26. The only lingerie model I can think of who regularly beats up large men is "Melba," and that's because she has some extremely rare, expensive, and unhealthy body modifications to give her almost superhuman strength and reflexes for a short period of time (and the cost of that is made pretty clear in both books and series). Bobbie Draper is also pretty kickass, but I mean, did you not notice that actress' size and build? Pretty sure that actress could beat up 95% of men in real life if she had the fight training her character has.
    1
  27. Mormon plot? There is no "Mormon plot," the Mormons are very minor side characters. The Mormon SHIP becomes very important after it's hijacked.
    1
  28. Its cancellation was announced before this video was made. Kinda makes sense, because the books make a 30-year leap at the point where the next and last season is going to end, so they'd probably have to re-cast everyone.
    1
  29. Not sure why you'd think that, it was about as realistic as the similar scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey (and in both cases something necessary if desperate for the character involved). In the book it's explained a little better why she could stand it and Cyn couldn't.
    1
  30. Entertaining, but nowhere remotely near as good as the Expanse. And absolute shite as far as history goes.
    1
  31. Ummmmmmm no.
    1
  32. And the difference is that the authors have managed to complete the entire nine-volume series of novels in the time since GRRM wrote the last (to date, but let's face facts, it probably was the last ever) Got/ASoIaF novel.
    1
  33.  @szymonbaranowski8184  Don't look up!
    1
  34.  @szymonbaranowski8184  As for why we don't plan to fly to Venus, that's probably because the environmental conditions on Venus are so extreme that we couldn't possibly build a vessel that could maintain conditions a human inside could survive without making it so huge and heavy that it would take a hundred missions to lift the parts into orbit and assemble it there. At present we can't even build unmanned probes that can survive and function for more than a few hours on Venus.
    1
  35.  @TheNethertyp  That would be true if it were just some sort of force field, but it seems like the alien tech actually perceives objects as a whole and accelerates them as a whole - when Eros dodged the Navoo, it didn't implode from the stress if only part of it being accelerated, and the people inside weren't hurled against the walls, the whole asteroid and everything inside all moved together.
    1
  36. They're sort of fascist-y like the Empire, just without the part where they're eeeevil. Sort of like how the Empire would be run if it were run by the same professional officers but without Palpatine or Vader.
    1
  37. One of the neat touches they thought of is that because belters spend so much time in vacc suits they have developed their own unique gestures that use broad movements of arms and hands rather than more subtle ones or ones involving the head and torso - so, for example, belters always shrug by putting their hands put palm up and moving them upwards rather than shrugging their shoulders as the latter would be hard to see with a suit on.
    1
  38. Mormons on the show aren't shady, just annoying because of the endless proselytizing. And the implication seems to be that mainstream religions are mostly dying out and don't have many adherents off of the earth. There's one minor character who's a minister, but no one else ever seems to talk or think about religion at all.
    1
  39. It also has Jared Harris, who was so great in Chernobyl. At least for the first few seasons (although he's said he'd be glad to come back for Season 6 if they want him).
    1
  40. Amos kicks the shit out of Jayne. Peaches kicks the shit out of River. Bobbie starts kicking the shit out of Zoe but then they both realize how stupid it is for them to fight each other and make friends. Alex and Wash hit each other ineffectually like little girls until Bobbie and Zoe separate them and make them sit in the corner. Naomi and Kaylee get in a heated discussion about power couplings. The Roci's autodoc is a better doctor than Simon. Chrisjen's language shocks Inara so much that she faints dead away. Miller uncovers everything about Book's past. Anderson Dawes has Adelai Niska spaced. YoSaffBridge steals the protomolecule and ends up like Julie Mao. Mal kicks the shit out of Holden but then realizes that Holden is actually right and apologizes.
    1
  41. it's not 3.8 protomolecules, it's 15,000.
    1
  42. I watched about 3 episodes of Vikings before I just couldn't take any more. If you want to make a fantasy series, fine, just don't pretend it has anything to do with history or even actual historic legends. The same goes for the Last Kingdom.
    1
  43.  @rc5989  The problem isn't that it's based on legends, it's that it's a gross distortion of the society being depicted.
    1
  44.  @jimkenealy6448  After that she understands why he calls the ship the Rocinante - it's an insight into his character she didn't have before.
    1
  45. Holden: “There was a button. I pushed it." Johnson: "Jesus Christ. That really is how you go through life, isn't it?”
    1
  46. Not a chance. GoT took a nosedive because they went past the point the books have reached and Martin couldn't be bothered to help write the series past that. The Expanse books season 6 will be based on have already been published, and the authors are closely involved with the show.
    1
  47. You're not done with Miller yet.
    1
  48. Not as long as you might think. At a constant acceleration, it would take about twice as long to get to the Kuiper Belt as to Saturn, depending on where Saturn is in its orbit and where you're going in the belt. But in the books and show they don't bother going past Saturn much because there's nothing out there that can't be obtained more easily closer in to the sun (until the ring gate shows up, anyway).
    1
  49.  @robertcartier5088  By constant acceleration I meant a constant burn, accelerating halfway there then flipping and burning to decelerate for the back half of the trip like they always do in the show. The very efficient Epstein drive is capable of sustained burns of 1g for weeks if the crew can stand it (for belters that would be very stressful but not much of a problem for Martians and perfectly comfortable for Earthers). The Kuiper Belt starts about 30 AU from Earth or about 4.5 trillion meters (4.5 billion km). Plugging that into the formula d= 1/2 a t^2 where a= 9.8 m/s^2 you get a travel time of a bit under 8 days to get halfway there at a constant 1g acceleration, then another 8 days to travel the rest of the way at a constant 1g deceleration, 16 days total travel time. At its closest to Earth, Saturn is about 1.2 billion km away, plugging that into the same formula gives you a total travel time of 8 days. Dropping to 1/2 g acceleration to make the belters happy would make those travel times about 22 days and 11 days respectively. (Because the formula is t^2, halving the acceleration or doubling the distance only makes the trip 1.4 times as long.) Of course travel times to Saturn from the asteroid belt would depend on the positions of Saturn and your starting asteroid in their orbits, travel time could be anywhere from 9 to 13 days at a constant burn 1/2g. It's in the same ballpark as the travel time to the ring gate in the later books, and that doesn't seem to be much of a problem for their ships. As I've said elsewhere, the main reason they didn't go out that far very often before the gate was lack of any motivation to do so: there's not much in the way of resources out there that can't be obtained more easily in the asteroid belt or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
    1
  50. Shed would disagree that they are fantastic.
    1
  51.  @Justanotherconsumer  I've never known a stripper quite as foul-mouthed as Chrisjen.
    1
  52. Because you're used to seeing shows and movies that lack the realism of the Expanse. They fly backwards half the time because they accelerate halfway to their destination then turn around and spend the second half of the trip decelerating at the same rate. If they didn't they'd just fly right past their destination at a million miles an hour. Spaceships aren't like cars that start slowing down as soon as you take your foot off the gas. The show runners have said that a lot of the first few episodes had to be devoted to establishing the world and teaching people to break the bad mental habits they've developed from watching decades of bad, unrealistic SF where spacecraft maneuver like airplanes, ships always have gravity, and space has a universal up and down orientation to which all ships, stations, etc conform at all times.
    1