The Expanse (TV show on Syfy)

General
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Earth water is deep inside a gravity well, making it pretty economically useless. Ceres is actually trying to throw water away (as they spun it up to get the mother of all rotating colonies). And water is actually the most important resource in that kind of close/mid future industrialized space - this might be the first show ever to get that right.
Between that and vertical spaceships, there is already a lot to forgive there.

The funny thing is, those clichés totally are there, but they feel splattered on the actual story in the book. And the story in the book is pretty good, so if they continue, they will have a pretty good story with those superficial clichés splattered on, making it a net win in total.

Didn’t catch the 20 m higher sea level, though. That one was really dumb, actually.

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So the show hasn’t really followed the books then. I have heard others mention this. I guess we’ll have to give it all the season one episodes to see if it redeems itself. I’ll still watch them all back to back after he last one airs.

I really want some clever complicated space scifi back on TV. There is still a chance we will be seeing Isaac Asimov’s Foundation/Galactic Empire made into a TV mini series. I read back last year that its being developed. Now that could of benefited from a HBO 10x60 minute episodes for a few seasons to tall that massive story. Deep, dark and complicated.

But I guess its too deep, dark and complicated for today’s TV audiences. I would like to see it though.

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Possibly, however it’s important to remember that on a ship many things including water act as a closed system. you get an amount of water on your ship then it’s recycled indefinitely, there is no need for ever increasing supplies. Unless there’s some other use im missing.

edit: hydrogen fuel, maybe. But it didnt look like they were using engines that low tech judging by that silly “stop in space” maneuver. I cant imagine the wasted fuel, forget their schedule nonsense.

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What maneuver was silly? Did you mean they said “we need to stop to intercept the ship”?

Also, why shouldn’t they use huge amounts of hydrogen/oxygen in their engines? Maybe the whole “water is the most precious element and we are wasting it for fuel” did go full circle and went from “using water to get fossil fuel” to just outright using water as fuel and maybe that’s why water is so precious.

That’s a detail that is dropped (as in outright told to the reader) pretty casually by SciFi authors, is “The Expanse” an exception and was it never mentioned?

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Couldn’t you break down heavy water to get deuterium for fusion reactors? If they’re using some sort of plasma engine then a fusion reactor to power it would make sense.

And isn’t water everywhere in the solar system? Especially in icy asteroids?

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Yes but you can get extreme amounts of energy from just small amounts of that. Although, their fusion reactors could be extremely low efficiently, that would create the problem that the unusable/wasted energy would probably manifest itself as heat energy, getting rid of all that heat would be another problem.

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Rich assholes don’t want to drink reprocessed water maybe?
From what I can tell Mars and Earth are full of said rich assholes.

Then again there’s an absolutely silly amount of water ice on even Ceres, way more than enough to satisfy rich idiots that want “pure space water deluxe”

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So, what is water used for?

  • Drinking (obviously)
  • Making food
  • Breathing
  • Radiation shielding
  • Bulk material (when staying outside of the Ice line, preferably)
  • Coolant fluid
  • Heat sink mass
  • Reaction mass (if you are using a solar thermal, nuclear or antimatter drive)
  • Chemical fuel (for when fusion drives are impractical, like manoeuvring thrusters, or when next to things you don’t to glow blue like spaceports)
  • Hydrogen nuclear fuel - if you can manage pure H1 fusion without a handy star to crush it
    And I’m probably forgetting a few…
    Also note how the last ones are not recyclable, and all around guzzling like there’s no tomorrow.

If you don’t believe me, look at those companies that want to start exploiting space resources. The one think they absolutely prioritize, before iron, before platinium, before Helium-3, is water. There are very good reasons for that.
Or look at this page and search for the word “water”.

So it’s like space oil, but that you also need to survive.

Yeah… no.

Seriously, such high-performing torch engines are borderline magical. We currently have no drive both that powerful and efficient imagined - and we imagined turning the central galactic black hole into a power station, and how we would do it.
The only thing we have that is remotely in those performances is a high-end antimatter engine, and they are using plain hydrogen.
Not to mention the thing is many orders of magnitude more efficient that anything we can devise, given the absence of oversized heat radiators.

Sure, pure, optimal fusion sounds a lot on paper, but that’s before you realize how vast space is - and how much an utopian 10% loss in waste heat means in necessary radiator size to not melt the hull.

Not dissing on the show here, mind you - it does a good enough job elsewhere to be more than fine. But we’d better be careful with those assumptions born out of (otherwise great) Star Wars or Star Trek space fantasy on how space really works.

And that manoeuvre was actually exactly what a real spaceship would have done (assuming a real spaceship would have a magical torch drive, of course). They’re not stopping, they’re turning around and changing course (at several g) to intercept and match an object on a wildly different vector.

They follow the events, what kind of people the characters are and what the world is like. For me, those are the main elements, so as long as they are kept and they don’t screw the presentation, it’s faithful enough.
We’ll see how it holds up with time, though.
I may end up doing like you in the end, better watch it at our own pace.

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This content is not available in your location.

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Yeah, US only for now because companies still think international licensing agreements with air-dates separated by months works as a viable marketing strategy these days.

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Have you tried a VPN, as suggested in the OP? It worked for me.

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I gave in and watched the first 4 episodes of The Expanse the other day. I really enjoyed them, and you can see the polish is there. And so it should be for the many millions per episode it costs.

I particularly liked the use of the various types of gravity as a story element, spin, acceleration etc. For example when the cop pours a drink on the belt station which has spin gravity you see the sideways motion and then gravity acting at the same time. Actually makes you think about where they are and the forces the body has to deal with. I am very much hooked and this might be the best thing since Battlestar for me. Dark matter is good, but The Expanse is really good. Just my kind of SciFi.

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The thing I like most about this show is that it avoids a lot of annoying TV Tropes. For example if you watch a show and an airplane hull gets breached you know that someone is getting sucked out of that hole. Here they simply get on with the job of patching it.

I felt like I was at a slight advantage having already read the book. It seems like it would be hard to follow for people fresh to the story. Leviathan Wakes ties up a lot of its strings at the end of the book so it works well as a standalone read. But now I am thinking that I might read the second book in the series as well.

The fifth episode will be broadcast today and I’m looking forward to it.

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I have all the audio books downloaded and novellas inc the 2015 one, all ready to go. But I’ve not yet listened to them. I’ll wait until I’ve seen all 13 season 1 episodes and then listen to ‘The Chrun’ and Leviathan Wakes.

And try and resit the urge to watch ep5-13 until they have all aired and I can watch them all back to back.

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I really enjoy this show. It’s about time I got a science fiction TV series that doesn’t pander to all the idiots out there that think rocket engines on every surface is a requirement. Or that ‘exotic’ means bone appliance on forehead or nose. One that doesn’t fill me with made up, nonsensical, words. I’m not totally at peace with the casting choices but pretty happy over all.

I really enjoy the world building they have done. They have made the attempt to give us an idea of the different languages and cultures without letting it bog down the story. It would be fascinating to see something of Mars but I suspect that is coming.

As for the spaceships. Far superior to almost anything I’ve seen in other TV shows, movies, video games, or a certain prototype. we are all clamoring for. I’ve been spending years trying to get people to accept the PEN-1S, design criteria on this forum, on the previous forum, on IRC, without luck.

For the ‘Torpedoes’, I really like how they handled the missiles in flight. In Episode 7(?), they show a missile make a maneuver correction to a different heading, after being launched. None of that insipidly stupid, aiming at the bad guy and shooting crap that everyone uses.

Physics on the other hand is merely, meh. The TV show still tends to treat objects as if there is a fixed coordinate. or that orbits only apply to certain objects. but I think the books make the same mistake at least in part. We have to accept a relatively low budget is going to prevent the proper representation of microgravity but I’m willing to accept the limitations. at least they make the nod to it. One thing that could be mentioned more often is the passage of time to get places.

I don’t much care for the ShakyCam™ on exterior shots. I didn’t much like it for Battlestar Galactica either. I can understand its use to convey a certain feeling of adrenaline as well as to hide the visual faults of CGI. but I still prefer long beauty shots. with sweeping establishment shots.

As far as the Gatling Gun. Everyone that has bad mouthed it is right. What’s more, a gun in space is not really the best idea anyway. I did enjoy the use of reaction control system to counter the recoil (I assume). but for all you folks arguing about it. the best weapon to use would be a large caliber, recoilless cannon. Germany has messed around with autoloading recoilless cannon. You don’t need to fire 4000 rounds of 20mm bullets, if you have a 40-60mm round, full of a dozen 20mm sub-munitions. Curiously just like an Oerlikon 35mm cannon revolver used today.

I hope that this show can build on audience number and be renewed. It’s a really fun series of books and so far, I enjoy how the series reflects the books. I’m glad to have seen the quality that they have shown in the episodes so far and can’t wait to see how how they handle the more complex story as it progresses.

Needs moar Space-whales.

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I think the show goes as far as it can with a mainstream audience with the way it uses gravity as a story element to advance certain scenes. Spin gravity etc when pouring fluid into a glass. Otherwise things get too complicated, not that I wouldn’t love more complexity.

For now I’m saving up episodes 5-13 to watch them back to when when season one is done. I sure hope it gets an early renew, which is always a good sign of network confidence in the show. I think it deserves an early renew.

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Ah, well that is jolly good news. An early renew. Ta.

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Just finished ep 5-10, really enjoying it so far. Season 2 has 13 eps.
I’m wondering whether to listen to the first audio book and short stories now this first season has aired.

Am looking forward to season 2.

Has to be the best space sci-fi on TV at the moment, although pickings are slim these days for space sci-fi.

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‘Which Side Are You On’: Syfy’s ‘The Expanse’ Raises the Stakes in Season 2 - space.com

TheExpanse_gallery_109Recap_33.jpg1200×675 182 KB

The Rocinante sheds its gas-hauler disguise in the final episode of “The Expanse” Season 1. The crew will have to grapple with a solar system in turmoil in Season 2.

Credit: Syfy

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