So, um, what happened to the other belters that helped arm the bombs on Eros in the previous episode? Because they arrived there on the Rocinante but definitely weren't onboard during the chase.
I thought they came on a freighter (in pods) that was effectively escorted by the Rocinante - and they returned to said frieghters, and took off to get out of the range of the expected nuclear blast? And I liked that they did mention reactions to the Hijacking of the Mormon ship - just surprised they couldn't work that 30 seconds or so into LAST WEEK'S episode.
A question for those of you who have read the novels. Do they attempt to explain how the "juice" that they're injected with for high G burns works? I have a hard time imagining that any juice could mitigate the physical effects of high Gs. Or, is just a magical juice that we have to assume works as shown?
The young belter Miller befriends, Diogo, is a book character, their friendship is pretty much identical to the book, although Diogo's earlier scenes on Ceres and then later in the belt with his uncle were new for the TV series.
There is no in depth scientific explanation if that's what you are looking for. But basically, it keeps your lungs and blood vessels from collapsing so you don't die, you're still be pressed into your crash couch and mostly unable to move. With the basic version, people still lose consciousness at high G's, then there is a stimulant version for pilots that also keeps them from passing out.
I saw a graphic calling it "A.R." something, so I'm wondering if it was "anti-radiation" -- not to mitigate the effect of high gees so much as protecting from the radiation the drive puts out at those levels, or perhaps from the increased particle radiation exposure they'd get from moving through space at such high velocities (because radiation is basically just particles hitting you with high kinetic energy).
Just binged this show. It's actually pretty damn good! If Discovery is decent maybe genre TV will pull itself out of this contemptible parade of endless superhero garbage.
DVRed it and watched it last night. That was utterly beautiful. Pure poetry, both story and visuals. I said to my wife, as Miller was dragging the nuke around and resetting it every few minutes, in the blue glowy hallways, "Well, this show sure gives us things we haven't seen before!" And then it got even more things-we-haven't-seen-before! Some of the science/physics was off - if the Roci was burning at 15 Gs to catch Eros, then so was Eros, so why was Miller able to walk around? The missiles launched from Earth and just shot straight up and away - a visual storytelling simplification. Then they were continually burning for the whole trip, which seems unnecessary and inefficient. Missile travel time to Eros would likely be weeks, not moments. In fact, all the traveling in this ep seemed too fast, the solar system too small. But the poetry overshadowed all that.
The same reason Eros was moving in the first place, the protomolecule. In addition to being able to accelerate a large asteroid, it also seem to generate artificial gravity and inertial dampening. Miller doesn't even realize that Eros is moving until Holden tells him.
If I remember the books correctly (and I most likely am not), the protomolecule was both generating artificial gravity and basically had inertia dampers. Edit: Beaten to the punch. I sort of hope the TV show will spend more time dealing with humanities reaction to what the protomolecule means. In the books the reaction largely occurred between two of them.
Oh, really? I'd assumed that it just did the inertia damping and reactionless drive, and that the artificial gravity to let Miller walk around normally was something the TV writers had tossed in for production convenience.
I'm sure it'll get on some peoples nerves, specifically those who wanted something close to "pure" realism.
Indeed. While the rest of the show is relatively "hard SF", the protomolecule technology is so far above humanity that it can essentially create artificial gravity and propulsion that mimics what you might see on Star Trek. I'm happy that we are in book #2 territory now. Exciting.
Hard SF does allow for the possibility of hypothetical new physics breakthroughs beyond what we know now -- after all, hard SF is about realism, and it would be unrealistic to assume we already know everything there is to know about physics. So it's okay to posit things beyond existing physics, as long as everything around them behaves realistically and their workings and ramifications are plausibly thought through.
I'm 90% sure that's supposed to be Michio Pa. It's basically a combination of steroids, blood thickeners, stimulants, and probably some sort of anti-inflammatory agent to reduce the possibility of stroke or hemorrhage. But on the whole, it isn't so much to mitigate the physical effects of high G so much as to keep the crew CONSCIOUS under high-G. Fifteen gees is still fifteen gees; it's HELLA bad for you to experience that kind of force for any length of time. The juice just makes sure that you're still conscious and breathing when your spleen ruptures and the little bleeding ulcer in your stomach tears itself wide open and pours the contents of your stomach into your chest cavity. Actually, the science was pretty spot on here. The whole point of the fusion drives is that they are amazingly fuel efficient, so a ship or a missile can constantly accelerate at a high rate of speed and build velocity very quickly. The missiles could accelerate at 50Gs or more and wind up leaving the Earth/Moon system at something like 300km/s. At that velocity, they could reach the orbit of Eros in a little under 20 hours. Call it a few days more if Eros isn't actually at the closest point of its orbit, but not TOO much more considering it's actually trying to hit Earth at the time. Of course, the timeframe for the missile impact wasn't really described in detail; Holden had them divert the missiles so that Eros would calm the hell down and maybe then Miller could try to reason with it. As for the G-forces: Miller actually noticed the discrepancy too, and on two separate occasions pointed out how weird it was that he didn't feel any acceleration when Eros moved. That fact has everyone in the solar system scratching their heads, and Alex even flat out says "Okay, we just a broke a couple of laws of physics here..."
I imagined Pa as older when I read Abaddon's Gate - and assumed this was just a proxy for Sam (as a different actress played Sam in Season One). According to James SA Corey and the actress on twitter, the character is called Drummer.
I imagined pretty much everyone as older in the novels than the actors who play them on the show, with very few exceptions. I didn't actually remember her from the novels, and after checking out The Expanse Wiki, it turns out the character was nameless in the novels as well. Oh, well, at least now we have something other than "Fred's Second" to call her.