No love for "The Expanse" (SyFy)

[The Wormhole]

Besides which, magnetic boots actually are in the novels, and what we see on the show is an accurate depiction of what is described in the novels. So in this case, it isn't the show's fault.

The beer cans are odd, though.

 

[Markonian]

In the novels, people drink from “bulbs” for coffee, tea and the like. Beer and alcoholic beverages are held in “helix bottles”.

Beyond my imagination.

 

[Christopher]

^And it would have probably been a logistical nightmare, and probably really uncomfortable for the actors, to try to film every single space scene with the actors stuck in the wirework rigs.

Well, not every space scene, just the ones where they aren't under thrust or in rotating habitats. And there are shows that do use wirework on a routine basis, such as Supergirl.

Last year's movie Life did a fantastic job shooting pretty much an entire movie in simulated microgravity, and it was remarkably convincing. But they didn't need wire rigs in every shot -- in close-ups, or in shots where the characters were on perches at their workstations or strapped into safety harnesses, they wouldn't be necessary. I think the skills and experience of the team that did Life could be beneficial to other filmmakers trying to simulate microgravity, and they may have worked out some methods that would simplify the process somewhat.

In The Expanse, it would just be a question of setting up the shots in the right way to sell the illusion convincingly. Some episode have done that successfully, like showing someone starting to rise out of a hatch (presumably being pushed up on a platform from below) and then cutting to a different shot where they come into frame from the side, say, and are just leaning in. But there are some episodes that didn't design their shots that well. Like there's one scene in one first-season episode where they're supposedly in free fall and using magnetic boots, and there's a lengthy shot of a character climbing down a ladder one rung at a time, which is an utterly stupid waste of time if you're in free fall. They could've just blocked that scene differently so that we didn't see the descent of the ladder.

That's a lot of the problem, I think -- a movie has a single dedicated director, but TV shows tend to have different directors come in week to week, and not all of them will have the same kind of experience or savvy when it comes to shooting the kind of specialized scenes in The Expanse. So the success at simulating free fall varies from week to week.

Besides which, magnetic boots actually are in the novels, and what we see on the show is an accurate depiction of what is described in the novels. So in this case, it isn't the show's fault.

It always surprises me when prose SF writers try to "cheat" like that and let their characters "walk" or "stand" in free fall. For me, part of the satisfaction of being a prose author is the old "unlimited budget" element -- the freedom to depict things in a way they couldn't be easily depicted on film or TV, to be limited only by my imagination. So if I write scenes in free fall, I can really take advantage of the free fall in describing how the characters move, and that's what makes it interesting.

 

[JD]

Well, not every space scene, just the ones where they aren't under thrust or in rotating habitats. And there are shows that do use wirework on a routine basis, such as Supergirl.

Ok, not every space scene, but still a lot of them.
Most of Supergirl's flying scenes are fairly short, so they probably don't have to spend that much time suspended by the rig.

Last year's movie Life did a fantastic job shooting pretty much an entire movie in simulated microgravity, and it was remarkably convincing. But they didn't need wire rigs in every shot -- in close-ups, or in shots where the characters were on perches at their workstations or strapped into safety harnesses, they wouldn't be necessary. I think the skills and experience of the team that did Life could be beneficial to other filmmakers trying to simulate microgravity, and they may have worked out some methods that would simplify the process somewhat.

Was most of this stuff cheap enough to be doable on a TV budget? This is not a criticism, it's a honest question.

 

[Christopher]

Was most of this stuff cheap enough to be doable on a TV budget? This is not a criticism, it's a honest question.

Oh, sure -- Life's budget was $58 million, which I think is fairly modest by today's standards. From what I recall of the bonus features, they mostly used pretty basic wire rigs; it was just a question of doing the research, consulting with experienced astronauts and watching videos to see how they really move in free fall, which is fast and fluid, instead of falling back on the usual space-movie cliche of having everyone move like they're in slow motion. So it's more a matter of improved choreography than improved technology.

Besides, if they did develop new kinds of flying rig, then the cost of that development work has already been done, so that'd make it more easily available for other productions.

 

[PlainSimpleJoel]

New trailer released.

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

 

[Locutus of Bored]

It always surprises me when prose SF writers try to "cheat" like that and let their characters "walk" or "stand" in free fall. For me, part of the satisfaction of being a prose author is the old "unlimited budget" element -- the freedom to depict things in a way they couldn't be easily depicted on film or TV, to be limited only by my imagination. So if I write scenes in free fall, I can really take advantage of the free fall in describing how the characters move, and that's what makes it interesting.

The Expanse started out life as a concept for an MMO game, where the tech and political situation in the Solar System was first fleshed out before it was turned into an online RPG (where most of the characters came from) and finally a novel series. So it was designed with the idea of making things simple for even novice gamers to use, which necessitates intuitive movements like walking most of the time rather than floating around and grasping things.

 

[Christopher]

The Expanse started out life as a concept for an MMO game, where the tech and political situation in the Solar System was first fleshed out before it was turned into an online RPG (where most of the characters came from) and finally a novel series. So it was designed with the idea of making things simple for even novice gamers to use, which necessitates intuitive movements like walking most of the time rather than floating around and grasping things.

I guess that explains it in that case, but I've seen similar things done in other prose SF. Either they come up with an approximation for artificial gravity (other than rotation or thrust), or they just fudge it and write the descriptions as if the characters were standing and walking even when they're supposed to be in free fall. (I think the Gentry Lee Rama sequels did that from time to time. Although that was one of the more minor problems I had with them.)

 

[Locutus of Bored]

When they're in the ships their arms and hair don't float up either, so you could take the Defying Gravity TV show approach and say that they have magnetic particles in their hair and magnetic fibers in their clothing as well, which besides serving the purpose of anchoring them down, could also keep their muscles from atrophying, since these people are spending weeks or months or years in zero-g despite most of them growing up on planets, moons, asteroids, and spinning stations. The Belters and space hab dwellers could adapt more easily, but the Earthers and Martians would have more difficulty. If your clothes and boots give you a constant workout that would mitigate the effect of being in space on long journeys. We don't see them exercise very often.

 

[Christopher]

When they're in the ships their arms and hair don't float up either

Why would their arms "float up," as long as they were conscious and able to control their position? Besides, one of the most pervasive mistakes TV and movies make is treating free fall like floating in water, assuming some kind of buoyant force that pulls things upward, when the whole point is that there's no force pulling in any direction and things just stay where they are until they're moved.

And they all have short haircuts that are sensible for variable gravity, or else they wear long hair in tightly bound styles.

, so you could take the Defying Gravity TV show approach and say that they have magnetic particles in their hair and magnetic fibers in their clothing as well, which besides serving the purpose of anchoring them down, could also keep their muscles from atrophying, since these people are spending weeks or months or years in zero-g despite most of them growing up on planets, moons, asteroids, and spinning stations.

The "magnetic particles" thing from that show was really, really stupid. It has some of the same problems as The Expanse's magnetic boots -- such strong magnetic fields would be harmful for shipboard electronics, and it's a whole lot easier to move in free fall without sticking yourself artificially to the floor. As long as you have handholds in easy reach (and any free fall living/working space would be designed so that you did), it's enormously easier and more efficient just to float (so to speak). Also, magnetic particles in particular would be terrible. They'd get into everything, they'd short out sensitive equipment and clog up air filters, you'd inhale them, just ugghh.

Besides, magnetism is subject to the inverse square law. If the source of the magnetic pull were, say, 5 cm below the floor, then if you were c. 175 cm tall, any "magnetic particles" in your hair would be subjected to less than a thousandth of the magnetic attraction that the soles of your boots would feel. And magnetic fibers in your sleeves or whatever would feel only a few hundredths as strong a pull. It would be completely ineffectual.

The only reason Defying Gravity came up with such an inane idea was that they wanted an excuse for their cast to have glamorous hairdos. That was a really dumb show. It made a token effort at scientific plausibility, but did it so sloppily and half-heartedly that it was worse than if they'd just gone for straight-up fantasy. I mean, the ship in that show had a rotating habitat section, so it's not like they needed to invent some more fanciful form of simulated weight.

 

[fireproof78]

^And it would have probably been a logistical nightmare, and probably really uncomfortable for the actors, to try to film every single space scene with the actors stuck in the wirework rigs.

Not everyone can be James Cameron.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Why would their arms "float up," as long as they were conscious and able to control their position? Besides, one of the most pervasive mistakes TV and movies make is treating free fall like floating in water, assuming some kind of buoyant force that pulls things upward, when the whole point is that there's no force pulling in any direction and things just stay where they are until they're moved.
And they all have short haircuts that are sensible for variable gravity, or else they wear long hair in tightly bound styles.
The "magnetic particles" thing from that show was really, really stupid. It has some of the same problems as The Expanse's magnetic boots -- such strong magnetic fields would be harmful for shipboard electronics, and it's a whole lot easier to move in free fall without sticking yourself artificially to the floor. As long as you have handholds in easy reach (and any free fall living/working space would be designed so that you did), it's enormously easier and more efficient just to float (so to speak). Also, magnetic particles in particular would be terrible. They'd get into everything, they'd short out sensitive equipment and clog up air filters, you'd inhale them, just ugghh.
Besides, magnetism is subject to the inverse square law. If the source of the magnetic pull were, say, 5 cm below the floor, then if you were c. 175 cm tall, any "magnetic particles" in your hair would be subjected to less than a thousandth of the magnetic attraction that the soles of your boots would feel. And magnetic fibers in your sleeves or whatever would feel only a few hundredths as strong a pull. It would be completely ineffectual.
The only reason Defying Gravity came up with such an inane idea was that they wanted an excuse for their cast to have glamorous hairdos. That was a really dumb show. It made a token effort at scientific plausibility, but did it so sloppily and half-heartedly that it was worse than if they'd just gone for straight-up fantasy. I mean, the ship in that show had a rotating habitat section, so it's not like they needed to invent some more fanciful form of simulated weight.

Hmm, the field due to a magnetic monopole decreases as 1/r, where r is distance, so the force goes as 1/r^2. We've never found any magnetic monopoles in nature. However, the field due to a magnetic dipole goes as 1/r^2 so the force goes as 1/r^3. In fact, I seem to recall the equations also depend on dipole orientation - I'll have to look it up. Meanwhile:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/q...s-the-magnetic-field-proportional-to-distance
I agree with your points generally although I expect most viewers would be happy with the explanation given onscreen. It's less of a stretch than a whirligig magic mushroom drive.

ETA: The scalar field strength due to a magnetic dipole moment of strength m at an angle of theta to the distance vector goes as m.cosine(theta)/(4.pi.r^2). The 1/r^2 relationship comes about because the fields due to the effective poles of the dipole tend to cancel - what remains is due to their spatial separation. The magnetic field strength goes as the gradient of the scalar dipole potential so it is proportional to 1/r^3 and also depends on theta. The torque on another dipole is the vector cross product of the local dipole moment vector and the magnetic field vector due to the other dipole.

 

[BillJ]

It's less of a stretch than a whirligig magic mushroom drive.

 

[Christopher]

It's less of a stretch than a whirligig magic mushroom drive.

That's apples and oranges, since we're talking specifically about gravity generation here. Limiting it to that, at least with a fictitious form of artificial gravity like most SFTV uses, we can assume it has whatever properties are necessary for the story. Since it's based on science we haven't discovered yet, we can't rule out the possibility that it could work as shown. After all, we don't know everything. There will inevitably be future discoveries we can't imagine yet. We don't fully understand what gravity is or how to unify it with quantum physics or the other fundamental forces. So once people do solve that problem in the future, they might discover some method of gravity control we can't currently imagine. That idea is a bit of a reach, but it can't be ruled out entirely. It falls into the category of known unknowns, so it's not that hard to suspend disbelief about.

But when you take science we do understand perfectly well, like magnets, and show it working in a way it couldn't possibly work, that's a lot harder to suspend disbelief about. Sometimes a black box is easier to accept than a detailed explanation that you can tell is wrong.

And The Expanse already has a black-box technology, the Epstein Drive. It generates high, continuous thrust beyond what current theory allows to be practical without swiftly exhausting a ship's fuel supply. So there's some as-yet-unknown physical principle making that possible. It would've been easy enough to throw in a handwave that the physics that made that drive practical -- perhaps some kind of inertial-mass reduction -- could also be finagled to create a synthetic gravity field. It's not something I'd want to see done in prose, but given the practical limitations of filming a space show on Earth, I could live with it.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

That's apples and oranges, since we're talking specifically about gravity generation here. Limiting it to that, at least with a fictitious form of artificial gravity like most SFTV uses, we can assume it has whatever properties are necessary for the story. Since it's based on science we haven't discovered yet, we can't rule out the possibility that it could work as shown. After all, we don't know everything. There will inevitably be future discoveries we can't imagine yet. We don't fully understand what gravity is or how to unify it with quantum physics or the other fundamental forces. So once people do solve that problem in the future, they might discover some method of gravity control we can't currently imagine. That idea is a bit of a reach, but it can't be ruled out entirely. It falls into the category of known unknowns, so it's not that hard to suspend disbelief about.

But when you take science we do understand perfectly well, like magnets, and show it working in a way it couldn't possibly work, that's a lot harder to suspend disbelief about. Sometimes a black box is easier to accept than a detailed explanation that you can tell is wrong.

And The Expanse already has a black-box technology, the Epstein Drive. It generates high, continuous thrust beyond what current theory allows to be practical without swiftly exhausting a ship's fuel supply. So there's some as-yet-unknown physical principle making that possible. It would've been easy enough to throw in a handwave that the physics that made that drive practical -- perhaps some kind of inertial-mass reduction -- could also be finagled to create a synthetic gravity field. It's not something I'd want to see done in prose, but given the practical limitations of filming a space show on Earth, I could live with it.

Sometimes too much knowledge spoils the fun. Scott Manley did a great youtube video on why the Epstein Drive is problematic from a real-world physics point of view.

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

 

[Christopher]

Sometimes too much knowledge spoils the fun.

That depends on how you define fun. Hal Clement liked to say that hard science fiction was a competition between the writer trying to convince science-savvy readers and the readers trying to spot the errors. Sometimes it's not about actually convincing the audience that something is real -- it's just about faking it in a way that's informed and elegant enough that the audience respects the thought that went into the conceit and is willing to play along. My problem with magnetism-based "artificial gravity" is that it's too inelegant and unconvincing.

 

[fireproof78]

Sometimes too much knowledge spoils the fun. Scott Manley did a great youtube video on why the Epstein Drive is problematic from a real-world physics point of view.

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

Which is why I've hesitated to write the original science fiction ideas is because I fear that kind of scrutiny. If something like the "Expanse" gets that kind of treatment then it makes a very daunting idea of what will make sense.

So, as much as I enjoy science, and learning something new, I'm on the fence about such videos.

 

[Christopher]

Which is why I've hesitated to write the original science fiction ideas is because I fear that kind of scrutiny. If something like the "Expanse" gets that kind of treatment then it makes a very daunting idea of what will make sense.

Everything that every writer does will get scrutiny and criticism. It just comes with the job, and you can't let it scare you off of saying what you want to say. If anything, the worst thing to fear is that you'll get no scrutiny paid to your work at all. If people are complaining about your work, then at least they're talking about it and bringing attention to it.

Besides, if people like that video's maker point out the scientific inaccuracies in a work of fiction, that doesn't mean they don't value the work of fiction in its own right; if anything, just the opposite. They're using something popular and entertaining as an opportunity to get people interested in a discussion of real physics. It's not attacking the fiction for being wrong, it's just putting it into context and inviting its fans to look beyond the story and learn something about how it compares to reality. Science fiction has always been a great way to teach real science, even when its internal science takes liberties. Because the story is just the starting point. The fiction gets you interested, then you look beyond it and learn how things really work. That's how I got interested in science and astronomy as a kid. It's the same with any fiction based on reality. A historical novel or a biographical film or a play like Hamilton will always change some of the facts for the sake of the story. But the audience knows that, in theory, so if they want to learn about the reality, then they'll investigate beyond the fiction. And there's a long tradition of books and articles and shows that tie into historical fiction or science fiction or the like and explain the underlying reality. It's not an attack on the fiction, but a supplement to it.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Which is why I've hesitated to write the original science fiction ideas is because I fear that kind of scrutiny. If something like the "Expanse" gets that kind of treatment then it makes a very daunting idea of what will make sense.

So, as much as I enjoy science, and learning something new, I'm on the fence about such videos.

I, on the other hand, think it adds to the fun being able to poke holes in the science. The nearest we might ever come to Epstein drives might well be something akin to Orion nuclear pulse propulsion - possibly using antimatter-initiated fusion - dropping mininukes out the back end of a pusher plate and exploding them. Probably never going to be allowed within the earth's magnetosphere though. Carl Sagan thought it would be a noble way of depleting the world's stockpile of nuclear weapon material.

 

[Christopher]

In my own hard-SF Solar system-based novel Only Superhuman, I had the ships rely on a variety of onboard and outboard propulsion methods. The main systems used to produce high acceleration were networks of drive beams -- particle beams based on satellites or space habitats that accelerated magnetic sail ships at dozens of gs and decelerated them at their destinations -- and "Bolasats," tether-based Rotovator stations that captured ships and catapulted them onto new trajectories. On the whole, spacecraft that don't have to carry their own fuel are a lot more efficient, and particle beams and tether systems can impart much higher accelerations than rocket propulsion. They're not much use for interstellar travel into parts unknown, but for travel within a settled and civilized Sol system, you can have an established transportation infrastructure, the equivalent of a highway or rail system, so ships aren't limited to what they can achieve under their own power.