By the end of the episode, yes. But it shouldn't have been that hard to track the guy down before then, with a modicum of effort applied rather than none at all. And as I said, regardless of results, at least Alex would be more likely to try.
The Expanse season 2
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By the end of the episode, yes. But it shouldn't have been that hard to track the guy down before then, with a modicum of effort applied rather than none at all. And as I said, regardless of results, at least Alex would be more likely to try.
The thing with spacing the "inners" was to show the prevalent attitudes in the Belt. This reinforces the growing conflict. The actual spacing showed this attitude, but so did the fact that nothing could be done. It reminded me of the war crimes during WW2. Many people knew yet nothing was done. Same thing here. I think this plot point accomplished what it meant to do. It's also probably laying the ground work for future tension. Shoot, we've already seen it with the opposition to Fred because he was born on Earth. It all fits together in a nice way.
And, for in story logic, the series didn't want to get bogged down in this issue but stay focused on the main storyline involving the proto-molecule. Got choice I think. I don't want to watch some legal drama!
I'm glad to hear it's renewed for a 3rd season!
Mr Awe
And, for in story logic, the series didn't want to get bogged down in this issue but stay focused on the main storyline involving the proto-molecule. Got choice I think. I don't want to watch some legal drama!
I'm glad to hear it's renewed for a 3rd season!
Mr Awe
I cry tears of joy.
Yeah, I'm just not fully convinced that nothing could be done; it's more that the will to act wasn't there, which was exactly the problem in the Holocaust and other atrocities. I just don't think Alex would've been as resigned about it as that woman was.
And I wasn't convinced by the premise that there was no way to identify which ship Prax had come from. They don't have surveillance? They don't know which ships docked at which airlocks? It's not that big a station. There couldn't have been too many ships docked to it at that particular time. If this were actually a story set in a refugee camp in WWII, then I could buy that there'd be no way to backtrack and identify the killer, but it's 200 years in the future and they have cameras and sensors everywhere.
If nothing else, they could go through sensor readings of the ships that made the journey from Ganymede to Tycho Station and observe which one of them shut off its Epstein Drive for a brief, otherwise inexplicable interval. Those things give off light, and that light can be detected from anywhere in the Solar System. That's the thing about space -- it has no horizons. Everything happens in plain sight, if one has a good enough telescope. And spaceship drives are bright and easy to observe. We saw last week, when the Roci was chasing what they thought was Dawes's ship, it had to shut off its main drive before it could attempt evasive maneuvers, because as long as that drive was on, it was clearly visible.
So the premise that what that captain did was somehow impossible to detect and prove just isn't scientifically valid. It's not that the possibility to get justice wasn't there, just that the will wasn't there. That woman was too quick to assume the problem was insoluble, probably because she was just too swamped and compassion-fatigued to think about how to solve it. If someone more motivated or activist had gotten involved, more could've been done. And Alex would've fit the bill. I just think it's ironic that Prax came so close to getting that opportunity but missed it by one person. Indeed, why else include Alex in that scene at all, if not to convey the sense that they just missed each other?
That is good news. I have not read the books so i don't know how the story will turn out. But i want to see a few things.
1) More back story on the Martian civilians. We have mostly seen the military types so far.
2) we know how the Belters feel about the Inners. I want to know how the Inners feel about the Belters. The average Earther or Martian that is. Not the military or government types.
3) i want to know how a Martian dome city looks like. The Martians are technologically more advanced than Earth or the Belt. Their cities should be amazing.
As you know well, it's also HUGE. Last week the Roci could track Dawes' ship because it knew where it was, and was actively looking. A ship on the burn is easy to spot with a powerful enough scope, true, but finding one random ship that you have no real reason to track? The show doesn't really get into it, but the books clearly get into just how difficult it can be to track a spacecraft. Mars and Earth track each other's warships, but they've been following them for a long time. It's hard to lose something you know to look for. But his was a random transport. Why would scopes around the system be focused on it in the first place? There's so much tension in the air, with everyone on the cusp of war, and you're going to waste your scope tracking civilian transports?
With a propulsion system as powerful as the Epstein Drive, any spaceship is a potential weapon of mass destruction if it crashes into an inhabited body or station at high enough velocity. A single drunk driver could kill thousands, if not millions. So I'd expect every such spacecraft in the system to be carefully tracked as a routine precaution.
Besides, it was coming from Ganymede to Tycho Station. It would be known where they were in their orbits at the time, and it would be known roughly when it launched and when it arrived. And the laws of physics are a constant. Given that information, there's only a narrow range of trajectories the ship could've followed, so it wouldn't be that hard to determine where to look in the sensor records.
Even aside from that, there are lots of people with telescopes. A lot of bad sci-fi postulates the government keeping events in outer space secret from the public, but that's nonsense because there are countless amateur and professional astronomers constantly watching the skies, so things in space are hard to hide. (Ironically, one of the only things I've seen that avoided this mistake was a work of really bad sci-fi, Galactica 1980's "The Night the Cylons Landed." Although that was made shortly after Skylab fell out of orbit, so the general public was probably more savvy about such things from all the news coverage than they were later on after it had faded from pop-culture memory.) I don't see it as that much different from a cop show today where the detectives use ubiquitous traffic cams and security cams to track a criminal's movements, or even use facial recognition on social media to find where someone was at a certain time. Imagine how much more ubiquitous cameras and telescopes would be 200 years from now.
Anyway, as I've said, this would be the last resort if easier methods fail. I mean, Meng had just come out of the airlock. It couldn't have been that hard to backtrack him to where he came in and find out what ship was docked there. It was probably the closest gate to where that woman was standing. If not, surely there are surveillance cameras on the station, docking records of what ships docked where, etc. Not to mention all the news coverage of the Ganymede attack and the refugee crisis. I just don't buy that it would be at all hard to identify the ship if a modicum of effort were made. There should be a wealth of information to draw on.
No,
Bobbie Draper survives.
The break comes at the point between the books Leviathan Wakes and Caliban's War -- the same core characters, mostly, but a new story.
Miller survives, sort of. The protomolecule matrix is also effectively a character.
If there is a third season, I expect they'll finish off the story in Caliban's War but I doubt they'll get to adapt Abaddon's Gate -- that would likely be very expensive in terms of SFX.
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Some real physics with the coreolis effect sweeping the sparks away.I probably didn't explain clearly what I meant but it's basically what you're saying. Yeah, more *could* have been done. The willpower to do it wasn't there so it was never going to be done. And, I completely agree with you that the idea that they couldn't identify the ship was pretty lame. But, that's probably a pretty realistic attitude for how it was back in WW2. Ah, there's nothing I can do.
I suppose there's the chance that there are just so many refuge ships arriving that it's hard to track down. But, we haven't seen that. Certainly, they could narrow it down to few based on the time and origination.
In general, I think it does reflect that prevailing sentiment towards the "inners". It nicely ties in with the attempted coup. After all, if that sentiment is strong enough to lead a rebellion, it'll probably have other effects as well. Perhaps a few details were bungled in the story, such as not being able to ID the ship. And, I think the presentation was a bit awkward because they wanted to show that prevailing attitude yet bent over backwards to keep the heroes out of that part of the story to avoid making them look to callous or ineffective.
So, they quickly "dealt with" the spacing event with an unknown character, dispensed with that angle, and then brought the heroes in on rescuing the daughter. Although, I'm a bit understanding because that whole spacing angle could be a huge drag on the main storyline.
Mr Awe
All the more reason why I think it would've been different if Alex had gotten involved. One, he's an "Inner" himself, a Martian, so he'd have more motivation than a Belter. Two, he's one of the series leads, and that automatically makes him more likely to move heaven and earth to achieve things that other characters can't. I mean, I was wondering later in the episode, why was it the Roci crew that went out to shut down the air in the control room to rescue Fred? How was it their responsibility to do that instead of the Tycho Station security crew? But they did it because they're the main characters, so they're the default problem-solvers. And that's why the script had Meng tell some random background player instead of Alex -- because the way for the writers to ensure that the problem wouldn't be solved was to make sure it didn't come to the attention of a lead character.
I'd agree but, like I was saying, it seems like they went out of the way to keep the heroes from getting involved with this aspect of the story. I think they wanted to make the general climate a definite point but yet not get them involved in it. Instead, they're off to rescue the daughter and find the proto-molecule. (I think that's what you're saying too if I understand correctly.) I think that's the more interesting storyline, so I can't fault them for making that choice.
Mr Awe
How is that a "but"? It's exactly the same thing I just said! "And that's why the script had Meng tell some random background player instead of Alex -- because the way for the writers to ensure that the problem wouldn't be solved was to make sure it didn't come to the attention of a lead character."
I guess we agree then!
Ok, that's fine if you expect it, but that's not the rules the show is playing by, in universe.
Yes, and I'm saying I don't find that a credible assumption, for the reasons I explained. The show touts its realism, so if it falls short of realism in a given area, we're entitled to criticize those shortfalls. Science fiction is not just about saying "This advanced technology exists." It's about extrapolating the ramifications of that technology. If a high-acceleration interplanetary drive exists, then one of the ramifications is the danger of mass destruction that it poses. In science fiction circles, this is called the Kzinti Lesson, after Larry Niven's story "The Warriors": "A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive." It's also known as Jon's Law for SF Authors: "Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction." That is, any drive powerful enough to allow interplanetary or interstellar travel in a reasonable, non-boring amount of time is powerful enough to cause cataclysmic damage. (Indeed, a variation of this idea was the basis of my own first published story, "Aggravated Vehicular Genocide.") So it just stands to reason that a civilization using such drives would track all interplanetary traffic routinely. If it doesn't, then that's a logic hole in the premise.
It's stands to reason that any society that produces sufficient pollution to cause cataclysmic damage to our home world will control it, but we don't! Just because you should doesn't mean you will. As for the show, it has gone out of its way to show that it's not hard for ships to hide several times.
That said, the protection against these ships doesn't have to be based on tracking all ships at all times. Instead it can be defensive like our missile intercept platforms. Detect the trajectory of dangerous inbound objects within a certain area and certain flight characteristics, and destroy them before they reach you. This reduces the amount information required to keep you safe down to a manageable and realistic amount. It allows each district, like Earth, to focus it's detection/tracking resources on the most crucial areas.
Mr Awe
That said, the protection against these ships doesn't have to be based on tracking all ships at all times. Instead it can be defensive like our missile intercept platforms. Detect the trajectory of dangerous inbound objects within a certain area and certain flight characteristics, and destroy them before they reach you. This reduces the amount information required to keep you safe down to a manageable and realistic amount. It allows each district, like Earth, to focus it's detection/tracking resources on the most crucial areas.
Mr Awe
But this ship wasn't trying to hide. It made a direct journey from Ganymede to Tycho Station. It's known when it arrived and roughly when it must have departed. It wouldn't be that hard to find. And for the third time, I'm saying this is what they could've fallen back on if more obvious, easy methods like checking the station's docking logs and surveillance footage. How many times do we have to go in circles on this?
That's also covered in the novels: it's the whole reason ships are required to keep their transponders on, so traffic controllers can know where they are. If you turn off your transponder and "run dark" you can go undetected as long as you're in deep space and far from any legitimate ports. But once you get into the airspace of, say, Ceres Station or Vesta, running with your transponder off gives you away as either a pirate or fugitive and in any case they'll burry you up to your eyeballs in fines as soon as they spot you. You can't dock at a legitimate port with your transponder off and you can't do commerce with anyone who finds out you've been doing it.
On the other hand, space is still very, very BIG. A space ship flying teakettle (that is, without its drives and using only the superheated steam in its maneuvering jets) doesn't stand out against background radiation from any significant distance, and even if you just happen to detect it, it's hard to tell it apart from random space debris, uncharted asteroids (of which there are literally millions) or a false positive. IOW, if a ship doesn't want to be tracked, there are all kinds of ways it can make that happen, but as soon as it tries to DO anything more interesting than drift and float, it'll show up on security scans across half the solar system.
True, but it WOULD be pretty damn hard to visually confirm a cloud of bodies floating away from the ship. Even if you pointed the Hubble telescope DIRECTLY AT the ship at the exact moment it was dumping the bodies, its angular diameter in Hubble's field of vision would be a couple of pixels at most. So what you would actually see is:
Big bright dot gets really small (can barely see it).
Stays small for 60 seconds
Becomes big bright dot again.
All the captain of the ship would have to say is "Ima lowda choked on his kilbble and we cut drift to space the body. See? It's right there in the nav logs, sa sa que?"
Yes, but things in space are also hard to SEE. I can point my 8 inch reflector at Jupiter right now and see all four of the Gallilean moons, but if you asked me to find 101955 Bennu, even if I knew exactly where to look, you're basically asking me to find a black dot on a slightly blacker background.
Anything smaller than, say, the moon is only going to really show up with a long-exposure image.
And this is also the whole point about "stealth technology" being a first-strike weapon: because stealth ships are very hard to track even when they're CLOSE to something that would normally be watching for inbound threats. So it's a very serious game-changer in the Expanse world.
Which is exactly what happens in "Nemesis Games" when the OPA cover several small asteroids with stealth coating and fling them at Earth at high speed. The Earth's defense systems, which are specifically designed to keep this from happening, never see them coming, and 5 billion people die pretty much instantly.
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