That or Tycho Station, which is spun up to 1/3rd of a G
The Expanse season 2
- Thread starter RAMA
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with all this argument about drinking from cans and coffee makers, do we know that whether ships under constant acceleration thus maintaining gravity when traveling or do they accelerate than coast?
If they have the drives running the whole time providing a near 1G environment, it wouldn't' be out the norm to have regular drinking vessels and coffee makers (the 23rd Century and man is still addicted to caffeine). stuff in bulbs for zero would probably be basic food supplies/emergency ratios.
I've addressed this every time it comes up. Even if a ship maintained 1g thrust under normal circumstances, it'd still have to stop and flip around at the midpoint to decelerate, and to be in free fall at any destination that didn't have rotating docks like Tycho Station. Not to mention, what if the drive broke down? What if the ship had to make emergency maneuvers that varied the gravity? Any competent design takes the possibility of failures or emergencies into account. That's why cars have seatbelts. Or, more appropriately for this analogy, why cars have cupholders.
Yeah, but you're acting like they can't have both systems in place on the same ship. They'll have a pretty good idea when they'll be under thrust, barring failures. They can account for when they'll need bulbs vs mugs.
As for the great can debate, I'm assuming this is one of those places where the production team let the science slide for the ease of visual shorthand. If you want the audience to know Alex has been pounding energy drinks to stay awake, you can either ignore the science and just show him surrounded by cans, or you need to give him dialogue to that effect (he has nobody to talk to mind you, so you'd need him talking to himself), or you need to waste a scene to set up the energy drinks in the appropriate null g containers. Honestly, this is a place where it's just easier to use the cheat, since every viewer everywhere will immediately get what you're conveying with the cans and you don't have to waste valuable time elsewhere. It's narrative convenience.
The whole point is, it's foolish to assume "barring failures" as an absolute. You can't prevent failures by refusing to believe they can happen. The first rule of competent safety design is to expect failures.
And there's no reason you can't use squeeze bulbs under gravity, so there's no reason to waste resources on two separate sets of containers when you can just use the same one for both. (Indeed, The Expanse does show them using the same one for both, but they use one that can't actually work in both conditions, i.e. normal pull-tab cans.)
No, you don't. Just use bulb containers with a recognizably energy drink-like logo or brand name on the side. Heck, we've seen The Expanse use actual product placement -- the FedEx shipping containers used as drop ships for the Eros mission -- so they could've used an actual energy-drink brand name and logo and stuck it on some drinking bulbs. There are plenty of ways in cinema to convey information visually rather than verbally.
But in other places, they choose not to go the lazy "narrative convenience" route and actually do make an effort to get the science right, like with communication time lags, spaceship maneuvering, and so forth. If they're committed enough to get those right, it's bizarre that they're so lazy and sloppy about something like this. In any other show, it would be easy enough to dismiss, but these producers have chosen to set the bar of credibility high, so I feel absolutely entitled to complain when they choose to fall short of their own standards.
Actually that's a pretty good idea. Stick the Red Bull logo on the bulbs. Since floating in 0G is like flying in a manner of speaking, it could tie into the whole "Red Bull gives you wings" slogan.
Communication lags, spaceship maneuvering and so forth are actually related to plot elements. The story, adapted as it has been from the novels, has been designed with those elements included in it, and doesn't work as well without them. They need to maintain those conceits for internal consistency with what they've already done. This was a single scene to convey Alex's state of mind, and you really want to argue that they're the same?
Unless, wait for it... the crew chooses to do exactly that. Holden is from Earth, and he's a coffee nut. Maybe dude just likes keeping a coffee maker and mugs handy to remind him of home. It's their ship, and it's extremely under-crewed. They have space aplenty to keep some novelty items on hand, just because.
Yeah it was definitely a character piece.
Except that in season 1, Holden expresses delight on discovering the coffee maker and bags of coffee beans on the Tachi, newly acquired from the MCRN after the destruction of the Donnager. Really, how hard would it have been for the prop makers to add a spout and come up with some bulb-style receptacles? Also slopping sticky, syrupy liquids around in a spacecraft cabin is probably still high on the list of taboo actions in whatever century The Expanse is set or perhaps it's just the Belters that are ultra safety conscious and Martians are really all cowboys.
Hmm, I disapprove of such juvenile behaviour but then I'm a grumpy old fart.
It's not a single scene. We've seen two or three episodes now where characters were drinking out of Earth-style containers in microgravity. And it's not just about the cans; that's just a symptom of the larger problem of bad set and prop design that also encompasses the drip coffee makers, the beds with loose pillows, and so many other things that just take Earthlike gravity for granted and aren't logical designs for spacecraft that would often be in free fall. This is part of the overall design work that goes into creating the universe throughout the entire series. If they'd put more care into it at the start of the series, then it would've made the entire world more plausible throughout the series.
A lot of good production design is about the details hardly anyone notices. If you get them right, they're just subliminal, but they help add to the believable texture of the world. But if you get them wrong, they stand out as distractions. And this show's production design has a consistent, systemic flaw in that it fails to apply the same level of plausibility to its set and prop design that it does to other aspects of the show. It's an incongruous bit of lazy, sloppy futurism in a show that's pretty good at other aspects of futurism, so it stands out as a shortcoming.
Yeah, here are some videos they've done of water and stuff.
The astronauts have posted tons of videos of them doing this kind of stuff over the years. Chris Hatfield and Mike Kelley especially posted tons of videos while they were up there.
Which is exactly what they explicitly do in the novels. Especially when they expect they're going to be under thrust for long stretches of time -- several days or so -- they use ordinary cups and mugs so they don't have to use bulbs, OR they use a mug with a sealed top in case they're close to a flip-n-burn or close to a potential combat situation.
They've also been known to deliberately vary the thrust for long transits, primarily because Naomi and Alex don't like long stretches at high-G so if they're REALLY in a hurry to get somewhere they throttle back for an hour or two for meals and bathroom breaks (otherwise it's crash couch all the way).
Ships like Rocinante are built to move, and they spend almost as much time under thrust as not.
The mugs they're using to depict zero-g bulbs are basically implied to be sealed at the top to avoid spillage. The design is ambiguous enough to not just be an ordinary "mug" plus it has a magnetic bottom so you can stick it to a wall.
Chris Hadfield did some experiments on ISS during his flight that basically demonstrated that you CAN use an actual open-top coffee cup this way in microgravity, so long as it has the right internal shape to promote surface tension and capillary action. The "bulb" of traditional scifi turns out to be overkill for this task.
Also nope. In fact, sticky syrupy liquids are almost the only thing you CAN use in microgravity, because the sticky liquid with its high surface tension will not only stick to the food, it'll keep the food from floating too far away from the bowl.
It actually turns out that without the force of gravity, many foods that would otherwise be pretty messy have a tendency to stay put. Sticky rice, ironically, is one of them: the pull of gravity on a bowl of rice is a constant force on each individual grain that causes them to separate more readily from the clumps. In microgravity, you'd have to shake a bowl of rice fairly rigorously to get the same effect, but otherwise the rice just stays clumped together and sticks to the bowl anyway. So as long as you aren't literally throwing your food around the cabin like an angry chimp, it's not going to just float away on its own. And some sticky sweet-and-sour sauce will only act like a kind of goopy glue to keep it all clumped together anyway.
The Belters trust the debris traps and filters to pull anything out of the air that might be a problem. Plus, they've spent enough time in microgravity to be understand intuitively how things work in freefall; strictly speaking, it's actually kind of weird that Belters even bother to use mugs at all when they could just as easily dispense coffee onto a big spoon and drink from the resulting bubble through a straw.
That's just it: the research doesn't bear out the normal assumptions WE keep making about what we would expect to see. It's not just the science, it's also a point of human nature: when you buy a sixpack of beer from a store in Tycho Station, you can either get a pack that is designed for microgravity or one that's designed for kicking around the actual station. The latter is probably cheaper (simpler packaging design) and using it in microgravity, while less convenient than the micro-gee design, is hardly a deal breaker for somebody like Alex, who is not only used to weightless living, but also gives no fucks at all.
There ARE problems with the set design and even some of the prop design, but they're all production necessities, really. The space suits all having lights inside their helmets is a big one, but it's also a neccesary one because otherwise the viewers wouldn't be able to see anyone's faces (although the Martian helmets having lights behind the goggles is definitely over the border into silly town). The design of the space suits is another, but that's also a scifi conceit that we're supposed to ignore because engineering a scientifically realistic space suit is both very expensive and very difficult and even if you could, the actors will curse your family to ten generations for making you wear them under studio lights.
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