Talk:The Expanse (novel series)/Archive 1

Archive 1

Contra views on the technology

Based on previous experience in these areas, I have to assume that adding a section on the implausibility of several of the tech features in the novels would quickly be marked as OR. However these are the points you could raise:

• Despite the "efficiency" touted for the Epstein drive it still has issues. Exhaust velocity is on the order of 5% of the speed of light for the journeys described. Power requirements exceed the entire output of the human race today, even for small ships.
• Spinning up asteroids would almost certainly tear them apart. Anything on the surface would be moving at more than escape velocity. Even if they could hang together, the pressures within the rock would make it impossible to keep caverns open.
• Many distances are underestimated. Jupiter's moons are further apart than the Earth and Moon even at close approach, but the writing implies much shorter distances and the need to hide behind them. If you can get that far away quickly, you don't need to hide.
• Journey times are often overestimated. The 1g drive eats up distance: time to 40 AU is 18 days. Yet the trip to the Ring takes weeks when it's only 21 AU from the Sun. That's about a 12 day trip.
• A 1-kilometer ship accelerating at 1g is basically a 1000 meter skyscraper with all the same engineering challenges. Nobody in their right minds would build one.
• Hitting Eros with a ship, even one a kilometer long, is not going to knock it into the Sun. Doing that requires you to hit the asteroid hard enough to cancel almost its entire orbital velocity. Eros has a mass of 6.69 trillion tonnes and is moving at nearly 25 km/s. A million tonne spaceship would have to be moving faster than the speed of light to have enough momentum to do the job.
• There's a throwaway line in the first book where Epstein's prototype ship, still accelerating, is still visible in telescopes. In fact constant acceleration will get you close to the speed of light in 1 to 10 years, depending on the acceleration. After over a century, the ship would be beyond the closer stars.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Djdaedalus (talk • contribs)

• Those are neat points. You should find them in a published reference (someone other than you must have noticed) then add them to the article.--Jim in Georgia Contribs Talk 02:43, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Currently the article says "the series handles technology in realistic way", with no sources at all. Maybe that could be dialled back, though it probably is less unrealistic than a lot of SF. However, whether the above points are correct or not, they certainly are WP:OR. It's not for editors to nitpick the plausibility of a fictional story. 202.81.249.131 (talk) 18:33, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

• Regarding the final point - the novella "Drive" states that Epstein's yacht only had enough fuel to sustain the burn for about a day and a half, reaching 0.05 c, so it's only been coasting at that speed for 100 years, not accelerating. But all your other points are spot on. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.172.27.93 (talk) 03:52, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

Awkward

"The Expanse is set in a future in which humanity has colonized much of the Solar System, but does not have the means to travel to other systems." That should read The Expanse is set in a future in which humanity has colonized much of the Solar System, but does not have the means to travel to extra-solar systems. or other planetary systems. aajacksoniv (talk) 19:17, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Babylon's Ashes: publication date

I changed the publication date to June 2016, with two supporting refs from the publisher. Someone else has changed it to November 2016 because that's what Amazon have as their release date. I think the publisher is a better source than a book retailer.82.1.16.12 (talk) 20:50, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Orbit appear to have different publishing dates for UK and USA. UK (Little Brown) is June, USA (Hachette) November82.1.16.12 (talk) 09:48, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

References

It would be nice to have simple plot summaries of the novels.

I've read the first five, and when talking with friends who are starting the series I sometimes forget which is which. I was hoping to see plot summaries here, but there are not any. It would be great to add them.

ZeroXero (talk) 16:04, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

me too. came here to find summaries after picking on the latest novel 47.69.75.181 (talk) 10:29, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

Translations

I must agree with User:Indopug that it is inappropriate to have a table listing all the translations of the books to other languages. Someone obviously put good faith effort into creating that list but it is especially difficult to support the kind of list cruft that editors implicitly admit is unimportant when they hide the table by default. If a proper source was included it might be notable to state how many languages the books have been translated into but a long list of every one of them is not helpful. -- 109.76.209.240 (talk) 15:26, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Audiobooks

The original audiobook version of Cibola Burn was not read by Jefferson Mays, and many of the early reviews of it on Audible.com reflect this. It was subsequently rereleased with Jefferson Mays as the reader, and there is a note to this effect on Audible's page for the novel at https://www.audible.com/pd/Cibola-Burn-Audiobook/B00K7PP15W . I listened to the original version, but don't have it on any of the devices I can find, and the version that can be downloaded now is the Jefferson Mays version, with no reference to the original reader.

It seems that this ought to be noted, as the current section on the audiobooks implies that Jefferson Mays was the only reader of the novels. Perhaps the identity of the original reader is not important, but the fact that someone else did read one of the novels does seem worthy of note. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.213.181.150 (talk) 04:33, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Character list

Just to let everybody know—I have started a character list in the draft space.SirLou (talk) 00:13, 15 June 2021 (UTC)