Author Topic: 'The Expanse' on SyFy - First trailer for new space opera show  (Read 127016 times)

Offline Lars-J

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SyFy announced last year that they had picked up the rights to 'The Expanse', a space opera based on the popular Expanse series by James S. A. Corey. And now they have premiered the first trailer for the show, starting sometime this year:


(there is a version of this on Youtube, but don't view that one unless you have to - the Vimeo version has corrected colors)

For those who haven't read the books, the books/series take place 200 years in the future, as humanity has colonized the solar system. The technology level is fairly realistic - no artificial gravity, no FTL communication, no FTL drive. The only significant technology leap over today is the 'Epstein drive', a fusion-based propulsion technology that allows +1G acceleration for extended time.

I'm happy to see SyFy finally get back and produce a real "in-space" show - the first since "Battlestar Galactica". I moan as much as most of you about their schlock made for TV crap, but it seems like they have finally made a decent investment here.

EDIT: For those of you who have read the books, here is a trailer breakdown that points out characters from the books: http://alwayssometimesvillains.com/2015/01/15/the-expanse-trailer-breakdown/
« Last Edit: 01/19/2015 06:33 pm by Lars-J »

Offline KelvinZero

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Could be excellent! I imagine the slow replies are because we couldn't find anything immediate to gripe about.

Im not sure the last line of that trailer was meant to crack me up though ;)


Offline Norm38

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A friend of mine has read the books and is really excited for this show.  I'm going to start reading them soon.  I like that they'll have a lot of existing material and plot lines to pull from.  So they should be able to do some decent story arcs that are consistent and fit together.  I'm thinking more Babylon 5 than ST Voyager.
Anyway, it's been too long since there's been real spaceflight on SyFy, so I'm in.

Offline Lampyridae

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I started reading the first book, and it all went pretty well until I got to the bit about Ceres. Which the books says is 250km in diameter and has been spun up to provide 0.3g for its six million inhabitants... even if it's not a typo and the excess mass has been stripped off, it's still badly threatening to my suspension of disbelief.

Offline QuantumG

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These books are fabulous, I hope they do it justice.
Human spaceflight is basically just LARPing now.

Offline Lampyridae

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For the curious, it seems that the rotational energy of a shaved-off Ceres to 0.3g at the equator is equivalent to one Chixclub crater, or a month's solar radiation for Earth. Those Epstein drives are pretty serious!

Offline Lars-J

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I started reading the first book, and it all went pretty well until I got to the bit about Ceres. Which the books says is 250km in diameter and has been spun up to provide 0.3g for its six million inhabitants... even if it's not a typo and the excess mass has been stripped off, it's still badly threatening to my suspension of disbelief.

I thought it was just a massive habitation wheel built into Ceres that was rotating, and not the entire Ceres (how would they stop it from falling apart??), but my memory may be faulty.

Offline Lampyridae

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I started reading the first book, and it all went pretty well until I got to the bit about Ceres. Which the books says is 250km in diameter and has been spun up to provide 0.3g for its six million inhabitants... even if it's not a typo and the excess mass has been stripped off, it's still badly threatening to my suspension of disbelief.

I thought it was just a massive habitation wheel built into Ceres that was rotating, and not the entire Ceres (how would they stop it from falling apart??), but my memory may be faulty.

I thought that at first, but I re-read bits of it, thinking "that can't be right." But that's exactly what is written. And yes, it would utterly disintegrate - the rotational energy is a couple of orders of magnitude above the binding energy.

I'm enjoying the characters and the plot but mistakes like that make it quite painful. I don't think the TV series will address any of these.

Offline Norm38

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We're talking about the network that put sharks inside a tornado.  I don't think most of their audience could even tell you what an order of magnitude is, much less why anything they see on screen violates the laws of physics.

I've given up mostly on TV/film sci-fi having any rational scientific basis.  Tried having a discussion with the amazing peoples on Aint-it-cool-news about why having capital ships flying through atmosphere/gravity wells (ST Into Darkness, SW prequels) was just plain lazy writing.  But they don't care.  "It looks cool!" is good enough for them.

Offline Lampyridae

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Having almost finished the book, I can see why SyFy would pick this. It could very easily be another Nu Battlestar Galactica. No doubt the protomolecule will be going on about "God" and having a "plan" and be the result of adolescent angst combined with human greed and technology and we're all supposed to feel guilty about the Cylons. I can also see them ruining Miller's character too, which is a real pity because he's the most engaging.
« Last Edit: 02/13/2015 02:01 pm by Lampyridae »

Offline Lars-J

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'The Expanse' on SyFy - First trailer for new space opera show
« Reply #10 on: 02/14/2015 03:45 am »
Having almost finished the book, I can see why SyFy would pick this. It could very easily be another Nu Battlestar Galactica. No doubt the protomolecule will be going on about "God" and having a "plan" and be the result of adolescent angst combined with human greed and technology and we're all supposed to feel guilty about the Cylons. I can also see them ruining Miller's character too, which is a real pity because he's the most engaging.

Careful with the spoilers. Have you finished the first book? Or all of them? (4 out, 5th coming soon)

As far as "as I can see them ruining"... I prefer to be an optimist until proven wrong. :)
« Last Edit: 02/14/2015 03:45 am by Lars-J »

Offline cadzilla74

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Having read all of The Expanse books I'm looking forward to a TV treatise of the series. I'm also pretty sure the SyFy channel will make a mess of it. Sadly. Awaiting the outcome with bated breath but assuming the worst. Fingers crossed for them to prove me wrong.

Offline Jarnis

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I'm having hard time seeing SyFy having the budget to pull of a good version of the books.

So expecting lots of low-budget CGI, randomly uneven actors and series cancelled midway through :)

(hey, that way I can't be disappointed and if it actually turns out to be any good, it is all good)

Offline speedevil

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Random ballpark.
Ceres mass * 3m/s^2 is 3*10^19N.
Divide by 30GPa for tensile strength of a decent synthetic fibre, and you get a nice round one billion square meters.

Call it a belt 1000km in width or so, 1000m thick.

It's a very small fraction of Ceres total mass, and not completely utterly ridiculous - given mature nanotech.

10^15m^3  of material seems a lot.
We've probably made of the order of 10^10m^3 of plastic, or 5*10^11m^3 of concrete.

Of course - if true, and considered logically, it does have really interesting implications.

Mature nanotech or stupid-scale autofactories are available, that can produce high grade fibres almost free.

Really, really large beanstalks on earth are essentially completely free.





Offline Lampyridae

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Hell, with that kind of high-strength* mass, you could make an atmospheric shield for the whole of Mars, 6m thick. Just don't make the entry code 12345...

For the super-lazy terraforming of Venus, make a world deck at the 1 bar/30 deg celcius line. Rotate for a 4 hour day! Later on, build some sunroofs and settle the lower "half" of Venus once the CO2's all frozen out.

*Of course that's now a different kind of strength but hey nanomaterials
« Last Edit: 03/04/2015 11:28 am by Lampyridae »

Offline JasonAW3

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I started reading the first book, and it all went pretty well until I got to the bit about Ceres. Which the books says is 250km in diameter and has been spun up to provide 0.3g for its six million inhabitants... even if it's not a typo and the excess mass has been stripped off, it's still badly threatening to my suspension of disbelief.

I thought it was just a massive habitation wheel built into Ceres that was rotating, and not the entire Ceres (how would they stop it from falling apart??), but my memory may be faulty.

The way I'd buid it, is as a pair of O'neil style tubes, one to each side of Ceres with a central 0 gee corridor going through Ceres, forming the axis of the two counter rotating tubes.  With a 150 mile radius per tube, the rotation rate for a .3G centriguge shold be slow enough to allow easy transfer from the center cooridore to a transfer train that loops down to the inner habitat and back up again.  with an atmospheric depth of 150 miles at about 10 psi, (arbitrary choice for this example) the central cooridorpressure at 149.5 miles from the spun surface would be so low as to effectively be a vacume, thus eliminating a pressure loss issue aroundthe mechnical couplings holding the tubes in place around the cooridor, which would be kept in vacume.
My God!  It's full of universes!

Offline KelvinZero

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This seemed worth a bump because I just noticed that Google claims the release date is 23rd of November. I don't know where and no doubt it will take months longer to make it to my particular corner of the solar system..  ::)

Offline Oli

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So has anyone seen the pilot?

I thought it was pretty good.

Offline NovaSilisko

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I enjoyed seeing the hard science fiction elements of it on a TV show for once, but couldn't find myself getting into the plot or characters very much.

Offline Jarnis

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I enjoyed seeing the hard science fiction elements of it on a TV show for once, but couldn't find myself getting into the plot or characters very much.

Kinda same feeling, but I'm handing out substantial bonus points for trying to portray zero G on a television budget and not making a complete mess about it, tho they are "cheating" a lot to save in FX shot quantity (magnetic boots) and I haven't quite figured out how Ceres is supposed to work in the show... Based on one specific scene, I guess it is supposed to be like the books, spun up for gravity, so people walk around in low G with feet point towards space - which wouldn't really work without breaking it apart. With of course the catch that you can find dozens of small nits about things that don't match low G, but whatever...

Anyway, this is mostly nitpicking when you have a space show that looks most of the time good enough to pass as plausible. More plausible than many movies with ten times the budget.

Story, at least if it follows the books, indeed starts slow, but if they are keeping the meat of it for the series, some pretty cool stuff is coming.

Definitely going to watch the next episode.

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