Caliban's War - spoiler thread

[Mikkelinski]

Finished this just the other day (and now enjoying Abaddon's Gate). Been Expanse series for me all week, and I'm not tired of it yet. For Caliban's War I really enjoyed the new PoVs, but I don't know, needs more Miller. Something about his view and take on things made for such a great juxtaposition to Holden and it was missing in the new PoVs. Mars power marines are awesome. My visual image was of Samus (Metroid) which I'm guessing was intentional, and it worked. She was great, and the angsty parts were well done and not grating. I didn't mind Prax, he felt very real to me, and Avasarala gave a nice view on the wider context, but the whole powerplay dynamic was just eh...

I wonder if it was also something about the protomolecule soldiers that felt a bit off. I mean, they are much more "concrete" than the more mysterious protomolecule in Leviathan's Wake, and it just didn't convince me in the setting. Vomit zombies were scary, and the molecule was so alien, but monster men (I was just thinking Mini Hulks) didn't really do it for me in terms of suspense.

Still, great books (just a notch below Leviathan's Wakes for me) and Abaddon's Gate is shaping up great.

[Happy Ent]

Finished books 1 and 2, enjoyed them a lot.

I like the choices of level of technology, which are very old-fashioned: There are basically no advances in nanotechnology or AI, everything is “today, but with super-efficient space-travel engines.” (Down to the iPhones and Latte restaurants!) Makes for a setting that is easy to immerse into.

Tech quibbles:

1. Ships constantly accelerating towards a position need to thrust towards the target for half of the journey, and away from it for the other half. (Right?) Is this ever acknowledged?

2. Speed of radio communication seems to be “at the rate of plot”. In particular, the communication between Holden and Miller at the end of book 1 was way too quick, wasn’t it? (This could be rationalised with magic protomolecule tech?)

[Rhom]

Finished books 1 and 2, enjoyed them a lot.

I like the choices of level of technology, which are very old-fashioned: There are basically no advances in nanotechnology or AI, everything is today, but with super-efficient space-travel engines. (Down to the iPhones and Latte restaurants!) Makes for a setting that is easy to immerse into.

Tech quibbles:

1. Ships constantly accelerating towards a position need to thrust towards the target for half of the journey, and away from it for the other half. (Right?) Is this ever acknowledged?

2. Speed of radio communication seems to be at the rate of plot. In particular, the communication between Holden and Miller at the end of book 1 was way too quick, wasnt it? (This could be rationalised with magic protomolecule tech?)

At some point I remember them talking about flipping around to reverse thrust.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

Finished books 1 and 2, enjoyed them a lot.

I like the choices of level of technology, which are very old-fashioned: There are basically no advances in nanotechnology or AI, everything is “today, but with super-efficient space-travel engines.” (Down to the iPhones and Latte restaurants!) Makes for a setting that is easy to immerse into.

Tech quibbles:

1. Ships constantly accelerating towards a position need to thrust towards the target for half of the journey, and away from it for the other half. (Right?) Is this ever acknowledged?

2. Speed of radio communication seems to be “at the rate of plot”. In particular, the communication between Holden and Miller at the end of book 1 was way too quick, wasn’t it? (This could be rationalised with magic protomolecule tech?)

AI is better, at least to the point that a modern warship can run fine with a crew of 1. There's also fairly advanced 3d printing.

But there's no strong AI, so I get your point that the technological advances all seem to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

[Happy Ent]

Look what I found: Travel times for 1G constant acceleration (discounting relativistic factors) http://williamhaloupek.hubpages.com/hub/Calculations-for-science-fiction-writers-Space-travel-with-constant-acceleration-nonrelativistic . Basically, 12 astronomical units in a week.

[red snow]

Look what I found: Travel times for 1G constant acceleration (discounting relativistic factors) http://williamhaloupek.hubpages.com/hub/Calculations-for-science-fiction-writers-Space-travel-with-constant-acceleration-nonrelativistic . Basically, 12 astronomical units in a week.

Excellent link. Thanks, HE. I keep thinking "surely you can't accelerate for that long before you are at super speeds" but it appears to be legit. I guess the speeds are pretty fast by that point though.

I think they do acknowledge the deceleration part in the sense that they say the ships are designed where the floor and ceiling is interchangeable. It definitely mentions deceleration in later books too (which I don't think could be considered a massive spoiler) as I just read one last week and there's mention of planning an acceleration/deceleration course.

[End of Disc One]

I recently finished this as well. Enjoyed it a lot, much more than Leviathan Wakes. The extra POVs helped, and there wasn't one POV that I wasn't looking forward to reading.

Looks like I guessed correctly that Abraham wrote Prax and Avasarala. I figured it out in the first half of the book...you could tell that the type of imagery Abraham uses in his own books was present in these chapters. That was the only indicator for me, really.

[red snow]

I recently finished this as well. Enjoyed it a lot, much more than Leviathan Wakes. The extra POVs helped, and there wasn't one POV that I wasn't looking forward to reading.

Looks like I guessed correctly that Abraham wrote Prax and Avasarala. I figured it out in the first half of the book...you could tell that the type of imagery Abraham uses in his own books was present in these chapters. That was the only indicator for me, really.

I didn't enjoy this one as much as the first but it's still good. I wasn't sure if Prax was Abraham's or not (it usually feels as though Ty gets the more action-oriented ones). I didn't really like Prax as a character or POV but I thought Avasarala was the most interesting by a mile.

It is fun trying to guess who writes who though for each book and haveto admit they are similar enough (or edit each other enough) so that I'm never undone by the change from one chapter to the next.

[Happy Ent]

I think they do acknowledge the deceleration part in the sense that they say the ships are designed where the floor and ceiling is interchangeable.

Oh, you don’t need that. Unless you can also move the drive around. To get from A to B you point your engines away from B for half the time (pushing you into the floor), then turn the ship 180 degrees and point you engines away from B (pushing you into the floor as well).

But the point is that your ship can’t react very fast to anything. If you’ve flown at a gentle 1G (which make the passengers happy) for a week then, in order to react to something, you need to break for a full week to stand still relatively to what you’re trying to react to.

OK, re-reading, this seems to be acknowledged. When Canterbury reacts to a distress signal at the beginning of book 1, they do turn around and “burn like hell” for two days. (I still think it doesn’t add up—what where they accelerating for before? Half a G? And how long were they flying for? Weeks? So to revert a .5 G acceleration that has been going on for weeks, it seems that you need to kill the crew if you want to break in two days. I haven’t done the calculation, though.)

[red snow]

Oh, you don’t need that. Unless you can also move the drive around. To get from A to B you point your engines away from B for half the time (pushing you into the floor), then turn the ship 180 degrees and point you engines away from B (pushing you into the floor as well).

But the point is that your ship can’t react very fast to anything. If you’ve flown at a gentle 1G (which make the passengers happy) for a week then, in order to react to something, you need to break for a full week to stand still relatively to what you’re trying to react to.

OK, re-reading, this seems to be acknowledged. When Canterbury reacts to a distress signal at the beginning of book 1, they do turn around and “burn like hell” for two days. (I still think it doesn’t add up—what where they accelerating for before? Half a G? And how long were they flying for? Weeks? So to revert a .5 G acceleration that has been going on for weeks, it seems that you need to kill the crew if you want to break in two days. I haven’t done the calculation, though.)

For some reason I thought they'd maybe have engines either side of the ship? Switch the forward ones off and then use the others for the deceleration. Otherwise it's a complicated manoeuvre. Although I guess having the engine away from the main body of the ship and able to turn would be even easier.

When they take all the drugs and sit in the gels, I guess they are facing heavier g when they need to make emergency manoeuvres or.

Good point on the emergency breaking though, the maths would suggest they'd need to be medicated to withstand that kind of g to slow down.

[Happy Ent]

So, let’s see. The dependency on both time and accelration in

v = at

is linear, so if you want to halve the time, you need accelerate twice as much.

Maximum acceleration we see in the books is 8G, as far as I remember (end of book 2), and that’s the Roci, and it’s very stressful.

We’re told that 20G kills people.

I don’t think the Canterbury could do 8G. Let’s say it can do 4G.

The Canterbury breaks for 2 full days “like hell” in order to stop. Let’s assume normal travelling acceleration in the Cant was half a G. (Belters and Martians seem to find 1G stressful, because they are used to lower gravities. So let’s assume they travel at a fraction of G.)

Then 2 days of breaking corresponds to 16 days of accelerating. The distance to Saturn is 9 AU from the Sun, we don’t know where in the ship was headed. So the total expected travel time would be weeks.

I think this more or less checks out. It’s not off by an order of magnitude.

(On the other hand the travel times in Caliban’s were also of the order of weeks, weren’t they? And those ships made more than 1 G, didn’t they?)

[RedEyedGhost]

:lol:

From their book tour:

Ty talked about the Epstein drive a bit, and how it is based on a theory that potentially could work, but likely would not in actuality. And they'll never say what it is so that people could then poke holes in it. This is also the reason they never give dates in the book - they don't want people looking up planetary positions and poking holes for specific dates (even though they do look up and know those themselves). They also go through and strike out any specific time frame and make it more vague when they're editing.

[WrathOfTinyKittens]

HE - Yes, you're correct about the braking mechanism; in later books (maybe even in books 1 & 2 and I can't remember), ships explicitely "flip" to decelerate so that the floor remains subjectively down. (Edit - I believe this is mentioned in Book 1 when Miller and crew are traveling to attack the Protogen space station)

As for point 2, I didn't really keep track of it very much, but you may be right. I do think that Abraham and Franck may have just omitted the time lags when needed. The convo you reference, though, was not over that great of a distance - they were following Eros fairly closely in astronomical terms as I recall. Delay may have only been a few seconds.

[red snow]

HE - Yes, you're correct about the braking mechanism; in later books (maybe even in books 1 & 2 and I can't remember), ships explicitely "flip" to decelerate so that the floor remains subjectively down. (Edit - I believe this is mentioned in Book 1 when Miller and crew are traveling to attack the Protogen space station)

Thanks for the clariification. I'm not great with physics but wouldn't the flipping motion need to be incredibly quick for them not to go majorly off course? wouldn't such a flip in itself be dangerous (much like the g from rolling in a plane?). To top it off my imaginary positioning isn't helping in this case. I'd need a diagram to get my head around this fully. Reverse thrusters I can deal with. Sorry if this sounds stupid.

It's too late for me to read this but I think it may answer my questions

[williamjm]

Thanks for the clariification. I'm not great with physics but wouldn't the flipping motion need to be incredibly quick for them not to go majorly off course? wouldn't such a flip in itself be dangerous (much like the g from rolling in a plane?). To top it off my imaginary positioning isn't helping in this case. I'd need a diagram to get my head around this fully. Reverse thrusters I can deal with. Sorry if this sounds stupid.

I'd imagine they'd turn off the main drive before flipping around using some sort of manoeuvring thrusters, so they'd continue travelling at the same velocity until they switched the drive back on once it is pointing the other way and started to decelerate.

Oh, you don’t need that. Unless you can also move the drive around. To get from A to B you point your engines away from B for half the time (pushing you into the floor), then turn the ship 180 degrees and point you engines away from B (pushing you into the floor as well).

But the point is that your ship can’t react very fast to anything. If you’ve flown at a gentle 1G (which make the passengers happy) for a week then, in order to react to something, you need to break for a full week to stand still relatively to what you’re trying to react to.

It's also possible they may not be accelerating/decelerating all the time. While it would be faster to do that, it make economic sense for a ship like the Canterbury to accelerate for a bit until it reaches a certain velocity and then save fuel by staying at that velocity.

[Happy Ent]

It's also possible they may not be accelerating/decelerating all the time. While it would be faster to do that, it make economic sense for a ship like the Canterbury to accelerate for a bit until it reaches a certain velocity and then save fuel by staying at that velocity.

But this (“travelling ballistic”) seems manifestly not how they’re doing it (neither would it make sense, assuming the Epstein drive) Almost all the ship travel we see happens “at a leisurely half G” or something like that.

[karaddin]

It is absolutely how I was picturing them doing it however. Every other ship we see doing the "leisurely half G" is carrying passengers to a specific destination. The Canterbury is hauling a huge mass of ice on a preset schedule, there is no reason that it needs to burn constantly if their business model allows slower travel.

If there is any mention of the gravity level in that first chapter prior to the deceleration burn that would say one way or the other though.

[Happy Ent]

(The main reason for ballistic travel in the Expanse universe seems to be stealth.)

Red Snow: as williamjm said, to turn around you kill the main thrusters, turning the crew weightless for a while. You then flip the ship using much smaller thrusters that aren’t pointed backwards but sideways. This doesn’t change its direction of travel at all and can’t take more than a minute anyway. During that manoeuvre the crew is still weightless and things will be very disorienting because the left wall of the ship may move towards you until it slams into you, your toothbrush suddenly flies right, etc. When the flipping manoeuvre is finished (and, from “the outside” it looks as if the ship is travelling backwards), you start the main thrusters again, pushing away from the direction of travel. This effectively starts the deceleration. From the point of view of the crew they’re pushed towards the floor, so it feels exactly like the first part of the trip.

[Happy Ent]

“Holden knelt beside her chair. In the one-third of their current thrust, it was perfectly comfortable.” (Leviathan Wakes, Chapter I: Holden)

[karaddin]

Ok so it's entirely possible that this is a mistake rather than definitive, but I don't think they actually care about getting it that perfectly accurate but you are right HE :P

Naomi looked at Holden, Are we done here? in her eyes. He snapped a sarcastic salute and she snorted, shaking her head as she walked away, her frame long and thin in her greasy coveralls.

For her to be walking away there must be gravity of some kind

ETA you clearly looked more thoroughly than me, and cited properly!