The Expanse

They never say how fast they go aswell in the books. Always under how much G they are accelerating or braking. It is also the limiting factor on how fast you can go from place A to B without running a high risk of blacking or stroking out or maneuver in battle.

Also stations are under different Gs aswell. Belters prefer lower than 1 G, because they are used to it from living out in the belt. Earth gravity causes them pain and nausea.

Edit: Havent watched season 4 yet, but I assume the person did a heavy maneuver and blacked out.

Miller just wanted access to the alien network or whatever to check in for the protomolecule and to complete his investigation. He wasn't able to fulfill that function at the station, but at Ilus he was.

And the belters weren't really planning that far ahead, they vaguely just figured if they had a hauler loaded down with lithium they'd find a way to sell it and refit their colony with the profits. I'm only a few episodes in, but someone mentioned before, the book did a way better job of showing the shitty position they were in as Ganymede refugees and the desperation they felt. They basically had no options.

LachiusTZ said:

Cant an orbit be 24 hours? What would orbit need to be to be out of LoS for 12 hours? 16hrs?

Of course they would all be in one spot... That's how colonies / settlements work

Lightning created by a structure. Not much of a reach to think that structure would change landscape, and they bedded down on part of it.

Kind of reaching a bit

Click to expand...

Orbit times can vary, it just depends on how far away from crashing into the planet you are.

For earth, geosynchronous orbit (1 orbit =24 hours) is at the height of 22,236 miles, anything in this distance and beyond is considered high earth orbit. Geosynchronous orbit also means that the ship would orbit at the same speed that the planet is turning; the ship would seem to stay in place over a single longitude, and it would not go into a coms blackout.

By contrast, low earth orbit is any orbit less than 2500 miles. An example of low earth orbit is the International Space Station, which, is at ~250 miles high and makes 1 orbit in ~92 minutes, or 15.5 orbits per day.

For the show, it's difficult to ascertain the distances at the time of that call, between the Earther ship and ground; they could have been doing survey stuff in high orbit. The Belter ship was in low orbit, and the Roci was, obviously, also in low orbit, later in the show, but the call in question was mid season.

As for figuring out the orbit needed to have a 12 hour coms blackout window, it would require a decent amount of math, and an assumption that the planet in question was exactly like earth in terms of atmosphere, gravity, and size, unless otherwise noted. I think modern coms can be bounced off of the atmospheric lensing (or some such) to achieve communication past line of sight loss, so you would need to account for X amount of time past when they went over the horizon.

A rough guesstimate would be that the ship would need to be in high orbit, much farther out than geosynchronous orbit. Somewhere along the lines of 1 orbit of the ship would take many days/weeks. Edit: I guess it could be some places in a medium orbit range (less than 24h per orbit), where it would be "chasing the dawn", and be on the far side of the planet for a prolonged period of time. Too much thinking required at this late hour.....or ever (for me), probably.

Send a tweet to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, or ask the physics board, I'm sure they could give an exact distance it would be orbiting at. Someone who owns the Kerbal Space Program game could plot it out too.

Blazin said:

There are 1300 new systems and the belters just somehow find themselves on the planet important to Holden and his alien friend. Despite this still like the show, just get frustrated how easy it would be to not put this type of silliness in and still tell the story.

Click to expand...

That's a pretty silly complaint - the wormholes are a fast-transit system - that's like being baffled at the weird coincidence that you took the subway at random and just somehow ended up in an American city.

Blazin said:

No idea how you are confused by such a simple statement but you pulled it off. Your statement is non sensical to mine, thanks for trying to help though .

Click to expand...

You're assuming that planet is the only one with a weapon/bomb/whatever you want to call it left over from an attack that killed the builders. It's hardly the ONLY planet that matters among the 1300.

At this point I think the implication is that all of the 1300 worlds are going to be proto-molecule "dead" (or inert at least) with remnants of some sort of weapon like that on them, otherwise one of those systems should still have a builder presence? This happened to be the first gate that Miller got taken through, but it could have been any of them.

LachiusTZ said:

I dont think in the books there are any "weapons" left from the spooky gate demon things. Could be wrong on it, I remember the new terra stuff, but not precisely HOW they imploded all the machinery on that planet.

Click to expand...

Aside from maybe the physical description, I think that part was setup the same way in the book. There was a dead spot that Miller couldn't see into that was something leftover from when the builders got wiped out. Miller needed Holden to tell him what it was/help him with it somehow.

The book described it as a black void thingy that Holden could see, kind of like what the show displayed. Just like the book, mech Miller needed to enter into the thing in order to shutdown all the alien tech.

Blazin said:

For a series that likes to be known for being better about realism, season 4 has bugged me a couple times with things that anyone involved would know is silly. At one point the orbiting ship says they are going around the other side of the planet and would be out of communication for 12hrs?

Then we have not even a 100 people on an earth like planet and they are all in the same exact part of it, like think about that for a minute. Then it gets better, they just happen to build their base in line with these lightning strikes going around the planet, within meters. You could maybe try to explain that away by saying the purposefully set up on the equator and the aliens previously also used the equator for functional reasons, but they still nailed it within meters which is impressive for both the aliens and the belters.

How were the belters planning to get their ore shipments back home to sell? They ran a blockade to get to the planet they just figuring on their cargo ships doing that every time?

There are 1300 new systems and the belters just somehow find themselves on the planet important to Holden and his alien friend. Despite this still like the show, just get frustrated how easy it would be to not put this type of silliness in and still tell the story.

Click to expand...

The communication thing makes sense because neither of the ships seemed to deploy any communications relay so line of sight issues would be problematic depending on their orbit but given they did not appear to be in geo stationary orbit it is kinda expected.

All 100 people went to the same place because they found a giant high purity lithium deposit near it. The belters prospected and found it and the people with the legit mining claim went there too because if you have an actual mining claim why would you not want to setup next to the jackpot that somebody else went through the trouble in finding.


The belters were banking on the blockade not lasting they figured if they could run it others would too and eventually it would just fall apart. Given what happens it was a very reasonable bet.

Every gate opened to a system important to the protoculture civilization they were all interesting to ghost miller. Miller was not pushing to go to any specific place he was being pushed to simply go through any gate and start hitting buttons. Had he not found anything of note it would have forced him through another gate and hit more buttons rinse repeat till he found something. Given what we see in the books later there are artifacts in almost all the systems they find some more interesting than others some just inexplicable.

Ya, Illus ends up being fairly run of the mill compared to some of the other shit that gets discovered.

Cybsled said:

Ya, Illus ends up being fairly run of the mill compared to some of the other shit that gets discovered.

Click to expand...

I am really curious what ghost miller would have made of the one where every scrap of everything in the system was basically in one giant crystalized brain thing.