The Expanse Discussion

[Nuke]

the drum was spun up with thrusters. its going to hold onto its angular momentum unless you use thrusters to spin it the other way. magnetic berings make the most sense but im not sure if its 100% frictionless. you would need to monitor it and make corrections periodically, and since you are teakettling thrusters you are wasting remass to do this. who builds a magnetic bearing that you cant use as a motor?

not really a big fan of that ship's design. it doesnt make any sense for the drum to be independent from the ship. it has 2 modes of operation, accell/decel (doing things the expanse way), and then the on the float mode where it produces gravity through spinning. in the book tycho station has spin gravity but can convert to thrust gravity by tilting the hab ring sections. the navoo/behemoth has no such feature in its design, it accelerates, goes on the float and spins up. running the engines for anything more than very low acceleration course corrections wouldnt be even remotely safe, and there is no reason to populate the bridge or engineering while on the float, so why not just spin the whole ship? the ship in general is kind of a misfit. it seems like an antiquated way of doing things when you have drives that can sustain 6g for long periods of time.

also doesnt seem like it would make a good battleship either. all that unneccisary bulk and complexity. maybe if you take the entire drum off to get your twr up, increase the range by adding remass tankage, increase armament and reduce a lot of unneeded complexity. in the book they had to jettison the behemoth's railguns to spin up the drum and they had some problems with the weapons integration in the first place, so it seems like it would have been better just to remove it entirely (it would have made the slowzone incident worse though). its supposidly made out of lighter weight materials than earth/mars battleships, so that might help it earn some brownie points, but i would still remove the drum to increase the capabilities of the warship. especially since it takes a swarm of drones to turn the ship around in the show seems to incicate the ship would have a hard time changing orientation under its own power. it kind of made sense near tycho for safety reasons but not on the retrieval mission. that drum is mostly hollow but that kind of thing plays havok on your moment of inertia. 

Edited July 4, 2018 by Nuke