Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame

[NSEP]

There is this show called the 100 or something. Its about 100 teens that have to re-inhabit the world after some kind of disaster.

The 100 teens are criminals by the way. Okay, so out of all the people you can choose to regrow human life on Earth the dummies in this "ark" space station are going to go for criminal teens? Litterly one of the most annoying type of humans to have ever existed ?

Also, they land on this weird looking, massive, un-aerodynamic looking cube thing. Seriously? Why? Why don't you send scientist, engineers, workers who can actually rebuild society on Earth so the rest can come back down. I would rather come back on Earth to a Mars-society kind of habitat city, rather than the clay/dirt mess these teens will make, after living in a high tech space station my entire life.

Edited February 14, 2018 by NSEP

[p1t1o]

7 hours ago, Gargamel said:

I just watched this within the past week, and I can't even remember the plot, nor the actors.  I might be old, but I do remember not enjoying it.   I'm booting up netflix right now to rewatch a few seconds to try and remember.   I was that bad/boring.  ...... Oh yeah.... I remember it now.   Nowhere as good as the other two films, and it very poorly explains the events of the other two.    A third movie, or even a series was needed for that storyline, but this was not it. 

-------

So has anybody read SevenEves yet?   I found it a hard pill to swallow, and I never finished the second part, it got... boring I guess. 

I enjoyed it, but yeah it had almost nothing to do with the first two movies. I half expect there to be a secret 4th movie that was the real sequel all along that will knit everything together and this one is just a filler or something. One can but hope.

***

I read SevenEves, the second half is jarring, but I liked the attempt at realism in the first half and it engaged me emotionally. A good read overall, for me.

[DDE]

45 minutes ago, NSEP said:

The 100 teens are criminals by the way. Okay, so out of all the people you can choose to regrow human life on Earth the dummies in this "ark" space station are going to go for criminal teens? Litterly one of the most annoying type of humans to have ever existed ?

They chose the wrong contractor.

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

1 hour ago, DDE said:

 

Asphalt killer.

1 hour ago, NSEP said:

Why? Why don't you send scientist, engineers, workers who can actually rebuild society on Earth

They tell that those The 100 are expendable, and the scientists don't know how much high is radiation there.
Radiation is a synonym to Magic in this series.

24 minutes ago, DDE said:

They chose the wrong contractor.

Remains of such contractors are also shown in s04.

Edited February 14, 2018 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

3 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

  Hide contents

Asphalt killer.

So are walkers.

Sweden has the solution, though.

[kerbiloid]

The 100 is not about the science.
It's about High Art of Betrayal. A master class by betrayal guru.
If at least somebody of main characters haven't betrayed somebody at least once per episode, the episode is lost

 

 

7 minutes ago, DDE said:

 

BT series can this too

Spoiler

 

Edited February 14, 2018 by kerbiloid

[peadar1987]

7 hours ago, Gargamel said:

So has anybody read SevenEves yet?   I found it a hard pill to swallow, and I never finished the second part, it got... boring I guess. 

In a funny way, it fell into the same realm as Interstellar for me. It would have been fine as a work of fantasy, but pretending to be scientifically accurate while being nothing of the sort would me up a little.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

@KerikBalm The two only tiny niches are elevated DEW platforms - thus presuming DEWs are worth such contrivances - and the few types of terrain where legs are the superior if not only means of locomotion.

On the issue of the latter, I know of more prospective methods of locomotion than legs.

Legs is nice if you are small ground get very uneven relative to you, as platform get larger this become less of an problem and the square cube law start punish you. 
Legs are also pretty slow and as other say in an war you don't want to be high, the legs are also an obvious weak point and hard to armor.
So if you have an robot larger than say an cat you want wheels or belts. 

That screw car is design to work in water, ice, deep snow and mud, it float and the screws work well enough in water. Slower than tracks and wheels are faster  

[sevenperforce]

Armored exoskeletons are realistic only in really, ridiculously difficult terrain where there is a lot of cover and you need to be as agile as an ordinary human.

There is a reason that the Battle of Culloden was the last pitched battle on the British Isles.

[kerbiloid]

Combat armored exoskeleton should include a BostonDynamic-style robohorse.

[DDE]

4 hours ago, magnemoe said:

That screw car is design to work in water, ice, deep snow and mud, it float and the screws work well enough in water. Slower than tracks and wheels are faster  

I was actually wondering about environments where it may be useful. And it's not only Dagobah.

5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

BT series can this too

It can't, however, be ported to a screw design.

Yes, I know one guy tried.

[DAL59]

18 hours ago, p1t1o said:

 

Well GPS guided weapons did not really come into vogue until the 90s, and even so, the idea that GPS would not necessarily be available in wartime is a doctrine that permeates pretty much completely. There are other ways that are almost as good, to determine location or guide weapons. Inertial systems are very good nowadays and there are things like TERCOM and more advanced imaging-radar versions. So there is no weaponry that is entirely eliminated by knocking out satellites.

The given premise also has a very limited idea of modern long range warfare. For one thing, high altitude bombing has not been the state of the art for decades, we only use it these days because the majority of modern wars are horrifically one-sided which makes things very easy. So tactical and strategic airstrikes are still in, as long as your cruise phases are not too high. And for another, the Stratosphere boundary is around the 60,000feet mark which gives plenty of room for high-altitude bombing. Heck it leaves enough room for some creative uses of ballistic missiles - there is a technique called "depressed trajectory" that is believed to be an option to modern nuclear forces, a technique which sends the weapon on a very inefficient, but much lower and much quicker trajectory, enabling so-called "decapitation" strikes and more effective counter-force strikes. Air warfare pretty much takes place entirely below 60k feet, and usually much lower. The one thing I would say is that modern air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles may have their upper range curtailed, as most long range weapons have high altitude cruise phases, often in excess of 100k feet. But this is not to say that long range air combat would not be possible.

Also, cruise missiles, a huge part of modern arsenals would be unaffected.

In my opinion then, the machines and mechanisms of war would be largely unaffected, but by far the biggest effect would be intelligence and communications.

Without satellite relays, communicating with forces on the other side of the globe becomes much more problematic. Not impossible by a long chalk, by using ground-based relays in combination with, or alongside very long range radio stations. It is possible for a single radio station to communicate with another on the other side of the globe, there are several methods. There are disadvantages however, reliability and resistance to electronic countermeasures for example. But the point is communications would be difficult but not impossible.

I consider it very likely that the major militaries already know how they would deal with global coordination without satellites.

So still not exactly a paradigm-shift in general warfare.

 

The big cheese I think is reconnaissance and intelligence - knowing what the enemy is doing, where your targets are.

Satellite reconnaissance revolutionised planning and fighting wars and I think that there would be some gaps that would take time to fill. For example, high-speed air recon was the state of the art for a long time until satellites rendered it almost obsolete.

Back in the day, aircraft used to be able to fly high and fast enough to make a very difficult shot for air defences. However, air defences have come an extremely long way since the advent of space based recon, especially if the target is limited to 60k feet. There is little capability to fill the gap of strategic recon.

There has been a minor recent surge in the popularity of high-speed, high-altitude air recon, but with an artificial cap on altitude, it is questionable that anything could fly fast enough to escape modern air defences.

It is not like forces would be blind, low altitude recon, ground based recon, stealth drones etc all fit into the picture, but there is a large scale impact on recon capability.

This impact on strategic intelligence would have another effect - it would affect political stability. For better or worse perhaps, one one side, enemies get very nervous when they cant see what their opponent is up to, and on another - its harder to plan aggression with impaired long-range recon. What the result of that would be, is definitely a difficult question.

On the political side again, quite apart from the loss of satellites is the now apparently impenetrable missile shield. This may well have a stabilising effect in a nuclear context - although all-out global nuclear war is still well within our means, it would certainly be harder, and slower. This may not have a similar effect on conventional warfare though, as nuclear deterrence prevents conventional aggression too, as the powers fear any conflict triggering escalation closer to a nuclear exchange, even today. Again the exact effect of this is a very difficult question.

 

 

In conclusion, then, whilst it would have a significant impact on many aspects of warfighting, I do not believe that essentially putting a 60k feet "lid" on it would result in such huge changes to military doctrine. Long range warfare would still be more than possible.

All this has little to do with the rise of an the "armoured infantry", as described they are far beyond todays technological level. Neither do they fill any niche which suddenly appears due to the aforementioned conditions.

I judge the book to be: fantasy grade "war-opera"

Thats only a take on its real-world plausibility, not to say it wont be a good read.

 

 

This is kind of like the enders shadow premise: a global alliance breaks up, but space stations shoot down all missiles.  

[magnemoe]

18 hours ago, p1t1o said:

 

Well GPS guided weapons did not really come into vogue until the 90s, and even so, the idea that GPS would not necessarily be available in wartime is a doctrine that permeates pretty much completely. There are other ways that are almost as good, to determine location or guide weapons. Inertial systems are very good nowadays and there are things like TERCOM and more advanced imaging-radar versions. So there is no weaponry that is entirely eliminated by knocking out satellites.

The given premise also has a very limited idea of modern long range warfare. For one thing, high altitude bombing has not been the state of the art for decades, we only use it these days because the majority of modern wars are horrifically one-sided which makes things very easy. So tactical and strategic airstrikes are still in, as long as your cruise phases are not too high. And for another, the Stratosphere boundary is around the 60,000feet mark which gives plenty of room for high-altitude bombing. Heck it leaves enough room for some creative uses of ballistic missiles - there is a technique called "depressed trajectory" that is believed to be an option to modern nuclear forces, a technique which sends the weapon on a very inefficient, but much lower and much quicker trajectory, enabling so-called "decapitation" strikes and more effective counter-force strikes. Air warfare pretty much takes place entirely below 60k feet, and usually much lower. The one thing I would say is that modern air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles may have their upper range curtailed, as most long range weapons have high altitude cruise phases, often in excess of 100k feet. But this is not to say that long range air combat would not be possible.

Also, cruise missiles, a huge part of modern arsenals would be unaffected.

In my opinion then, the machines and mechanisms of war would be largely unaffected, but by far the biggest effect would be intelligence and communications.

Without satellite relays, communicating with forces on the other side of the globe becomes much more problematic. Not impossible by a long chalk, by using ground-based relays in combination with, or alongside very long range radio stations. It is possible for a single radio station to communicate with another on the other side of the globe, there are several methods. There are disadvantages however, reliability and resistance to electronic countermeasures for example. But the point is communications would be difficult but not impossible.

I consider it very likely that the major militaries already know how they would deal with global coordination without satellites.

So still not exactly a paradigm-shift in general warfare.

 

The big cheese I think is reconnaissance and intelligence - knowing what the enemy is doing, where your targets are.

Satellite reconnaissance revolutionised planning and fighting wars and I think that there would be some gaps that would take time to fill. For example, high-speed air recon was the state of the art for a long time until satellites rendered it almost obsolete.

Back in the day, aircraft used to be able to fly high and fast enough to make a very difficult shot for air defences. However, air defences have come an extremely long way since the advent of space based recon, especially if the target is limited to 60k feet. There is little capability to fill the gap of strategic recon.

There has been a minor recent surge in the popularity of high-speed, high-altitude air recon, but with an artificial cap on altitude, it is questionable that anything could fly fast enough to escape modern air defences.

It is not like forces would be blind, low altitude recon, ground based recon, stealth drones etc all fit into the picture, but there is a large scale impact on recon capability.

This impact on strategic intelligence would have another effect - it would affect political stability. For better or worse perhaps, one one side, enemies get very nervous when they cant see what their opponent is up to, and on another - its harder to plan aggression with impaired long-range recon. What the result of that would be, is definitely a difficult question.

On the political side again, quite apart from the loss of satellites is the now apparently impenetrable missile shield. This may well have a stabilising effect in a nuclear context - although all-out global nuclear war is still well within our means, it would certainly be harder, and slower. This may not have a similar effect on conventional warfare though, as nuclear deterrence prevents conventional aggression too, as the powers fear any conflict triggering escalation closer to a nuclear exchange, even today. Again the exact effect of this is a very difficult question.

In conclusion, then, whilst it would have a significant impact on many aspects of warfighting, I do not believe that essentially putting a 60k feet "lid" on it would result in such huge changes to military doctrine. Long range warfare would still be more than possible.

All this has little to do with the rise of an the "armoured infantry", as described they are far beyond todays technological level. Neither do they fill any niche which suddenly appears due to the aforementioned conditions.

I judge the book to be: fantasy grade "war-opera"

Thats only a take on its real-world plausibility, not to say it wont be a good read.

Correctly, laser guides was most common during gulf war 1 is also both more accurate, accurate as in death star is an soft targets, you can use against moving targets , B1 bomber has one air kill with an laser guided bomb against an helicopter trying to escape an air base getting hit. 
Also war against terror has generated an focus on small and cheap precision weapons, they uses gps, now an air dropped bomb, rocket or artillery shell, are very hard to interrupt with jamming, they update their position all the time and adjust their
trajectory. if jammed internal guidance take over and you are already on correct trajectory. An bomb dropped from 10 km will hit within meters even if you jam gps the last 3 km, rockets and shells even less.

Note that on the other hand jamming handheld gps devices and small UAV or robots using gps is pretty easy, downside is that your jammers broadcast pretty loud and this you can not hide.

Now you can use recon pods on planes and drones, this is common to get high resolution coverage during an fight or in an high conflict area, as an bonus the plane or drone can do air support. 
For harder areas you will use F22, B2 and probably some unknown drones. 

And yes its war opera, for one taking out high orbit system in quantity petty much leaves US, Russia and China, you might add more major powers the next 30-50 years but it would still be hard. 
This would also result in strategic bombing of launch sites. Yes you could use modified ICBM but is that an good idea  

[kerbiloid]

And now suddenly an unexpectedly good but unrecognized science in fiction.

Matrix.

From wiki:

Quote

When humans blocked the machines' access to solar energy, the machines retaliated by harvesting the humans' bioelectricity for power.

, and this is usually erroneously treated as a bad science.
Everybody understands that the humans would consume much more energy as food than produce as heat, and such purpose of humans herding makes no sense.

But imagine you have gathered a billion of humans in one place.
They will produce ~70 GW of heat even sleeping.
Suppose, you have them in a spherical space station or a hollow asteroid.
Luminosity = 4 pi R² sigma T⁴.
R = sqrt(Luminosity / (4 pi sigma T⁴)) = sqrt(Luminosity / (4 pi sigma)) / T²  ~=.sqrt(70*10⁹ / (4 * pi * 5.67*10^-8)) / 300² = sqrt(9.8*10¹⁶) / 90000 ~= 3500 m = 3.5 km.
It's volume is = 4 * pi * (3500/2)³ / 3 ~= 22*10⁹ m³.

Each sarcophagus is, say, 2 m³.
So, total volume occupied by humans ~= 2*10⁹ m3.
I.e. ~= 10% of the volume required for thermodynamic equilibrium.

We can conclude that:
00. Matrix is friend. It's a VaultTek overseer. She keeps people alive in a kind of orbital vault until the Earth conditions get repaired.
01. Machines are friends, they are human servants.
10. Machines do not herd the humans as batteries. They feed them to keep alive and as healthy as possible just because they must.
11. The machines have to utilize the heat produced by billions of people. And they just use the humans waste heat (70 GW per billion) to power themselves.

Also this explains how the servicing machines fly through the tunnels.
These tunnels are inside an asteroid several kilometers in diameter, where the people are kept. And there is zero-G.

Also this explains why the underground capital of rebels can survive near the "Earth center". It's indeed the Earth Center. New Earth.

About the Neb's crew and their vision of the world.
Did you see their faces? Would you trust them with your money?

Edited February 15, 2018 by kerbiloid

[p1t1o]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

And now suddenly an unexpectedly good but unrecognized science in fiction.

Matrix.

From wiki:

, and this is usually erroneously treated as a bad science.
Everybody understands that the humans would consume much more energy as food than produce as heat, and such purpose of humans herding makes no sense.

But imagine you have gathered a billion of humans in one place.
They will produce ~70 GW of heat even sleeping.
Suppose, you have them in a spherical space station or a hollow asteroid.
Luminosity = 4 pi R² sigma T⁴.
R = sqrt(Luminosity / (4 pi sigma T⁴)) = sqrt(Luminosity / (4 pi sigma)) / T²  ~=.sqrt(70*10⁹ / (4 * pi * 5.67*10^-8)) / 300² = sqrt(9.8*10¹⁶) / 90000 ~= 3500 m = 3.5 km.
It's volume is = 4 * pi * (3500/2)³ / 3 ~= 22*10⁹ m³.

Each sarcophagus is, say, 2 m³.
So, total volume occupied by humans ~= 2*10⁹ m3.
I.e. ~= 10% of the volume required for thermodynamic equilibrium.

We can conclude that:
00. Matrix is friend. It's a VaultTek overseer. She keeps people alive in a kind of orbital vault until the Earth conditions get repaired.
01. Machines are friends, they are human servants.
10. Machines do not herd the humans as batteries. They feed them to keep alive and as healthy as possible just because they must.
11. The machines have to utilize the heat produced by billions of people. And they just use the humans waste heat (70 GW per billion) to power themselves.

Also this explains how the servicing machines fly through the tunnels.
These tunnels are inside an asteroid several kilometers in diameter, where the people are kept. And there is zero-G.

Also this explains why the underground capital of rebels can survive near the "Earth center". It's indeed the Earth Center. New Earth.

About the Neb's crew and their vision of the world.
Did you see their faces? Would you trust them with your money?

Nice take! I re-watched the Matrix the other day and I think it is one of the best movies ever made. It was also SUPER nostalgic. That movie is everything that was considered ultra-cool about the 90's jammed into one movie.

But I dont buy your premise wholesale.

I do like the part about machines "saving" humans and storing them on an asteroid though, thats a neat interpretation - but it largely ignores the human "farms" and the history of the "animatrix" prequels, unless you subscribe to the "MWAM" - matrix-within-a-matrix(within-a-matrix...etc) - school of thought.

And its weird, for it to be a saviour scenario, humans would have had to initiate it, they would have had to program the robots to act like villains in the knowledge that that is what is required to preserve the human psyche over the long-term. Which is internally consistent, logically, but SUPER weird. Imagine knowing that and programming it in deliberately. It takes some mental contorsions.

Occams' razor says that some form of the original overall premise (war with machines, humans in captivity) is still the case.

Personally I subscribe to a one-layer MWAM, what is seen as the "real" in the films is also within a matrix, and outside that, the machines are harvesting energy from us in a far more efficient manner, or even using us as computing power or biochemical factories.

For me, that neatly sows up most difficulties with the finer plot elements.

But I love that its the kind of movie that is open to wide interpretation.

Edited February 15, 2018 by p1t1o

[Guest]

KSP has ruined The Expanse for me.

I mean, it looks like hard sci-fi and sounds like hard sci-fi and occasionally nerds out about vacuum exposure and black-body radiation, but it does not respect Sir Isaac Newton at all. And I'm not talking about Epstein Drive here, I can accept that for narrative reasons.

Some of my pet peeves:

• The Canterbury stopping to check out a distress signal on an asteroid mid-course, "because it's the only ship in the area." Yeah that'd be a nice deceleration burn that wouldn't throw the dV reserves out of whack at all.
• Things falling out of orbit when blown up, e.g. Phoebe, the mirrors around Ganymede
• "It's going for Earth!" about Eros when it's accelerating at 15 g and more in random directions, I mean 15 g is about 150 m/s^2 and we all know what even a 1 m/s midcourse adjustment burn does to your trajectory
• That "gravity assist course" thing the Roci does around Ganymede 
• Ceres spun up so it has around 1 g centrifugal surface gravity in tunnels near the equator. It would fly apart!

There's more like this, and most of it is unnecessary. It's a shame because the series (books and TV) does so many things right. I'm much happier with straight-up fantasy with lasers (Star Wars, Star Trek, Valerian etc.) than something that masquerades as hard sci-fi but isn't. It's like it's in the Uncanny Valley of physics.

Another one was the Ascension miniseries. Stop reading if you don't want spoilers.

It's set on a Project Orion type starship supposedly launched during JFK's presidency, with the culture onboard frozen in a strange late-1950s style, but with major technological advances. Cool idea, right? Thing is, it turns out that the ship actually never launched: it's stationary on Earth with the people onboard just believing they're on their way to another star system. There was some Cold War rationale for that but never mind.

Thing is, that would never fly.

• Project Orion ships don't have constant acceleration. They use atomic bombs and a giant shock absorber to accelerate. It's a very bumpy ride during burns, and then zero-g for most of the trip.
• Even if they did, a constant 1g acceleration would have them going at c minus epsilon by now, which would put them halfway across the Milky Way in subjective time.
• When bad things (tm) happen onboard, the captain rushes to the bridge to check if they're "still on course." They're still under supposed constant 1 g acceleration, how could they have possibly gone "off course" because something in the hold blew up?
• They've got an observation cupola at the bow, with telescopes and such, peering at the (fake) sky. How could they possibly not tell the sky is fake? There would be parallax effects all over the place, a real telescope wouldn't even be able to focus on a fake star on a fake sky a few hundred meters away, tops, and they're highly sophisticated scientist types who must be maintaining the instruments so would easily be able to tell that they're fake. They even make their own instruments!
• Also the observation cupola is at the bow. With Plexiglass. On an interstellar starship speeding along at a significant fraction of c. They would be fried by gamma radiation in no time flat.

That's just a sampling. It's horrid. And again, it's something that masquerades as hard sci-fi, being anchored to a real historical epoch here and everything. Uncanny Valley again.

[kerbiloid]

28 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

the history of the "animatrix" prequels

Indeed, I haven't seen them.

26 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

the machines are harvesting energy from us in a far more efficient manner, or even using us as computing power or biochemical factories.

Nice idea, not just energy but a wider symbiosis.

Inspired by KSP, this forum and "Rose and Worm" book (where the Earth was almost fully devastated by a sudden aliens' bombardment, except several nerdish and highly militarized colonies on Mars, Venus and several asteroids), some time ago I was thinking about any possible purpose of other planets colonization/utilization.

Demographic, economical, scientific colonization of other celestial bodies for me look ridiculous.
Martian vault to evacuate the humanity looks even more funny.

So, I have believed that The True And The Only Way (tm) is a pack of nerds near several significant planets (mostly Saturn and Mars), having as many prepared resources (raw metals, raw polymers, etc) as possible and a working local industry.
If the Earth gets devastated, they should not terraform Mars or do other pathetic things, but get to the Earth and restore the terrestrial industrial base as soon as possible. Then re-colonize the Earth.

But what to do with other 99% of humanity? The Mars is too far, and so. The underground vaults are of course required, but unlikely will survive.

So, I tried the idea of hollow asteroid-like vaults in near-Earth orbit, to evacuate there as many millions as possible right before the hell opens on the surface.
This first rised a question: how could be a billion of humans quickly evactuated? Nothing except "inject them a sedative and put conveyor belts in queue order" I still can't see.

The second problem is: how much place will they have. As I realized much earlier (playing Minecraft and thinking about the mountain dungeons), humans themselves occupy a little of place themselves.
A sleeping billion could be placed inside one mountain or a small asteroid. While being awaken they need at least 25 m³ each.

The third problem appeared when I tried to estimate their energy requirements and heat production, and thats what I described here.

So, I just came to exactly this idea: a hollow asteroid several kilometers in diameter, with a hundred million sleeping inside, with machinery partially utilizing the waste heat as energy source.
With AI overseer. So, me and Matrix have close opinions on this theme.

[YNM]

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

And now suddenly an unexpectedly good but unrecognized science in fiction.

Matrix.

From wiki:

Quote

When humans blocked the machines' access to solar energy, the machines retaliated by harvesting the humans' bioelectricity for power.

, and this is usually erroneously treated as a bad science.
Everybody understands that the humans would consume much more energy as food than produce as heat, and such purpose of humans herding makes no sense.

Man, I never knew Matrix had sci-fi stuff behind it ! I just thought it was all a metaphor of computer and "world" stuff (ie. Oracle the OS, Smith is one of the names Microsoft uses, then outside there's a Zion and such) with crazy actions. I was only 5 or so when I saw the original, then for the sequels on TV runs I guess I was only 10, I was really oblivious.

But it's obviously not a sci-fi as I see it now. For a starter, where's the original energy source (food) from ? How did they kept having new humans ? Why digging down ?

Edited February 15, 2018 by YNM

[kerbiloid]

5 minutes ago, YNM said:

For a starter, where's the original energy source (food) from ? How did they kept having new humans ? Why digging down ?

If my Theory^(tm) is correct, they don' need new humans, they just keep the existing ones. And they don't dig down, it's a hollow asteroid vault prepared before the war.

A human needs ~0.8 kg of food per day, so an algae vat would be say an order of magnitude smaller than the dormitory.
Do you remember their porridge?

Edited February 15, 2018 by kerbiloid

[YNM]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

... they don' need new humans, they just keep the existing ones. ...

... Which is contrared by this statement :

Quote

... The Matrix is a shared simulation of the world as it was in 1999 in which the minds of the harvested humans are trapped and pacified; Neo had lived in it since birth. ...

 

Also

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

it's a hollow asteroid vault

 

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

an algae vat

proves a bit hard when Neo comes out to the surface (admittedly in the last sequel) and we see red-colored clouds with somewhat breathable atmosphere. (let's not forget solar power was said to be unavailable in the first place - plants are powered by sunlight.)

So yeah, it's a good fantasy, good action, but the sci-fi is lacking.

Edited February 15, 2018 by YNM

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, YNM said:

Neo had lived in it since birth. ...

VR "birth"? Or somebody saw baby-Neo in his aquarium childhood?

1 hour ago, YNM said:

Neo comes out to the surface (admittedly in the last sequel) and we see red-colored clouds with somewhat breathable atmosphere.

(Unless Neo is "awaken" into just another VR and his body is still held in aquarium)

Spoiler

 

(skip to 0:50)

Edited February 15, 2018 by kerbiloid

[YNM]

29 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

(Unless Neo is "awaken" into just another VR and his body is still held

you're making your own story then XD

[mikegarrison]

2 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

KSP has ruined The Expanse for me.

I mean, it looks like hard sci-fi and sounds like hard sci-fi and occasionally nerds out about vacuum exposure and black-body radiation, but it does not respect Sir Isaac Newton at all. And I'm not talking about Epstein Drive here, I can accept that for narrative reasons.

Some of my pet peeves:

• The Canterbury stopping to check out a distress signal on an asteroid mid-course, "because it's the only ship in the area." Yeah that'd be a nice deceleration burn that wouldn't throw the dV reserves out of whack at all.
• Things falling out of orbit when blown up, e.g. Phoebe, the mirrors around Ganymede
• "It's going for Earth!" about Eros when it's accelerating at 15 g and more in random directions, I mean 15 g is about 150 m/s^2 and we all know what even a 1 m/s midcourse adjustment burn does to your trajectory
• That "gravity assist course" thing the Roci does around Ganymede 
• Ceres spun up so it has around 1 g centrifugal surface gravity in tunnels near the equator. It would fly apart!

Not my job to apologize for them, but I'll point out a few things.

1) Delta-V *does* *not* *matter* with the Epstein Drive. So there is no problem with the Canterbury. It was their schedule they were worried about, not their effectively unlimited amount of delta-V.

2) Ceres does not have 1g surface gravity. It's only 1/3 g. (Of course, the filming set does have 1g gravity, not much they could really do about it.) And it's been artificially reinforced to hold together with that 1/3 g spin.

3) Eros actually was going for Earth, until Miller convinced Julie to go to Venus instead. So everyone who observed it as going to Earth was simply accurate. Those accelerations were not random any more than a zig-zagging convoy is randomly crossing the ocean. It may randomly zig zag, but it's doing so around an overall consistent trajectory.

[kerbiloid]

23 minutes ago, YNM said:

you're making your own story

That's what the whole Matrix series is about. There is no spoon story. Evertbody makes it on his/her own.

Edited February 15, 2018 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

And now suddenly an unexpectedly good but unrecognized science in fiction.

Matrix.

From wiki:

, and this is usually erroneously treated as a bad science.
Everybody understands that the humans would consume much more energy as food than produce as heat, and such purpose of humans herding makes no sense.

But imagine you have gathered a billion of humans in one place.
They will produce ~70 GW of heat even sleeping.
Suppose, you have them in a spherical space station or a hollow asteroid.
Luminosity = 4 pi R² sigma T⁴.
R = sqrt(Luminosity / (4 pi sigma T⁴)) = sqrt(Luminosity / (4 pi sigma)) / T²  ~=.sqrt(70*10⁹ / (4 * pi * 5.67*10^-8)) / 300² = sqrt(9.8*10¹⁶) / 90000 ~= 3500 m = 3.5 km.
It's volume is = 4 * pi * (3500/2)³ / 3 ~= 22*10⁹ m³.

Each sarcophagus is, say, 2 m³.
So, total volume occupied by humans ~= 2*10⁹ m3.
I.e. ~= 10% of the volume required for thermodynamic equilibrium.

We can conclude that:
00. Matrix is friend. It's a VaultTek overseer. She keeps people alive in a kind of orbital vault until the Earth conditions get repaired.
01. Machines are friends, they are human servants.
10. Machines do not herd the humans as batteries. They feed them to keep alive and as healthy as possible just because they must.
11. The machines have to utilize the heat produced by billions of people. And they just use the humans waste heat (70 GW per billion) to power themselves.

Also this explains how the servicing machines fly through the tunnels.
These tunnels are inside an asteroid several kilometers in diameter, where the people are kept. And there is zero-G.

Also this explains why the underground capital of rebels can survive near the "Earth center". It's indeed the Earth Center. New Earth.

About the Neb's crew and their vision of the world.
Did you see their faces? Would you trust them with your money?

Don't forget that the original script said the people were there for processing power, not electricity.