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I completely agree with you regarding Interstellar. I think it’s all about expectations. It was advertised to be this hard sci-fi with plausible physics and it
by avian 6y ago
I completely agree with you regarding Interstellar. I think it’s all about expectations. It was advertised to be this hard sci-fi with plausible physics and it wasn’t, as you say.
On the other hand, I remember enjoying watching the Core. It’s a stupid kind of sci-fi that allows you to suspend your disbelief and have fun. What else can you do with a movie that literally calls the metal the ship is made of unobtanium?
- mcv 6y agoIt does make me wonder how they obtain the metal to make the ship, though. I agree, though. Stupid space-fantasy can be tons of fun. Hard-SF always gets criticised for not being truly hard-SF. Even in the Martian, the adjustments needed to pick him up at the end would mean they're never going to make it back to Earth. Does it matter? It's still a fun movie. But balancing between fun and scientific accuracy can be hard, and a slip can be jarring. So how does everybody feel about The Expanse? There's some explicit super-science McGuffins in there, but most of it seems about as accurate as you could hope for, given the setting. Travel takes months. Not entire sure how their engines work, because the Rocinante does change course a lot without carrying insane amounts of fuel, so they do seem to have some sort of fantasy fuel.
- Valgrim 6y agoToughSF wrote a nice blog post trying to design a functional Epstein drive. He ended up choosing Deuterium and Helium-3 fusion reactions (which create little neutrons but lots of protons) happening far behind the ship to prevent overheating, picked up by a very strong magnetic field to provide thrust. http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-drive.html http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-dri...