Comment by le-mark
4 days ago
That series strived for realism in that regard, and in using magnetic boots to work in zero gravity; which was admirable. That made the things that were not realistic stand out even more imo. The (unfortunately named) Epstein drive, a drive that consumes very little mass under constant acceleration allows for relativistic speeds in very little time (weeks). Their ships were flying from one side of the solar system to the other in weeks, but they couldn’t make interstellar flights? Also the effects of cosmic rays and hard radiation on reproduction makes the disaffected belter population seem impossible. That’s all fine of course, just inconsistent imo.
Shohreh Aghdashloo performance was a real treat though!
The Epstein drives are efficient, but not efficient enough to run for months at a time without stopping, and are thus unusable for interstellar travel. The books go into that when talking about Medina/Behemoth/Nauvoo... The whole reason it had a rotating drum was because the engines would only be active at the start and end of the journey.
She was also in a show with Ray Liotta (Smith) that, in spite of some unevenness, sadly didn't make it through its first season.
Regarding reproduction, I'm willing to write that off to advanced medical technology doing DNA repair. Most of the plot wouldn't be that different with slower space drives, so I wasn't too bothered by that either.
But fwiw, it turns out it is possible to get that level of rocket performance, if ToughSF got their numbers right:
https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-dr...
It wouldn't look the same and the power level would be higher than what all of civilization uses today, but the amount of fusion fuel isn't all that remarkable. The design uses helium-3, which could be collected in large quantity from Uranus and Neptune.