Comment by api
1 day ago
Agreed. It's not "rock-hard sci-fi." It's "medium-hard sci-fi."
The background world building was pretty good from a hard SF point of view. Fusion rockets are possible and the high performance ones in the series are at the edge of physical plausibility but possible. Some of the details, like spinning up asteroids, don't work, but the basic physics of humanity's solar system build-out is mostly sound.
The rest of it gets increasingly soft and fantastic. Which is fine, it's fun space opera.
The issue is, and I believe the authors talk about this, is that the fusion torches they use are absolutely plausible, the problem is that theres no way those ships hold enough fuel for those trips, ripping the engines back out of plausibility again.
Right, they hand-wave this away with the "Epstein Drive"[0] (a name which I suppose has not aged well), which appears to somehow run on orders of magnitude less propellent than seems realistically possible.
[0] https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Epstein_Drive
The biggest issue is that with the energy economy of the drives as shown, none of the actual conflicts would ever happen.
Earth, the belt, etc. would have infinite clean water, for example, and plenty of energy to grow food via hydroponics.
No one would have any issues refining metals or other materals, due to all the available energy. Etc. etc.
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