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One scene in Leviathan Wakes involves a character plotting out the likely trajectories of a certain ship, but other than that, the characters can go just about anywhere they want to go as long as they have a good ship to call theirs.

But the ships don’t really move the way real spacecraft move.įirst of all, orbits barely enter the picture. And we often read references to what the thrusters are doing on ships. In the Expanse universe, spaceships are flipping around all the time to vector their engines in the correct direction to change their velocity. But that doesn’t give our characters a convenient floor to stand on! So Corey put the word “Epstein” in front of “fusion drive.” “Epstein,” in this case, is short for “magic.” It’s a kind of magic that lets Corey have thrust without propellant, so that he can simultaneously achieve short (astronomically speaking) travel times and keep his crew in thrust gravity.įor a more physically realistic depiction of relationship between fuel, propellant, and thrust, consider Neal Stevenson’s spaceship Ymir in Seveneves. As we are learning with ion propulsion nowadays, it can often be most efficient to run at a low level of thrust, but sustain that for a very long time. In the end, high thrust – and, with it, appreciable thrust gravity – should only be active for a short time in any space voyage through the Expanse. The spaceship must stop its burn, cease thrust gravity, and wait several more months before getting to their destination. But they will still run out of baseballs at some point, and then they must coast without thrust. In other words, their thrust is more efficient. They will put more momentum into each pitch, and so they’ll go faster across the ice. Writing that a spaceship has a fusion drive instead of a chemical rocket is like replacing yourself in this analogy with a major league baseball pitcher. You are going to have to keep throwing them, constantly, to keep accelerating yourself. But what if you wanted to keep thrusting the whole time? You will need more baseballs. That’s basically how spacecraft work now: they thrust for a little, and then coast for a long period of time until they get to their next destination. You can keep throwing baseballs until you decide that you’re going fast enough that you can wait it out. Another throw speeds you up a little more. But you don’t want to wait out this long slide, so you throw another baseball. Your body gets an equal and opposite amount of momentum: you start sliding in the direction opposite your throw, but much more slowly than the baseball (because its mass is small while yours is big).

If you throw a baseball away from you, then you have given it some amount of momentum (mass times velocity).

#THE EXPANSE SHIPS FULL#

What you do have is a bag full of baseballs. The ice is perfectly frictionless, so you can’t walk or crawl or anything to get back to solid ground. Picture this: you’re sitting in the middle of a frozen pond. No matter how powerful or efficient your engine is, you will always need to be chucking propellant out the back to sustain this kind of thrust profile. Ships are therefore designed with decks in “stacks” above the engine with a ladder or lift giving crew access between decks, like in a skyscraper.Ī fusion engine isn’t a crazy idea, especially not for a civilization a couple hundred years in the future.

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Conveniently for crew health, and for TV production, the engine also provides “thrust gravity” inside the spaceship.

This trajectory allows relatively quick travel times between worlds. It allows craft to thrust continuously from one planet or asteroid to another, accelerating constantly for half the trip and then decelerating constantly for the second half. I’m going to take a look at some of the spacecraft engineering concepts in “The Expanse.” Let’s start with the most science-fictional, and therefore least plausible: The Epstein DriveĬorey very quickly establishes that the powerhouse of his whole solar-system-wide civilization is the “Epstein Drive,” which is some kind of fusion engine for boosting spaceships around. Hopefully that will translate to the screen! For example, “Belters” nod and shrug with whole-arm gestures, so that they can be seen when wearing a suit. A good chunk of the books take place in zero gravity.

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Those are not the good parts of the book.) Corey steered clear of many sci-fi tropes that would have a big impact on the appearance of the series – no artificial gravity here! – and he made sure to build aspects of spacecraft engineering and operations into the cultures he depicted. (With the exception of parts of the first book, wherein Corey tried to write something horror-ish by being as gross as he could think to be. The books are soon going to be a TV series, and I am very much looking forward to see its depiction of space and space travel.

The expanse ships