How Fast Are Spaceships In 'The Expanse'? 

Silly Scott, you know all fictional spacecraft travel at the Speed of Plot.

"How does the Epstein drive work?" "Very well. Very efficiently."

I really liked that they didn't use some "magical" device that generates artificial gravity, instead the ship is constantly accelerating and decelerating.

During the time of the Expanse, if you have a powerful telescope, you can still see his little yacht speeding away at a good percentage of the speed of light. The longest, most spectacular funeral in history. Fortunately, his plans for the drive were stored on his home computer.

-How fast is the production of 'The Expanse'? -WAY. TOO. SLOW.

What I like about the books is that they show there actually being technological development. In book 8, there’s a ship called the Falcon that can easily accelerate at thirty Gs for long periods of time. This is so intense that users have to be submerged in high G fluid and have their lungs filled with oxygenated fluid to simply avoid them being squashed.

The Expanse started out as a MMO??!!! Uhm we need that MMO, you know now that the show and books have some good popularity.

You scored big points with me when you referenced Niven's universe. Niven was one of the first hard scifi authors to not treat spacecraft like magic cars and took deceleration and relativistic effects into account.

As an avid KSP player, I thought the same thing during the "I'll just gravity assist down to Ganymede." My thought: yeah, great, that'll take weeks, even if the moons are aligned.

It really puts the speed of light into perspective that even at one of the furthest distances one could travel in The Expanse solar system, the fastest they'd be going is less than 1% the speed of light! Unreal!

According to the book Eros was accelerating at over 30g by the time the Rosi gave up the chase.

If the "18 days to cross the solar system" estimate is right then that actually makes the Expanse's history of space travel line up with ocean travel IRL. Right now IIRC it takes about three months to get to Mars, which is comparable to an Atlantic crossing in the 18th century (I do believe that if Mars was as desirable as North America we'd be there by now). They don't say how fast early fusion drives were but as you said modern ships can travel the system in times comparable to ocean voyages now, basically paralleling the impact of steamships IRL.

"It's over here..." Next time, capture the mouse pointer for this, please. :)

Man you do really LOVE The Expanse. Can't blame you though.....

What fascinates me is that if you could accelerate at 1g constantly, you'd reach the speed of light in a little under a year.

the best moment was when that dude got liquefied when he hit the ring barrier thank God I wasn't drinking coffee or I'd have needed a new laptop 😄

in the books, (not sure about the TV show) ships in hard burn had periods when the shut down the burn to let the crew recover from the effects of the"drugs" and the effects of higher G forces. so travel time was in weeks rather then days. p.s. the writers did hold their hands up with the gravity assist sequence, they went with great visuals over actual realty.. ;)

You don't need fusion propulsion to move a starship. Just Thomas Jane's concentrated rage

You still have to admit, this is most likely the best sci-fi show of our generation yet! I am damn proud of the amount of study and research gone into the writing and scientific narrative of this show!

We need to clone Scott so every Sci-FYI writer can have him looking over their shoulder.

Just wanted to mention. The protomolecule was able to turn off inertia somehow. When Detective In love with a ghost over there was on Eros and it started moving, he didn't feel anything. This would imply that Eros station wouldn't have had to do a braking burn and so could have covered the distance to earth/venus much more quickly than 2 days

Just started watching The Expanse on bluray, i love it, even when somethings are matching physics. Anyway, its great to see that many things are accurate like repuslive breaking and debris after a ship or station got destroyed. In many shows ships just desapear when exploding, that always hurts my brain!

I never realized I wanted an expanse MMO...

just finished the audio book, 19 hours of pure enjoyment, one week for my next audible credit, cant wait

Did you read the books? I find them more interesting than the TV show. Althought I must admit that Amos and Avasarala are cast very well.

The book Leviathan Wakes that it is based on is much better and far more accurate when it comes to the science.

I could write so much on this but I will limit my response to two unfortunate issues with the Epstein Drive. 1.) Reactions from fusion consist of three basic products; protons, high energy photons, and neutrons. The protons are fairly easy to recover momentum from - magnetically focus them to the rear of the ship. The high energy photons MAY be possible to recover momentum from by focusing the photons to the rear of the ship. While difficult, this may be possible. We can currently guide X-rays with waveguides and turn them to limited degree. Maybe gamma rays may be possible someday. But the main problem here is the neutrons. And this isn't a engineering problem - this is a physics "Standard Model" problem. There is just no material that can exist that can reflect neutrons. The only way I could see to do this would be to manipulate gravity and/or the Higgs field - and if you can do that then you may not need an efficient fusion drive. 2.) How can we let these ships jet around the solar system at 1G? A constant burn to Jupiter at 1G is hitting some VERY high velocities - velocities that make asteroids look slow. Every ship in Expanse is a potential planet killer. We are worried about planes flying into buildings now days. How can we have planet killers flying around the solar system? Oh! You kinda mention this ( I say after watching your video! )

**SPOLIERS** Another point with Eros, I don't think that there was any intention of it slowing down, so you don't have to include deceleration time

Any ship accelerating at Mars standard gravity (3.72m/s^2) would take ~4.64 days to arrive at its destination. I assume this is the standard non-military acceleration as Belters were shown to be incapable of withstanding Earth gravity in the show and 1g was shown as being uncomfortable and possibly dangerous for untrained Martians. Because of how brachistochrone orbits work, all trips taken at this acceleration not including a coast phase will take the same amount of time. Ships are routinely shown traveling past the orbit of Neptune with payload fractions greater than 70%. This means getting to the ring wouldn't have been a months long journey, It would have taken less than a week. And so would going from Saturn to Ceres. And so would have going from wherever the Donnager picked them up to anywhere else. Any ship accelerating at 1g (9.8m/s^2) would take ~2.86 days to arrive. This means Earther and Martian warships, which all burn at at least 1g would take this long to get anywhere. It also means any vessel crewed entirely by Earthers would be almost twice as fast in transit than one with Martian or Belter crew or passengers. It also means that ships crewed entirely with Earthers would be all but immune from attack by Belter pirates as they could comfortably accelerate away from them at rates that would be legally torture to the Belter crew. This also implies that most of the Belt habitats rotate at Mars standard gravity or they would be lethal to most Belters who stepped foot on the station. it also means that Holden & Amos had been living in 1/3rd G for years. Their muscles would have atrophied to the point that returning to Earth would have been uncomfortable if not dangerous to them.

this is the video that introduced me to The Expanse! favorite TV show, and it got me back into reading! just stopping by to say thank you! :)

Good thing the guys name is Solomon and not Jeffrey, otherwise you would have to name your craft "Lolita express"..

one other thing about that marvelous scene with gravity assist rescue. At one point, all four gallilean moons are visible in one frame, which is impossible as 1:2:4 resonance of Ganymede:Europa:Io prevents all three to be lined up on one side of Jupiter.

In the book, one of crew member of Rocinnante mentioned all the shots that missed the target. Still there. On the extreme elliptic trajectory. Imagine you get shot by a round, travelling 100 km/s say five hundred years after it was fired. Big system, lot of free space, I know. But did you see how many rounds missed? Correction: On the second thought, that is not possible. Escape velocity and that stuff. So now you get shot by something that wasn't even fired in your solar system!

Loving the Expanse series, I try not to break down the mechanics while watching any sci-fi hehe but it is fun to do.

Just binged all 6 seasons. This is the first time I have ever considered rewatching it just because I want there to be more so badly.

actually, the events of the expanse take place 200 years from now (both showproducers and writers have said that) so the story of solomon epstein and mars` rise is only 50 years from now, right around when according to the books the stubborn colony "hit self-sustainability" (anyone else thinking that musk`s spacex vision has aims of outperforming that timeline? the expanse setting was created long before that was around)

The Expanse is one of my favourit series!😍

I'm a simple man. I see "The Expanse". I like and subscribe.

I’m very disturbed by the amount of asteroids that come close and cross Earth’s orbit!

As much as I love the expanse and appreciate the effort you've put into this, I must admit that I'm only liking this because of the Larry Niven reference. RINGWORLD FOREVER!

I think the books take more care with this stuff-the show speeds up the flow of time for story telling reasons I assume. It's great we have a season 3: i'd like to see your video on the realism of wormhole physics in the Expanse for sure!!

8:30 - looking at this it's easy to imagine space as a liquid, strange stuff.

If you reference from the books there is quite a large portion discussed about thrust speeds and distance. The third book goes pretty in depth into this kinda thing. Book 8 has a pretty cool example too

This was a great overview/explanation. thank you!

I got curious about the time dilation effects of moving at .75% of the speed of light on that 18 day trip between Saturn and Ceres. Turns out that even at these insane speeds, you would only experience about 15 seconds of time dilation for the 18 day trip. So no coming home to your 5 year old now being an adult on your long haul trip.

Be kinda unfortunate if a crazy belter were to figure out how to use those engines as a weapon...

This is a show I can't wait to just bing watch all seasons when it's finally over. I feel like I've missed sooo many details watching each episode week by week then just doing a 5 minute recap video when the new season drops.

thanks to your last video talking about the expanse, i decided to check it out. now i have a new addiction. thanks a lot Scott. lol

Can't wait for the next season

Hi Scott, I really like the videos you do explaining what is likely possible with near future technology. would you consider doing a video on your thoughts on the breakthrough starshot project? Id like to hear what you think about what might be involved, what kind of energy resources would be required and what kind of scientific payloads (mass-wise) might be sent to nearby solar systems and in what kind of timeframes you think it might be possible.

Omg! All this time binging the show I thought it would make an excellent video game, with the way the story unravels and the amount of action. Not surprised this was originally meant to be one!

Scot Manly I want you to be the pre-production scientific accuracy checker of new scifi shows!

Damn, I would've totally sold my Star Citizen stuff for an Expanse MMO :D

It's not mentioned anywhere in the Caliban's War that Alex was orbiting Celene, however the way it was narrated suggested that they got from Ganymede to Europa in something like 2 minutes, which is fishy

This man has an intuitive idea of the distance between stars because he played elite

I watched yesterday's Space X launch, some of the extreme closeup shots of returning Falcon 9 are looking like something pulled directly from the Expanse, brilliant stuff :)

“The thing with accelerations, of course, they build up over time” Wuahahahaha!

Back here again because I finished Season 4 ahh.

i love one section in "leviathan wakes" where it is mentioned that you can still probably observe epsteins ship driving away from sol, you just need to know where he is and a telescope with enough power xD

The Expanse was frikkin awesome. Thnx for the tip Scott

Speaking of The Expanse (I do realize I'm a bit late), how do you plot a path that requires you to be accelerating a deaccelerating at 1G (or at a constant acceleration for that matter)? Do you shoot straight to the target or do some eliptic trajectory? Would you have 1 or more transitions between accelerating and deaccelerating? Could you maybe show an example on KSP? Thanks and keep up with the amazing work!

I wonder what his time dilation would be at that speed...

I love the Epstein waking up in the 25th century bit. An astronomically remote light of hope.

The show brushes off travel time more than the books. The books talk about it taking weeks to make some trips, on account of the ever-changing distances between orbiting bodies and the one-third g of acceleration.

I guess there is a fine line between how accurate science can be before it cuts into the drama in any show

Wait, was that a Buck Rogers reference?

If a ship going that fast meets an atom just floating about, we are still talking about 500kg TNT of kinetic energy release. They better have good plating.

Great video! Definitely would like more like this.

Too bad the mouse wasn't capture, because the "up here and down here" sound futile as there is no pointer :D

It really takes place in 2350? I imagined it being closer to 2150-2200. I guess it is kind of hard to tell just from the series. But it seems like there would be a lot more infrastructure way further out into the system after 150 years of the Epstein drive, plus the 150 years before the drive was invented (assuming we start colonizing by 2050). I mean, the first working railroad was built in 1806, look at how far we were by 1956! Next look all the way back to 1656, Isaac Newton would have been 14. That is the same kind of time scale we are talking about, the beginning of our understanding of gravity, to our ultimate defeat of it with Sputnik/Gagarin/Apollo. So if we assume extra-terrestrial colonization starts by 2050, I think we should have achieved much more by 2350. Just to be clear, I don't really have a problem with the first half. I can feasibly see it taking 200 years from now to develop something like an Epstein drive. But once we have that technology, once space travel becomes THAT cheap, it opens the flood gates. That 150 years should have seen tremendous expansion and the human population should have absolutely exploded, dozens maybe even over a hundred billion people by that time. Also, did they ever recover Solomon Epstein? I assume that he had kept notes or something about his drive and told his wife that he was taking it for a test. When he didn't return, she likely gave the notes to somebody capable of furthering his work. But to actually retrieve him or the ship would have been a challenge. He was only at Saturn when his ship ran out of fuel, but at ridiculous velocity. On top of that, they'd still have to build a drive to actually get him (or tweak an existing one, whatever he did to his). Would be a daunting task for sure. It would be cool to see the math on that. If somebody left in 2350, how long would it take to get to Solomon at 1g of acceleration. What about 2g? That might be long term survivable for smaller people without a lot of physical exertion. What if somebody had left earlier? Assume 20 years for people to discover, build, and gain a certain nostalgia for the drive, at least enough to want to retrieve him. How long would it take them to retrieve the ship in 2220 at 1g? 2g? (And obviously this should include flip and burn halfway and whatever other adjustments are needed to actually match his velocity) Lastly, the difference is probably negligible just because of how far he is / how long it's been, but how much longer would the trip back be? Solomon accelerated at 11g for 37 hours which means he is traveling at approx 14,400 km/s or ~5% the speed of light (not accounting for relativistic affects). So, at 1g or 2g, how long would it take to dump all that velocity and retrace the distance covered? Oh, actually lastly, how much time would the travelers actually have experienced? This is likely to be a small difference, but I would like to know. What was their peak velocity? It would have to be a significant percentage of the speed of light (although for most of the journey they are going much slower). Thinking about it, this would probably be a very difficult equation to construct. To make it easier, assume endless/weightless(or unchanging weight) fuel supply, constant acceleration/deceleration. But what about Solomon? He's been traveling at 5% basically his entire journey, that would be much easier to calculate.

How about the fact that Belters survive flights in Spaceships that create gravity greater than Earth when they can't even handle Earth's gravity. Their whole concept is that they are made for 0 G. Naomi shoulda been flattened throughout the show using the show's own story. While science can be bent for a story, they don't follow through with their own science fiction.

it seems to me that alot of people forget that if you accelerate at 11gs for 37hrs then to stop you have to slow down at 11gs for 37hrs. you can't just stop on a dime from these extreme speeds.

I feel like the transit times in the expanse are way too long to be accurate. I tried the same thing as you Scott in space engine and found a 1g bakista-whatever burn from earth to neptune to be about seven days for the configuration they were in. The book has that taking a couple months at least. Even at 1/3g that's still under a month, and many ships make trips with even higher acceleration.

Expanse books are more correct than tv show :D

""A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive." Holy crap. That reminds me so much of the Wave Motion Engine from "Space Battleship Yamato" ("Starblazers" to our American friends). The Engine powered the FTL propulsion of the ship and also the famous Wave Motion Gun. Basically the Yamato (Argo) is a double-ended Wave Motion Engine; one end moves the ship to FTL speeds and the other end kills anything in its path.

As someone who loved the expanse, I was really interested to watch this ;D

I have heard about Expanse, have not read the books or seen the show, My guess would be to read the books first?

Maybe Rossi has RCS thrusters even more amaizing than Epstin drive - metalic hydrogen as monopropelant? BTW, with fusion drive, they should have data from probes in another star systems, if maned heavy spaceship reach 5% c so a probe will do much more.

And don't forget that Eros was travelling (and accelerating) way faster than the Roci could handle .. even in hard burn they couldn't keep up and had to back off or risk tearing the Roci apart ;)

The Expanse is one of my favorite shows. I've read most of the books . I know mistakes are made but over all, it's still pretty good.

Am I the only one that was annoyed by the last episode with the fkn slingshot thing around the jovian moons? Moving back behind the moon because there was a martian ship there? Come on..... Never heard of momentum?

I think the "water mining" thing is a bit far fetched as well. Hydrogen and oxygen are plentiful, and if you have a torch drive, you have a power source to convert any available carbonates and organic molecules, or any other hydrogen containing species, into water locally. Also, its silly to make a space station out of an asteroid if you have such a drive. You can launch materiale into space extremely cheaply, made from polymers (or whatever else we come up with) and purpose built. I suppose someone would do it as "art".. essentially a very cool piece of furniture. But it wouldn't be necessary, or desirable. If you have a fusion drive, you have fusion power. In theory, you also have elemental transformation.. which means nothing on the periodic table is scarce anymore. So scarcity is over. Manufacturing costs drop to nothing as automation takes over, AI and robots do 100% of the grunt work, and the human species stabilizes as plenty brings peace, and we are freed to do whatever we want to do with our lives. We would likely merge with our AI as well, over time. I really wish someone, somewhere would imagine a story based on this basic idea (Yes.. Ian Banks.. I know. But he still created conflict out of scarcity). Star Trek, for example, still had artificial resource scarcity to create story lines. Any conflict would be ideological, not resource driven, which would entirely change the panopoly of human experience. Power struggles would be entirely different, as scarce resources are what drives humans to conflict in general. It's written in to our evolutionary code to hoard for "bad times". But if there will be no bad times.. what happens next? No fear of loss or hunger, minimal fear of disease, and you can just go to sleep for 100 years if you don't like it right now. Would we become bonobos? Would we lose our intelligence and knowledge over time, giving everything over to the AI? Or.. would we create struggle in order to enhance our lives? Or all of the above? I can imagine a Dune-like scenario, where populations of people raise their children in harsh conditions with no knowledge of the outside civilization, giving them education in science but not technology, and may the best ones win. Or, a group of people who literally live day to day as hedonists. Another group who value exploration and novelty, And on and on. It could be really interesting.

wow i just finished season 2 yesterday so good timing scott xD

A few little minor discrepancies in the show, yes, but overall one of the best and most accurate one EVER. Take it from me, I've been watching Sci Fi for over 50 years.

I 💚 The Expanse

Out of curiosity, did you use Newtonian equations for kinetic energy or Einsteinian ones? I think the upper range of your calculations are starting to get to the point where the difference between them is greater than a rounding error.

Wonderful stuff, thank you!

In the books, not sure about the show (haven't watched it), you have to turn and burn with the epstein drive. That is, half way to your destination you have to flip your ship around and use thrust to decelerate.

Even after this comprehensive analyze, I will keep my conviction about a proven fact: "The Expanse" is, by far, THE most scientific embedded movie ever made in the last 20 years. Is light years ahead of any crappy BS made by Hollywood illiterates, is a true masterpiece of modern cinematographic SciFi - all that without using "great names" from industry, and without spending billions to produce the series. Brilliant producer team, great actors, and I am convinced something else helped a lot in maintaining the amazing quality of the series, constantly, over 5 - now 6 series - the books authors worked close with the producers, and they kept an eye on detail, on the books' story, without making any concessions - preventing, like that, a potential disaster ( see the slaughter of Eragon series when a retarded producer was free to, literary, spit on the book...).

2017: we’ll call it the Epstein drive, that’s original 2020: the Epstein drive, facepalm. Boy that didn’t age well...

Brilliant analysis!

I love this show, and I love your videos

Overall so far, The Expanse does a good job in balancing real world science and physics while remaining entertaining and not boring the normie watchers.

OK. Makers of Sci Fi series NEED TO do one simple thing : Go up in an aerobatic aircraft and check out what 4G for 10 seconds feels like... Then think twice about having their heroes pull 7G for... hours?!? Ermmmm,...nope.

Saw the first minute wothout knowing what the "Expanse" was. Damn it looks pretty cool!

9: 50 I love Larry Niven's "Tales of Known Space" series of books and stories. The stories would make a great TV series or several movies.

Fun fact, The Martian by Andy Weir is in the same Universe as The Expanse.

On a 1 to 10 scale, the expanse lost at least 5 points for the simple fact that the spacecraft made sounds in space.

I like how you can review The Expance because the ships actually fly like ships would in space and you don't have t start with a suspension of disbelief.

The producers knew they have screwed up with the gravity assist scene, they issued an apology before the episode aired. But in my opinion, they should have just omitted the scene, not many would have noticed.