How Fast Are Spaceships In 'The Expanse'?

although it's Scott Manley here today we're going to be talking about the expanse while playing a bit of space engine so the the universe of the expanse is well laid out there's a whole bunch of books sir but one of the things that's kind of missing in a lot of cases is real discussion of distance and speeds in a universe who you have something as powerful and amazing as the epstein drive and I kind of want to put some times and distances and velocities into some of the events in the story so yes there will be spoilers if you've not seen the show you might just want to go and watch some of my older male other science videos but this is going to be really talking about brick ista current reject trees fusion drives and getting places very fast so this is 2,200 it's January 18th the reason I've chosen 2200 is because that is many it's about 150 years before the purple purported date of the show I'm just going to start time here very slowly and a fire up the engines now the story goes originally is that when Solomon Epstein was testing his drive it came in a little more powerful than he inspect expected it started at 4 G quickly ramped up to five six seven and an his instruments didn't go any higher than seven later in the story however he estimates that after 37 hours he will be traveling just under 5% to the speed of light and anybody that can do math will tell you that while we're talking about 11 G's of acceleration there to be fair he was being crushed by the force of the acceleration or the hit the force of his body as subjected to the acceleration therefore his mathematical prowess might be getting challenged especially when you consider that Solomon Epstein was someone that had grown up on Mars and was more used to 1/3 of a G rather than 20 times that but yeah you'll see that after a minute with pretty much left full bars behind it has become shadow behind us and Mars well Mars that were going to be passing soon enough now to get through this we can of course use time acceleration just to see how quickly things happen the thing about accelerations of course they build up over time and yeah we're only moving what 1617 kilometers per second but very quickly we're you know the things are getting faster and faster and the the relative velocity of Mars very quickly ramping up and we're very quickly leaving it behind five minutes then we've gone from the orbit of Phobos to basically blazing past the Terminator of the planet ten minutes after ten minutes it is literally becoming a crescent any shadow behind us so 37 hours one might wonder how far can we actually get well we can actually go into this external view and we can accelerate time a bit so 1000 hours well we're basically heading out into the asteroid belt here it's kind of hard to tell because I I randomly selected a direction I didn't know any specific details you can see I'm going out above or below the plane of the ecliptic hard to tell because I can't see which way the planets are moving at this time that is the orbit of Ceres here and this is the orbit of Jupiter 8 hours in were definitely deep into the asteroid belt but this point Solomon Eckstein is almost certainly dead his his magnificent plans will carry humanity into a new age of exploration conquest and conflict which is ripe for storytelling by a pair of authors who are interested in that kind of thing now yeah I chose to date 2200 because it's a hundred and fifty years before the TV series now to be clear the actual date is kind of vague the so the story is very specifically says that it's about 150 years after Solomon Epstein's test of his drive system so this is about right however the actual date of fatigue of his test is still kind of vague relative to the universe but the at the expanse was originally designed as a videogame believer not with a video game an MMO universe obviously great opportunities for storytelling and ty Frank put together a bunch of notes to talk about it candid to describe the universe that this game would take place in ultimately a MMOs are expensive beasts and thing wasn't made so at some point he made a paper and pen RPG and and then later on Daniel Abraham got involved and they started writing books under the pen name of James s a Corey who I previously thought was one person because I didn't do my research but yeah by the time his drive stopped running Solomon Epstein would probably still be inside the orbit of Saturn and he would hold all sorts of Records for being the fastest human object ever constructed no 2200 I've worked out that the Voyager 1 spacecraft will probably be about 700 eu from earth at that distance it will take Solman epstein about 80 days to finally exceed its distance record every fast-forward 150 years to the setting of the books well by then he would probably be about 6 to 7 light years from the earth are there any stars that close well there are a few but surprisingly few stars based on current scientific knowledge there's only 3 star systems within the 7 light-years of the earth we have obviously Proxima and Alpha Centauri we have barnard star and we have lumen 16 which is actually a binary system of brown dwarfs the only ones that are visible of course are Alpha Centauri the other ones are too faint to be seen unless you have a telescope so yeah in the stories it's possible that Solman Epstein could be flying by one of these stars but most likely he's off in some other direction in deep freeze and perhaps waiting for aliens to wake them up in the 21st century now let us return to the solar system to actually talk about how we navigate through the solar system in this universe now at the start of 2350 I'm going to point out the right away Saturn is up here and Ceres is down here and if you know the stories you'll know that the Canterbury is an important part of the stories and it spends a lot of the show or it spends it spent a lot of its life pardon me transferring ice from between Ceres and Saturn it trolls the ice from the belts Saturn sorry the rings of Saturn and transports it to Ceres now at the start of 2350 Ceres and Saturn are on other sides of the Sun so yeah that is the longest studies about just about the furthest they could possibly be apart that's a bit 12 au and you know you can actually use the the bruh Cousteau crowing trajectory to figure out just how fast you could travel from one plate to the other if you used a constant acceleration burn so 12 au accelerating at a point 3 G for the first 6 au and then DCL accelerating at Point 3 G for the second half that takes about 18 days which you know is actually pretty fast I mean your ships cross the ocean in that kind of time so really puts things in perspective the even in the worst position the worst possible configuration the magic power of this epstein drive could actually make that in a few weeks now when they are close together right if you wait for the orbits to get into the correct orientation then the distance gets down to maybe six or seven au and the time drops to maybe 12 days the is important to realize that although you've half the distance it's more like a square root behavior because the because you're spending time accelerating and decelerating and the further you go the faster you go now that's also also begs the question or just how fast would they be going at peak velocity traveling between these two locations well if if you were talking about again the start of 23:54 they're on the opposite sides and you're traveling 12 EU if you're accelerating at point 3G continuously you would reach about 2300 kilometers per second or about 0.75 of a percent of the speed of light so that is pretty stunning speeds and velocities here now is worth noting a spacecraft traveling at 0.75% the speed of light is less than 1% but that's still a lot of kinetic energy every kilogram of spacecraft has kinetic energy equivalent to the energy content of 500 tons of TNT in a distant future where everybody can fly around thanks to the power of nuclear fusion everything is a potential weapon in another sci-fi universe this is expressed as the xingtai lesson which says a reaction drives effectiveness as a weapon is directly proportional to its effectiveness as a drive anyway before we get too deep into the rabbit hole of discussing sci-fi weapons yeah we should actually talk about eros eros of course is where a lot of important things happen and it does well it does start moving under its own power at the start of 2350 it's actually very close to Earth although because it's on an eccentric orbit it's actually moving away from Earth relatively quickly it's going downwards now at some point obviously in the show it ends up having it ends up deciding that it wants to travel towards Earth and then there's a whole bunch of exchange of weapons and discussions about emergency procedures the important thing to know at no point is that more than say to a you from Earth how long would it take something that can accelerate at 10 plus G to cover to a you would it take days weeks months was the drama in the TV show really exaggerated based upon the timelines that are required well I'll back of an envelope calculator if you are to a you from the earth and you are accelerating at near 10g you can cover that distance in less than two days including a accelerate and slowdown in that time so yeah it totally makes sense that would be the crisis on the earth as all this as errata starting to move towards it at incredible speeds finally I want to talk about that great scene in season 2 where Alex kamala pilot of the Russian Otte who's been hiding out on the little moon of Cellini on the edge of the Jovian system plots a many many gravity assist to get down into the core of the judean system and of course sneak in through the backdoor of Ganymede so he can save his friends that's all great in theory and I'm sure it's absolutely possible to interact with this myriad of moons here Cellini is actually a very very tiny piece of rock it's only about two kilometers Ganymede is down in here what isn't mentioned is that Cellini is on a two-year orbit getting down here even on just a straight hope and transfer orbit would take about a year which is fine if you're a space probe not so fine if you're trying to rescue your friends from some sort of weird proto molecule hybrid thing that's going to kill them or and of course the inevitable failure of the oxygen recycling system on Ganymede yet great in theory but somebody needed to do the math before they actually put that in this show and also somebody needed to check the pull the rotation of Jupiter because the FX shots messed that up okay it's fun to poke jokes at it I'm looking forward to the third season and yeah hope to see you then I'm Scott Manley fly STIs [Music] [Music]

Channel: Scott Manley

Views: 952,980

Keywords: the expanse, science, space engine

Id: SIaGXcEnC74

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Tue May 02 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/TheStrangeView]

Scott Manley is a a steely-eyed missile man!

[u/aeyntie]

It's not about speed, it's about acceleration

[u/MimicLizard]

How fast? It's v=a*t.

[u/nakedmeeple]

I've been fascinated by the concept of space flight in The Expanse. Every ship that moves is measured in terms of G's, which is a result of acceleration. The more thrust you apply to your mass, the more G's you'll get... so if they want to fly around and be able to walk the ship comfortably at some fraction of a G (1/3 or 1/2 G), that would seem to be a fairly small amount of thrust (relative to what they're capable of putting out).

[u/kakihara0513]

Love Scott Manley, can't wait to watch this after work.

[u/Hyperspacehost]

I love Scott Manley's stuff. His video where he worked out an Epstein drive would vapourise the entire ship instantly just with some back of the envelope maths was great, because he wasn't poo-pooing the books or show, just having fun working out the numbers.

[u/displaced_martian]

It seemed that Scott mainly focused on the velocities that the ships can achieve and the straight-line distances.

To actually hit the destination the flight program has to aim for where the target will be, not where it is right now. Otherwise you end up missing a planet by millions of km. And the destination is a particular radius and velocity from the Sun and when the destination is a planet or major moon, the flight computer also has to account for the major "nearby" bodies.

[u/theredeyedronin]

Super cool. I think a good chunk of my enjoyment of this show and the series of books just comes from how plausible it all feels. Even cooler when someone can lay it out like this and show some of the real science behind it.

[u/SPECTER_Z3R0]

ok that's it. I'm downloading this