The Expanse: Rocinante vs Pella | Detailed Battle Breakdown

[Music] hey everybody i'm daniel from space talk and let's talk about that space battle from the latest episode of the expanse that's season six episode three force projection now this is probably my favorite moment of the whole book series and i've been waiting since 2016 to see it adapted to screen and it really was adapted perfectly there are a few differences from the book which i'll talk about momentarily but it enlisted exactly the same response and feeling that the sequence did in babylon's ashes which to me is the best expanse book as far as i'm concerned and it's just one of the best depictions of space combat tactics and one of the most satisfying maneuvers we've ever seen pulled off in a space battle narrative now this battle is essentially a pursuit of the rosannante by three free navy warships in the book version it was three next generation corvette class ships commandeered from the mcrn and that was the pella the koto and the shin sakuto and in the show version we still have the pella which is now a light cruiser and two other ships the lauber and granicus which both appear to be just converted belter industrial ships outfitted for piracy now like any good space battle this whole sequence completely hinges on the decisions of certain characters as is repeatedly pointed out at the start this really should be a pretty easy win for the free navy in either version and it's almost entirely crew competence on the rosanante's part and mistakes on the three navy's part that carry the whole action now the rosannante is constantly burning away from the free navy ships and because it has a fixed forward spinal railgun in order to fire that back at the pursuers it needs to cut its drive completely invert fire continue to invert back to its original course and then fire it engine again now some of you might remember i did a video a while ago talking about why it would be a good idea to have aft mounted spinal rail guns or forward mounted drive cones for exactly situations like this it's worth pointing out that there are some ships in the tv version of the expanse that would be able to handle a situation like this the scirocco class for instance has a turreted light rail gun that's extended out beyond its profile so it could fire back directly off the aft if it wanted to but the rosenante does a good job here despite being forced to repeatedly flip over to fire backwards and it does make sense because the rosie was never actually built to carry a railgun so there are always going to be some quirks to applying it in combat the first thing we see is a huge torpedo salvo from the pella fired at the rosie which it completely fends off with its pdcs which seem to be unfailingly reliable especially in the tv show version these things have been through so much and had vast salvos of missiles fired at them and managed to shake it off even in season five when it had like the entire cargo bay of a commandeered ship just dumped at it in torpedoes and still managed to survive point defense definitely seems to be the ship's greatest strength now the first big important moment in this battle which pretty much single-handedly stops it from being a free navy whitewash i think is that holden flips the rosie and fires the railgun from way outside of the usual railgun operating range and by sheer luck and probably surprise catches the lauber and destroys it almost completely or at least it totally knocks it out of the battle now the thing is you normally fire railguns from inside what the expanse calls hammerlock range which basically is a sort of 1 000 kilometer ish distance where the instance of firing the railgun and the instance of the round hitting the target are pretty much the same instant you're so close that you essentially hit the target the moment you press fire and it's impossible for them to dodge from any greater distance a fast-acting ship's computer can see a railgun round coming and move out of the way now this shot was fired from well within the safe distance for this belt to ship to be able to dodge we can only assume that the belters on board just hadn't expected them to try firing the railgun from such a usually ineffective range and that surprise alone is what got them taken out this starts a bit of a chain reaction throughout the fleet as the other ship the granicus hangs back to begin rendering aid to the disabled lauber leaving it just as the pela and rosannante chasing one another in the book version this was handled by long-range missile support from taiko station which is where the battle happened in that version rather than a lucky shot from the rosie now as they're pulling further away we get the fantastic bobby draper sequence which i absolutely loved in the book and absolutely loved this time essentially they determine that the pellet is repeatedly dodging to port every time now this is a bit changed in the show version if i remember correctly i'm pretty sure in the book version they weren't dodging to port every time just like out of habit instead bobby kind of engineered a situation where they would be forced to dodge the way she wanted them to and it wasn't really a matter of them predicting which way they would dodge based on what they've been doing before though i might be wrong about that it has been a while but in the show version the pela seems to be habitually dodging to port every time they fire the railgun at it so knowing this they plan to force it to dodge into a cloud of pdc fire now if you watch the slow motion sequence of them firing they fire a few torpedoes which vector in towards the dorsal and ventral sides of the pellet and they fire the railgun off the pellers starboard hull so it can't dodge up or down laterally without risking hitting a torpedo most of its pdcs and crew are occupied shooting down those torpedoes so the only natural reaction is to dodge the port into the pdc fire which in the book version they make clear the peller wouldn't be able to see because the computers disregard pdc rounds as a threat once they leave a certain range of the engagement zone because there's no danger of you hitting them really and bobby has to kind of override this to make the pdc's misfire into open space this is just a genius use of like projectile speed timings to make this work because of course the railgun is going to reach the target almost instantly the pdc rounds are going to reach fairly quickly and the torpedoes are going to reach in their own pace so you have to time everything out based on the speed of the various projectiles to create this trap at the exact moment i kind of prefer the idea that it's entirely the result of bobby creating this situation where they're forced to dodge a certain way and the habits of the other pilot aren't involved because that makes it so there's like no incompetence on the part of the free navy at all it's just entirely brilliance on bobby's part and to be fair the visual effects in the show do back up this version because they still show the torpedoes coming in from the two angles and blocking off every other avenue of escape just like the books did it's just that they also have this foreshadowing about them always dodging the same way but the moment when the cloud of pdc fire hits the pillar and goes all the way through the command deck and everything was just as satisfying in this version as it was in the book you can't beat these moments where just ingenuity wins the day it's also a display of kind of masterful gunnery you get so many moments in science fiction books where you get displays of masterful piloting and stuff like that but it's not very often that you get something like this display because really holden in the show version and alex in the book version just flying the rosie in a straight line and inverting it every now and then it's not an impressive incredible feat of piloting all of the skill on display here is in the gunners seat in bobby's seat and it's absolutely her doing that they win this battle honestly the expanse at this point it's it's difficult to even say which is its best space battle because it's just racked up so many great ones and i assume more to come in the remainder of season six but this really was a great display of how to write a brilliant space battle if you remember my how to write a space battle video this really is taking all the boxes that i laid out there continuous threat to the crew inside the ships entirely based around action and reaction and character decision not oversaturated with a million ships just about the tactics and the distances and the planning really really great stuff it's making me want to read babylon's ashes again which i may well do now that i finished the rest of the series the show's version only left me wishing it was just a little bit longer with a little bit more time spent figuring out the maneuver but you can only spend so much on cgi and you can only devote so much of an episode to it so i'm more than content with what we got great work from the expanse folks as always it'll be a terrible shame to finally run out the clock on the expanse when these last few episodes are done but if you are a lost and orphaned expanse fan in desperate search of a new source of grounded space battles and character-driven storytelling you might just enjoy our original science fiction audio drama the sojourn it's available on google books itunes and various other big audio distributors and you can also get the series by pledging on patreon where at wanderer tier or higher you can get a copy of our sojourn visual dictionary which is our sort of comprehensive law book based on the old star wars visual dictionaries delving into the world and setting of the sojourn do check it out if you're interested but either way thank you so much for watching this is daniel from space doc signing off [Music] you

Channel: Spacedock

Views: 455,611

Keywords: Spacedock, space dock, spacedock, the expanse, rocinante vs pella, pella, rocinante, force projection, s06e03, season 6 episode 3, babylon's ashes, railgun, chase, pdc, draper, bobbie, holden, battle, inaros, marco, free navy, granicus, light cruiser, corvette, mcrn, breakdown, analysis, summary, spacedock expanse, news, season 6, season 5, belter, torpedo, tactics, combat, war, review, scene

Id: wIUIFq5qq4Q

Length: 8min 31sec (511 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 04 2022