Everyone who has not watched The Expanse yet: start doing it. It is easily the best SciFi show in the last decade and a top contender for best SciFi show ever.
It has a slow start but is increasing pace and when you realize you are being watching seasons you are doomed because soon the year long wait starts :)
I not sure how many realize this, but the books were actually written by a team of writers, well 2 writers, in parallel, defining the world, characters, and storylines. James S.A. Corey is the pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Great series too :)
I read them. All of it including Novellas and stuff. They are awesome. Especially once you are used to the chapter by character thing GoT also does. But surprise, New Mexico connection :)
It's basically Game of Thrones in space, for whatever that's worth. I didn't like Game of Thrones because of the fantasy setting, but I'm loving The Expanse.
I half jokingly expected GoT to end with the Colonial Service starship arriving to figure out why Valiria lost contact a couple centuries prior and how to fix the mess the colonists put themselves into.
take a fictional propulsion technology from [Sci-Fi TV show, movie or book] and apply the appropriate science to explain its features in a realistic manner
Doesn't everyone do that or is it just me? I always try my best to think of a way that such things could work.
With the caveat that magic and mentalism don't actually work, but only appear to work. So a better analogy might be between magic/mentalism and those fake perpetual motion machines which appear to work but don't.
Is it fair to call the Rocinante a time machine? If it can achieve 5% of C in 37 hours it can go seriously relativistic in a reasonable amount of time. It becomes possible to travel across hundreds or thousands of Earth years in a lifetime, like Andrew and Valentine Wiggin or Colonel George Taylor.
The travelling through space feature is pretty cool too though.
If you want to go relativistic, you'll have to deal with the fact vacuum is not as perfect as you'd like it to be. You'll need some form of abrasion shield because you'll be hitting a thin wall of hydrogen at relativistic speeds.
If the field manages to catch everything in the ship's path, that's good, but not all particles will cooperate. You'll catch some, push others out of the way and still get hammered by all the stubborn neutrally charged ones.
And that's only for the atomic scale. Smashing into a grain of dust at a relativistic speed is very destructive.
An "engineering challenges with today's technology" section would be great addition to this piece, I'm sure there'll be a few "biophysically possible but we don't know how" parts ;)
If the engine manages to get half as much useful thrust out of the fuel, it's still a nice 1g all the way to your destination. Still quite a revolution.
I cannot recommend the books and series enough. Definitely worth the time. Some of the best sci-fi I have read and seen. It is this generation's Star Trek when it comes to inspiration to pursue science and influence of future technologies.
It has a slow start but is increasing pace and when you realize you are being watching seasons you are doomed because soon the year long wait starts :)