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The Expanse 2x06 - Paradigm Shift - EARLY ACCESS
🕑 Added 2022-10-06 12:30:01 +0000 UTCHope you enjoy my first time watching Episode 6 "PARADIGM SHIFT" of Season Two of The Expanse.
Please watch the original content on Amazon Prime Video.
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Comments
Ian Hillan
The writers were asked how the Epstein drive works. Their answer: it works by efficiency. Lol. You're right that they could have ended the show after 2x5, called it a 15 episode show and it would have been a great show. However, as good as it has been so far, you're really not ready: from 2x1 to 3x13, is just about my favorite run of television ever. It just keeps getting better. Since you asked, book 2 ends in the middle of season 3 (you'll know it when you see it) and it's one of the best episodes in the entire show IMHO. Book 3 ends at 3x13. Then it's a book per season and, though some may disagree, I think the quality very, very rarely falters for the entire run. Season 1 they were all, cast and crew, still finding their feet. By the later seasons they were all consistently knocking it out of the park.
SuddenImpulse
^---this If you want to know more, the show doesn't delve into it further. The book does a little bit. I will provide the explanation below. Do not read this if you don't want to know until you read the book. It's not some big amazing reveal or anything. I'll give it extra space and warnings: EXPLANATION OF EPSTEIN DRIVE BELOW-THIS IS NOT EXPLAINED IN THE SHOW The drive utilizes magnetic coil exhaust acceleration to increase drive efficiency, which enables spaceships to sustain thrust throughout the entire voyage. A ship fitted with the efficient Epstein drive is able to run the drive continuously for acceleration to its goal and then after flipping at about the halfway point is able to run the drive continuously during deceleration. Previous engine designs used propellant less efficiently and could not be run long enough to achieve the high velocities that the Epstein drive permitted. In laymans terms it is a fusion torch. It's similar in principle to a conventional rocket, but except instead of a combustion chamber, it's a fusion reactor. A high efficiency continuous fusion reaction produces a large quantity of high velocity plasma and radiation that's magnetically directed out the back of the ship. But that design was created before epstien; his contribution was cracking the problem of reaction mass expulsion. Before, the reactors would spit out perfectly fusible hydrogen and helium along with the heavier exhaust plasma species due to limitations in the magnetic containment field technology. By stabilizing the reaction mass with cyclotronic superconducting coils that generate bidirectional electromagnetic vortices in the boundary layer between the actively fusing reaction mass and the "cold" exhaust, epstien dramatically increased the power output and efficiency of older fusion torch design.
Aldo Cassola
About Epstein's story not sitting right with you, they tell us he's a fusion drive engineer. He's not just an amateur tuning up his car. He has specialized knowledge. Having an "accidental" breakthrough under those conditions is less accidental than usual. But ultimately yes, the Epstein drive is the main conceit of this story. Just magical enough to be useful, just plausible enough to slip through disbelief. If we understood the Epstein drive we'd already have it. The books go into just slightly more detail on how it works, but don't expect much. Not everything has to be explained. To quote Leviathan Wakes: "A hundred and fifty years before, (...) Solomon Epstein had built his little modified fusion drive, popped it on the back of his three-man yacht, and turned it on. With a good scope, you could still see his ship going at a marginal percentage of the speed of light, heading out into the big empty. The best, longest funeral in the history of mankind,"
EmwunGarand
champagne was discovered by accident. Microwaves. X-Ray machines. Pacemakers. Insulin. Penicillin. History is full of accidental inventions. Epstein had a job, nobody on Mars was unemployed, and at the time they were all scientists or specialists in one field or another. Mars had no ordinary citizens back then. It's not a stretch to imagine he was a propulsion engineer and bought the yacht to tinker with in his free-time to test theories that might not be sanctioned by his official job.
nooky
Agreed, how the epstein drive was invented is a bit of a stretch. We are working on increasing effeciency of nuclear fusion for the past 40 years and getting closer in steps, as a multinational research project, not the genius loner in the garage. That's not how modern science works anymore (for the most part). Then again it might've been something fairly simply that nobody thought about before, and being the first he had little to no idea how well it would work. Improbable, but not entierly impossible i guess.
