I think the only other show to approach the level of “hard SF” as The Expanse would be Firefly. But Firefly didn’t show ship to ship combat and made terraforming look easier than likely.
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It doesn’t need to be an artificial horizon (and in fact doesn’t appear to be- it doesn’t have the blue and orange bands).
Spacecraft need an orientation instrument, even if (0,0,0) is arbitrary. You need to know your orientation to fire thrusters and to land/dock on anything. Apollo pioneered a lot of this. A problem they had was the dreaded gimbal lock. Because they used three Euler angles to measure orientation, there is a zone where two of the angles align and you lose an axis of control. It’s a deadly situation, and they had a red zone marked on the so-called “8-ball” instrument to try and keep the pilots from twisting into that zone by mistake. Anyone who’s done physics simulation or computer graphics knows of the dreaded gimbal lock, and we use quaternions rather than Euler angles because they are a mathematical construct for spatial orientation that does not suffer from gimbal lock. I think Apollo couldn’t use quaternions though, because they used mechanical gyros for tracking orientation, thus Euler angle was all they could get.
I don’t know the current status of this- do modern solid state accelerometer and gyro systems have a way to prevent gimbal lock and provide quaternions directly for the software? Anyways, Vipers are awesome.
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I think a lot of space sci-fi of that era really held fast to the idea of ‘water navy in space’ to the effect that the sort of assisted launch systems you saw on aircraft carriers of the time were extrapolated to also be how you’d get space fighter craft out of your space carriers. Mobile Suit Gundam also did this, but with giant robots!
Edit: This is from a more modern version of MS Gundam, but the OG series did it this way as well.
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Again how B5 tried to get the physics right - the Earhtforce Starfuries were hangered on the capital ships’ and space station’s rotating sections and simply ‘thrown’ out into space.
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In the defense of MS Gundam, the original White Base spacecraft was also capable of atmospheric flight. So an assisted launch system was actually somewhat useful when within Earth’s gravity well. How the hell a brick of a ship like White Base stayed in the air was handwaved of course.
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Early Colonial Vipers are great. Way more useful than those networked Mk 7s.
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Yamato is a great example
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Yamato is always the best example. I still don’t understand why Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato did not win the anime wars of the late 1970’s/early 1980’s. Great stories, great action, yet we are left with Thundercats and He-Man? Voltron was a close second, heck Tranzor-Z could have had Skeletor down and done in seconds. I suppose this means i am old.
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I even enjoyed the live action Yamato.
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If you’ve never seen, the reboot of Yamato ‘Space Battleship Yamato 2199’ from 2012 is gorgeous.
Me too! Had that BSG reboot feel to it in the Yamato world just wish it wasn’t such an abridged version of the story.
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Star Blazers gave way to Robotech.
Space fighters based of F-14’s were cooler looking than those based on 2nd generation jetfighters.
Unlike the Yamato, there was more than one woman on the SDF-1, Army of Southern Cross and whatever they called themselves in the 3rd series.
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Is it the same people that made the insane (in a good way) CG Captain Harlock?
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Other than the original writer Leiji Matsumoto I don’t think so.
Both were excellent films tho!
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I will have to check it out. Harlock was so good!
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Nice catch. I also like all the theories in the comments. Likes all around!
Ooh, sounds like a gizmo that would allow them to use the line “we have a situation.”
Are they are now coded to prevent human error?
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How can they expect us to fly in formation if we can’t see where the plane of the ecliptic is?
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It had a theatrical release in Canada, and it was pretty good on the big screen, pre-70mm.
The Cylons were cyborgs rather than robots.
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Less discussed was how they got back to the hangers on return. Backing an undamaged Star Fury or Thunderbolt into the rotating hanger would be possible, but tricky if any of the thrust vectors were gone.
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BSG did land a lot thou, they where always on planets or moons, before the pylons found them and they had to flee.
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