Those Pesky Belters

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

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@Max <maximiliancrichton512@gmail.com>

…And Their Smelterships

@Max <maximiliancrichton512@gmail.com>

Are they also torchships, perchance?

@Jade Nekotenshi <nekotenshi0@gmail.com>

All things considered I’d be shocked if they weren’t!

@Alistair Young <us@arkane-systems.net>

They are, but they’re among the least torchy of torch drives; it doesn’t take much acceleration to rock-hop in reasonable time. Most of them have a couple of high-accel pinnaces or bumboats for crew use.

@James Scott <jamesms4@yahoo.com>

I adore The Expanse but the whole nonsense that they would live in micro gravity or 1/3 gravity seems a bit off. Why could they built space stations or Asteroid Stations that spin at normal Earth Gravity? Also nanotech would be needed to maintain bone structure and effect DNA repair for the radiation damage. So wouldn’t you need that to have viable human populations live out there in the Belt?

@Robbie Yarber <xytan4@gmail.com>

The video game Dead Space takes this a step further with giant Planetcracker ships, which as the name implies use immensely powerful tractor beams to literally crack dead planets into continent-size chunks, which are then cracked into smaller chunks for processing onboard the ship.