Hedgehobbit

I found that astrophysicists tend to be way to forgiving of scientific mistakes for any movie or show that is more accurate than Star Wars. I, OTOH, think the opposite. While The Expanse gets some stuff right, the stuff that it gets wrong ends up being believed by viewers who just assume that everything shown is accurate.

Plus the landing legs never deployed. Great explosion though. The entire tank section disintegrated but the nose cone was sitting on the landing spot still mostly intact. I am impressed at the control they showed during the belly flop as well as how quickly they transitioned from horizontal to vertical flight. There was much less swing than all the computer renders I've seen.

SpaceX hasn't put up another livestream notice and neither Elon nor SpaceX have tweeted out any additional information since the abort. I'm not very confident that there will be another try today. If I had to bet, I'd say that they will switch to vertical flight a bit too early (to avoid a high speed crash) and have trouble landing straight down. This is because the Raptor isn't fully throttleable and bleeding off speed will be difficult. I'm also looking forward to Astra's next launch attempt which should be in a few days along with another launch by ULA's Delta IV.

I'm baffled on how to respond because what your saying has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. In the Gunsmoke episode, Charles Bronson, aka The Killer, is goading cowpokes to draw on him and then killing them and claiming self defense. Marshal Dillan knows the guy is trouble but can't arrest him (or shoot him) because he hasn't committed a crime. His only choice is to get The Killer to draw on him which is complicated further by the fact that The Killer is quicker on the draw than the Marshal. This modern white-hattery forms the basis of the drama of the episode. A similar situation occurs in the opening of Fistfull of Dollars, when Clint is demanding the men apologize to his mule to get them to draw their guns so he can kill them all. Or in True Grit, where Rooster is on trial for shooting an unarmed man while serving an arrest warrant. You can exclude all these iconic scenes as modern legalism, but if you make a western RPG that excludes Gunsmoke, Fistful of Dollars and True Grit, I'm not sure what you have left.

It isn't "modern legalism" as it's a central part of many old episodes of Gunsmoke such as S1E28 The Killer (with Charles Bronson). And I'm not suggesting it for realism, but to add a psychological element to gun fights; do you draw first and risk being an outlaw or wait until the other guy draws and possibly end up dead? Or do you take insults from a gunfighter or risk your life drawing on him? Anything to make a showdown something other than just a contest of who can roll the best dice.

A video about warp drive that has an X-Wing in the thumbnail .... Seriously!?!

It's probably too late, but I'd like to see a section in the book about the legal ramifications of being the first to go for your gun. It wasn't mentioned in the Western Hero book I have (4th maybe?) but it was a big part of many episodes of Gunsmoke and other radio westerns. For example, Marshal Dillan, being a lawman, couldn't reach for his gun until the bad guy did so he'd always have some sort of penalty when in a showdown.

This video is interesting in that it is almost completely wrong. If you're trying to match a vector to an enemy ship, you will rarely, if ever, be burning directly at him as your target will be moving many thousands of meters per second and you'll have to calculate where your enemy will be when you finish burning, and that assumes that you don't finish your burn long before you get into weapon range (that is, the range you can reasonably hit something). Once you've matched vectors, turning to orient your weapons will be trivial.

You can sum up Herzog's critique as "not an argument". To claim that going to Mars is obscene because fascism and communism existed is completely bonkers. Besides, Elon Musk is destined to go to Mars, as the leader of Mars has been called "The Elon" since 1952.