Can you please do more ships from The Expanse?

Have always liked this ship. Vid on the Necron World Engine maybe?

Very well done and well presented! Was a good first piece of his!

If this is his first, I'm looking forward to many more!

He reminds me of Orac from Blake's 7, love his stuff :)

I think they hired actual engineers to design it. Avatar had a huge budget for all the world building.

@@matthewconnor5483 Incl. recruiting biologists for the fauna. Every plant has a latin name and a description.

A lot of Real and cleverly thought out science and engineering went into basically every aspect of Avatar its absolutely insane and the main reason why I love the avatar universe

@@blckwtr2880 Not every part. Charakters where awful! To trust that douchebag of protagonist is plain stupid :/

It seems almost everything in that "shared" universe is extremely well thought out. From "Aliens" to "Balder Runner" to "Avatar" everything seems really well considered to a point that it is even plausible.

To be fair, as the General mentioned, the stakes are now much higher then simple mining ^^

this time is for colonization, because earth was already considered unsustainable

@@LtCWest Yep, chips were down, and it was all or nothing.

⁠@@edba1.037And it would be only the people who killed earth in the first place who’d be rich enough to go to Pandora. It’s a shame that people don’t see that the RDA is betraying humanity as much as Jake is. Giving how low the quality of living is for middle class folks as Jake mentions in the first movie, I don’t assume that they’re gonna invite some of the regular joes to live on Pandora.

​​​@@Ned-nw6ge They absolutely will bring "regular joes" lol

Literally, that landing sequence was arguably one of the best shots in the movie. It was just amazing

yea just watched it and those engines really are insanely powerful

I especially like the part where the whole fleet was slowing down accordingly to Pandora with their very bright and powerful engines.

Dude it was so fucking awesome

thought those massive engines were designed for vacuum, never thought they can actually perform a landing burn inside atmosphere.

So far the Navi have fought a mining groups security and a fisherman boat. Wait until Jake reminds them they’re basically going easy.

it's gotta be the most impractical way to land to. no landing zone is safe when you scorch the entire bottom like that. would of made more sense to have a crew come in and clear actual landing spots.

@@Mike-jv8bvI disagree, scorching everything was safer considering that all the wildlife wants to destroy humans.

@@Mike-jv8bv nah the whole point was to just remove everything from that area and build a base there. Way easier to just burn everything down

It was cool, but don't be such a Imp sounding degen.

The design was based on Charles Pellegrino's Valkyrie, in which the cable between the engines and the crew pod was 10 km long.

@@theresafisher8781 I was wondering if anyone else was aware of that book.

@@piotrd.4850 It wasn't an Interstellar ship, nor was it designed to be viewed in IMAX sized and 3D Silver screens. Still though it was a great design and entertaining Mockumentary. It even inspired a short-lived series on ABC called 'Defying Gravity'.

MY favorite part of the movie is when the Humans blew up the navi's tree. Mankind all-the-way baby.

@@alaskamark4562 yep and that’s why humans killed their planet what makes you think they won’t destroy Pandora? Only solution to not getting their way is to throw a tantrum.

and i will too

@@littlesneez9002 and seeing the radiator plumes burn the forest...that's like some Halo shit...when Covenant Ships use glassing beams to burn the surface of a target planet. In short, the Venture Stars pulled off some Covenant method of...burning the Pandoran Rainforest.

@@scarecrow108productions7 You mean exhaust plumes? Those were the engines doing the burning. But ya, that shot was incredibly awesome. Especially later when they show the settlement and you get a sense for just how damn big the area was that it scorched.

@@scarecrow108productions7 And remember those trees being disintegrated were as big as Kelutral (Hometree). Basically a nuke.

@@Big_Red1 Compared to the size of the destruction shown, that settlement is way too tiny. From the height that the ISV was hovering, the distance between the 2 exhausts was way larger than that scorched area. I believe either the landing was elsewhere, or the plants on Pandora grow quick enough to cover kilometres of scorched land in a year. There is no way the scorched area could be that small.

The choppers design is interesting. The idea of using ducted fan over open rotor was bounced around and tested a few times, but it seems it never really launched. That said, with lower gravity it would be easier to implement. As for the rest of the design, they are clearly designed to invoke hueys, and, by assosiaton Vietnam.

I love those Scorpion helicopters. Only thing they messed up was the sound - they sound just like a regular 4-blade helicopter, whereas dual contra-rotating ducted fans would sound more like a turboprop commuter plane. Less wop, more buzz. But anyway, what really impressed me about them was a little detail I saw. I was thinking to myself, "Yeah right, how are they doing to drive those silly rotors?" And then I saw that it has a tube running from the fuselage between the rotors to the center, obviously containing a driveshaft going to a gearbox which I'm sure would contain a very simple set of bevel gears. Sensible, simple, rugged, easy to maintain, just like it should be. Straight out of a truck axle! And like the other commenter said, they get away with the small rotors because the gravity is lower. Large, slow blades are more efficient than small fast ones, which is why a helicopter can hover but an airplane with the same horsepower and weight can't stand on it's prop. But giant blades are a huge PITA so it'd be nice to skip them if they're not needed. Pandora gravity is lower, so they're not needed. And I just LOVE that things are designed so well in this franchise that you can have these real engineering conversations about them, as opposed to most sci-fi stuff where the design is like "It's bubbly shaped because it's made by squid people."

@@JETZcorp oh i forgot about my comment but I love these replies. Im more of a digital electronics guy and mechanics are a bit lost to me so I dont fully understand all the things you said but Its always nice to see people geek out about something they love. Agree on the last part, scifi is my favorite genre and seeing some explanations just being techno babble or "space magic" is so tiresome and lazy. Attention to detail in worldbuilding isnt important for the story and the majority of the audience but my god does it make it so much better because its thought out and believable!

It's a shame the actual "Avatar" concept makes no sense at all

@@davidelrizzo I mean, science fiction always involves some form of unobtainium and bullshido. The Dune series is science fiction royalty, but hoooo boy there's so e weird shit going on. I don't think the concept of Avatars is nearly as ridiculous as navigating folds in space-time using the mental capacities afforded by Space Cocaine. The Force in Star Wars is turbo nonsense. None of this stops these series from being excellent. At least Avatar does have a pretty extensive technical lore behind everything, including the Avatar Program itself. If you want something more believable, perhaps a historical fiction like Titanic is more your speed. It's a real challenge to find inaccuracies in that thing. Even the wardrobes are straight out of period catalogs matching where that character would have gone shopping.

Had a fair amount of time to think about it!

Avatar worldbuilding is nothing simple like other big franchises. Cameron actually hired a biologist to create/design the plants of Pandora, he also hired a linguist to create the Na'Vi language based on Austronesian languages in Polynesia and other Native American languages. That's why the "Dances with wolves with Blue space cats Pocahontas" criticism is very stupid. I know there's some similarities but dismissing the other elements of the film just because you hate similarities with other films is not really a good criticism. It just makes you look shallow and not capable of digging deeper to analyze the film with serious criticisms.

@@randomly_random_0 going to quote this comment next time someone argues with me about Avatar.

I wouldn't even surprised. Cameron had this story on his notebook since late 1980s. He's is waiting for the right moment for the media technology to improve and it did that's why he made the first film.

Wasted potential

Cameron became an electrical engineer first before he became a filmmaker. That's why his visions in his movie have an underlying sense of realism.

@@Juice-chan And a truck driver! Fascinating dude.

The world building is what makes Avatar special. And it's one of the reasons why Avatar isn't just Dancing with Wolves or Pocahontas in space. I've always found this argument absurd. Plenty of movies borrow from each other

@@jackiemortes well frankly id rather have his derivatives over the crap Disney keeps churning out.

@@jackiemortes I don't think it's absurd to wish for a better story when the world building is that good.

We might see it again in Avatar 2. Or maybe, an upgraded version!

@@MatterBeamTSF I would love to see that!

They will come back escorting some modified ship or big rock who will kill pandora life when striking it at 0.2c, after what happened in the first avatar, earth will go full genocide, plus a dead planet is easier to mine than a hive mind controlled one.

@@AemerFactory Why use up so much vauable propellant? just unleash a bioweapon tailored to the ecosystem and be done, much less weight to throw around

@@alexanderbraun7887 bioweapon might have a bad habit of uncontrollable evolution, and then start to target everyone indiscriminately. Too dangerous to use it on the planet you intend to land after

No, the biggest problem is that radiators look, to the uninitiated, look almost like wings.

obviously any design made for science and constraints will be cooler, they include radiators.

@@TheTrueAdept Interestingly, while that's not what the wings on the Normandy are, they do have radiators on them.

Yep. Realistic designs oftentimes turn out to be gorgeous looking and age really well, while the "cool" ones sometimes look stupid from the get go. I mean, there's a lot of absolutely beautiful planes and other hardware that are not designed to be good looking, but they are. But Venture Star does look awesome even if we disregard the realism of the design. The warm color of the radiators on the cold background of the planet, the overall proportions, the curves etc. It's simply a good looking ship.

@@lurgee1706 That's a good point, I hadn't thought about it, but you seem to be right. Functional designs do seem to age well, and those stylized ones just go out of fad fast. I can think of many cars that fall into this, while most modern military vehicles are heavily function over form, and all continue to look good. Even the classic military Jeep still has its charm over countless commercial knockoffs. Sigh. Just as I swear every engineer must take some basic art courses if they design things people interact with, every artist that's doing art of technical items must understand some basic technical concepts.

Can-not-obtain-ium :D Un-obtainable-ium :D

Thank you for the hint! I did not see it.

That makes sense for theoretical materials -- another example is 'exotic matter' -- but they'd probably rename unobtanium after they've found it. It's a small gripe to have with the movie, but a gripe none the less. It makes sense but at the same time, it doesn't.

@@araknas3981 Maybe it was called that by someone when it was first discovered and it just stuck because, y'know, people are dumb?

@@araknas3981 You do not yet convince me. Yes, they'd _probably_ rename unobtanium after they've found it, but only probably. The name still is well imaginable. It has a natural foundation, and on top of that, one which allows for a great amount of mystical ivy.

Numquam femina eris.

Yes! Sci fi is held back by the trope that every spacecraft has to be sleek and aerodynamic.

@@joratto2833 Well B5 tends to disagree (look up the Earth Alliance Starfurry for instance, or the Omega class destroyer) Well now that I think about it, all the human spaceships in B5 except the shuttles and the thunderbolts are basically bricks, designs only valid outside an atmosphere :-)

@@srenkoch6127 there are definitely cool sleekly ships. It’s just good when that’s not the only thing that exists. Space bricks can look cool and practical and atmospheric drag is a limiting factor to a design.

In reality spacecraft do need heavy fairings and cowlings even if they don't see atmosphere. Look at the ISS for example. Space debris has huge velocity and will destroy anything unprotected.

With Avatar it almost seems like the less screentime something gets, the more thought out the design is in terms of functionality. As the stuff shown in atmosphere is all more fanciful or stylized than the Venture Star. I get that they were going for a late 60s early 70s aesthetic akin to Vietnam era helicopters (even the dedicated attack ones seem based on the AH-1 Cobra more than anything else and that itself is from the late 60s and is literally developed from the UH-1 Iroquois aka the Huey) and whatnot. And that the shuttle was deliberately meant to look like the STS and it really seems like its looks were more to to with function than that of the rotorcraft but still pale in comparison to the Venture Star. It seems like most of the thought there was in looks, rather than in function. But I guess this is to be expected in the end, one does afterall want to create something that people will identify with the movie/franchise. And you can never forget that the people who see any of these pieces of tech, are not people at war with blue catmonkeys.... they are people sitting in a theater or on a couch, watching a film.

yep most of those blue monkey scenes are stupid af.

@@whyjnot420 There's a video essay somewhere about the detail the film composers put into the music of the blue people, complete ethnomusicology based on harmonic series, the amount of objects in Pandora's sky, microtones and other crazy detailed concepts of biology that effects music which took literal years of research to create.... exactly none of which made it into the actual movie :(

@@musicalaviator it is an interesting topic. Generally speaking, aside from the actual, ripped almost wholesale from Ferngully story, a remarkable amount of thought was put into various aspects of the movie. I think though, if the point you are making was in regard to that last bit I said about who is watching. Well, that does lead to stuff like what you are saying too and it can be annoying as all hell at times. But given that this is a product offered up for consumption in a capitalist market and that I am fully onboard with that as a concept, the real kicker is if it is done well or not. Another thing to note is that the more screentime any one thing gets (all other things being equal that is), the better the chances of it being something focus groups will either comment on or be asked to comment on. I don't think I need to go on any further here.

You monster!

It’s funny that the most unrealistic vehicle is probably the c-21 dragon as it’s rotors are way too small to life it off the ground

@@omarbaba9892 Wings of a bumblebees are also to small, but they're flying :)

@@thejohnson2328 that’s different to rotors

The Dragon gunship also has thrusters for extra lift when needed, and the design is barely armored so it’s actually fairly lightweight for its size. Lastly, the rotors don’t need to be as big on pandora on account of the lower gravity and higher air density.

Same with the Scorpions, Samsons, Kestrels, and Seawasps. But due to the low gravity, large rotors aren't necessary like here on earth.

Also considering that the Rocinante was designed as an escort ship for patrols around Jupiter and Saturn the amount of heat and radiation is drastically reduced compared to that of earth orbit.

@@gold-818 most of the heat would be waste heat from electronics and engines onboard the roci not necessarily the sun cooking it besides you have to worry about interstellar radiation aswell.

@@hunterjames7786 The background temperature of space (interstellar radiation) is completely negligible, especially for systems that run as hot as humans. Point about waste heat from sources inside the ship still stands.

@E.L. Crisler no it's not, interstellar space has no reason at all to cook you, you have radiation though. We id not assume space in our system would be cold, rather that it would have *no* temperature, because it is vacuum, empty

That is interesting, I will have to look for those "radiators" on the pictures. Evaporating water is in essence open cycle cooling, it wastes coolant. Sadly these radiators could maybe shed the heat from living support systems, but not waste heat from the multi-terawatt Epstein drive. Thankfully, these engines are *magic* so no problem with waste heat

Agreeing with pretty much everything you said and just wanted support for a little coverage of Space: Above and Beyond. I have quite fond memories of that short lived show.

Love SAAB. Always will. The gun turrets on fighters made a lot of sense and the Hammerhead design was amazing.

I always thought of Avatar as Dances with Wolves on Mars

@@mpetersen6 It's also Ferngully and Pocahantas and a couple of other regurgitations of the same "profound" and "important" Hollywood message.

@@knghtbrd Well nobody ever said Hollyweird ever has an original thought.

Actually, there is a low render deleted scene of the Venture Star departing from Pandora on KZfaq ^^

Because most Sci-Fi authors don't know about this. (some few know but don't include it for storyline purposes, even fewer do include it). in the SF game, the Normandy has an internal heat sink that they can use to be "stealthy" but only for a limited time)

Probably because the process of dumping waste heat from spaceships is really slow and doesn't produce a large enough IR signature. It would be easier to track drive plumes or radar pings than weak heat signatures. Plus todays heat-seeking missiles are easily fooled by flares or good exhaust nozzle design.

It also doesn’t help in military sci-fi how the radiators would be large targets that would have your epic space battleship crippled after a few hits. It’s easier to just handwave it away with super tech or internal heat sinks. Honestly I always thought there were so many ideas you could use this heat for in stories. Like say they have some super conductive future space metal that you could shunt the heat into to be used in the engine system or when you arrive at a planet you could remove and replace the heat sink in the ship so that the heat could be reused on planets as a fuel source or in helping to terraform frozen worlds.

internal heat sinks and retractable radiators are the only way you can have a warship that isnt made of glass, and then you'll likely end up with something massive

@@danadraper6773 on the contrary, flares and some nozzle design doesn't help you that much. It's a cat and mouse game but relying on such a quickly developing field to not develop a counter to you complicated nozzles is a waste of time. I'd go in the direction of active counter measures. Lasers to blind the seeker head, or anti-missile missiles and so forth.

and there's still no hyperdrives

Their choice if land warfare equipment was absolutely ridiculous however, a couple dozen of heavily armored IFVs and SP-AA would have taken out as many navi as they had ammo for, the killratio would be so extreme the only question would be if they had more ammo than the navi had bodies to bleed before capitulation.

@@EvitoCruor There's actually an in-universe reason for this. Despite being the most powerful NGO private entity, the RDA were under strict jurisdictions when it came to it's military prowess and what it could actually have in it's arsenal, by order of the UN and thus were heavily neutered. A lot of their equipment is actually late 21st century stuff and is considered outdated by modern/next gen hardware that Earth Gov use. Hell, most of their ground forces stuff is repurposed from the civilian sector, like the AMP suits which are basically bipedal forklifts. Of course they still have the overpowered C-21 Dragon, but even then, its actually a nerfed version of the ones used by the UN, which apparently their versions can carry nuclear payloads. This is to ensure that the UN remains the most powerful militaristically faction. After all, can't have a mega-corporation threaten your hold of power on the world/interstellar stage

@@FrostbiteDigitalthe na vi are fvcked if the UN decides to swoop in

@@FrostbiteDigital Man, makes you wonder. If the stuff a "mere" corporation (even if it's a megacorporation) has is already this formidable, imagine the rest of the arsenal that the UN and national militaries have in the Avatar universe. Human technology by 2154 is clearly very advanced, it's just that the Earth is an ecologically devastated wreck by then. I know lots of people don't like the "humans bad" cliche storyline it seems to be at first, but I believe Cameron will find a way to end the story with an ending that is satisfactory to both humans and na'vi, and doesn't include one side or the other getting wiped out. What that solution is, I don't know yet, but I would be disappointed if it ended any other way.

Ignoring all in-universe continuity for the sake of CGI spectacle shock is how you end up with the Xyston ISDs...

Really? Mind blown, I’d always assumed they were just solar back ups for the fusion drives but now you say that it makes far far far more sense.

Even small ships have radiators glowing red-hot!

The problem with the show's interpretation of that is that they were seemingly really short-changed on available spacecraft dimensions, because there's no way they'd be able to fit enough mass in for that.

there are actually semi open cycle radiator systems, where a fine mist of coolant is exposed to vac to dump heat and then recaptured, but you have to tuck those away during ANY manuvering.

@@wilemelliott Unless you are willing to lose the coolant.

@@dsdy1205 that's... not how any of this works considering heat pumps are a thing and there are a lot of neat physics tricks you can do with the vacume of space and various fluids. if memory serves, there's been a version of cooling on a space suit that used the sublimation of water though a special block to suck all the heat out of coolant that ran though it. your suggestion implies air conditioning doesn't exist at all

@@dsdy1205 option 1 is exactly what I was referring to with heat pumps. Sounds like you just reinvented the maneuvering thrusters in the expanse... Superheated steam is exactly what they dump overboard. And as far as the ships structure is concerned, we've already got solutions that will keep a rocket engine dripping with ice on the outside of a running engine nozzle Also, couldn't you use the same water as the reaction mass in the drive by? Also, are you arguing a specific case? Because my point was that it was possible in general, which we've both just admitted. I've said no where about a reactor or anything. That's all from you. I was just saying that a radiator is not the exclusive way of removing heat...

I was surprised he didn't mention the Event Horizon or the Proteus from the 1996 Lost In Space film. Both are long rail ships.

@@nel1962 I hope they do the ships from Lost in Space!

@@nel1962 and the ship USS Cygnus in the movie The Black Hole.

Well, we know that pandora has lower surfave gravity than earth, and that the Venture Star (and its equivalents) can accellerate at 1.5 g. That should give it pleanty of TWR to land and take off, especially once depleates of most of its fuel and cargo

See.. Actually in Avatar 2 The "ISV Venture Star" doesn't not land directly on the pandora surface.. It just decelerates itself and stops in certain point in atmosphere or in midAir ..and it just drops that big cargo block on the surface of pandora by cables. The ISV Venture Star' engines thrust are so powerful that it just torches everything in it's radius on that surface of pandora.. The forest, the big trees , the ground instantly burned and turned into ashes in fraction of seconds.. and that is freaking insane. My god!! That's very powerful. If the ISV Venture Star decelerates and can cause that much destruction by stands in midAir.. I'm pretty sure that thing can surely take off from the surface.

I also thought that the venture star itself dropped off cargo, but after a second watch I saw it's actually a secondary drop craft with similar thrusters seen dropping off a package via a sky crane type method!

The ships never actually touch the surface of Pandora only by proxy through the landing pods.

this modified ISV is supposedly single use and it just drops these big monolith thingies with all the infrastructure and mechs and humans from the sky

The class name is actually "Capital Star" and there were 10 of them, of which the Venture Star was one such model. Often times, when people talk about a ship they dont know its class designation of, they will talk about the one prominant member and use its name as a reference, like "Ventrue Star type" and so on. Also, the ship doing the drop pod insertion was called the "Manifest Destiny" ^^

Good point you make. My question is how how does it rotate 180 degrees in order to decelerate for the six months prior to arrival?

​@@murdock6159 they would flip the WHOLE ship around using RCS. The bigger question is how they kept the ISV shielded on both sides when they used the light sail. That mirror on the other end of the ship is meant to act as both a light shield to protect the ship from the laser when it's under photonic propulsion, and an impact shielf to protect it from objects and dust ahead of them while the ship is coasting or using antimatter propulsion. But that means whenever it's using the light sail, the entire front end of the ship is exposed to incoming relativistic debris that can rip the ship apart!

Yes, the entire opening went all the way to 12 in just those 30 seconds xD

From what I've heard, the mechs were primarily intended for industry and were repurposed for a secondary military role. Kind of like mounting guns on a bulldozer because you really didn't anticipate that your iron ore mine was going to become a de-facto military base, "and yet here we are." Not what you'd bring to fight The Soviets, but probably good enough when the enemy has bows and arrows.

It'd only be an issue if spacecraft actually maneuvered as kinetically as starships in Star Trek or Star Wars. Trusses are extremely strong for their weight.

They tried to use the "its towed" logic but that fails anyway. Accelerating towards the destination its towed. But decelerating before arrival it's actually pushing into the drive section. Those forces are very different in how they are applied, and the designs needed to compensate for them. At this point you may aswell have pushed it on the way out, as in the way in your been pushed by it. It really doesn't matter which end you put the drive/habitation section, as it swaps sides half way through your journey. The only part that is important there is towing it means your now pointing your radiation spewing drives at it directly, so now it gets a radiation bath whenever the drivers are active. Pushing it allows you to point the drives away from the habitation section. It also has 1 other effect. A towed section can't be safely released to fly on if you have an accident, as it needs to pass through the towing section to keep going. There is no effective "lifeboat" scenario here for the whole habitation section. Admittedly should that accident occur, there is no practical way to rescue the habitation section anyway, and anyone aboard it would be dead before a rescue could arrive as it lacks those same radiators needed to regulate its temperature. The excess body heat generated by humans alone is going to eventually cause problems, nevermind all the electronics. This in turn raises an issue, the "teather" seems not to be designed with heat conducting capacity to transfer the excess heat from the habitation section to the drive section. Its not just drive/reactor heat you need to manage with radiators, it's all heat. The ISS doesn't have a drive system or large reactor, it has humans and low voltage electronics, and it needs a cooling solution with a surface area larger than 2 American football fields.

@@vmpgsc oh and it does have to manuver, once per trip. At the half way point it needs to flip 180 degrees on its axis. Fortunatly this doesn't actually generate alot of stress if done right. You deactive the main drive, use precision computer controlled thrust to spin about its axis, and your sorted. You just need to place the thrusters in locations that allow you to limit the lateral load on the spine.

@@cgi2002 > I'm curious where that notion came from, since I seem to recall from a Steve Burg (one of the designers) interview that turning the ship mid flight would be a potentially deadly maneuver, the Whipple shields must face forward at all times during the flight. Their solution was to have the engine/radiator pods swivel, so they push the ship at the start of the journey, then rotate to the position we see them in the film for the deceleration burn.

@@BlueChrome by the end of the video they defunct that idea at all, so I admit I got that wrong. The engines themselves don't accelerate the ship at all, so they should always be pointed forwards to deccelerate it. Its accelerated by a concept similar to a solar sail and the mirror must be on the rear of the ship during this process (the mirror is too small btw, it wouldn't protect the drive section, it needs to cover that too else it will be damaged). This drive system may be the single stupidest idea ever developed in scifi for long distance travel. It means this ship is not FTL (light can't break FTL), and just as importantly, uses the single most inefficient method of accelerating a ship possible to reach significant portions of light speed. It would frankly take less effort/resources to have a detachable booster module/fuel pods than to build the focused laser array that "pushes" hlthe solar sail. Oh and you need 2 of them, 1 at each end. Another note, they talk about a "detached" whipple shield. That's bull, or more precisely it's not going to work. While accelerating/decelerating it would not maintain distance (human tech isn't shown to include tractor beams in avatar). Also a detached sheild is just more debris to hit your ship with when it does take a hit. You'd be better off having it attached with a shock absorbing system in place, then you can atleast control it and make sure it doesn't hit you/drift away. Also since your using a solar sail, you can't have it ahead of you until that is collapsed/disconnected, as it wouldn't work inside the sail, due to it needing to block debris shredding the sail. It wouldn't work infront of the sail (without rigid structural connections to it) as the sail would catch upto and hit it. And finally, it's too small, the sail has a surface area dozens of times larger than the sheild, while also basically having to be thinner than paper, it's going to be shredded by anything that touches it. Tbh in reality the sail needs to be a few thousand times larger to even begin to work, and weigh less than a few kg in total, due to the ship already massing well over a few hundred thousand kg to even begin to have any noticable acceleration value.

Plots aren't bad at all, they're a little flawed but they're made to be digestible for the target audience which is Disney viewers and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

i wAnT c0MpLex pLot lmao this is just nitpicking tbh

Yup, to didn't think of those protusions as fins when I first saw them but as structural elements, "ribs" to keep the structural integrity of such humongous radiators that given their position wouel be under great compressive stress in the times the engines are burning.

The RDA ISVs were based on the "Valkyrie" design by physicist and SF author Charles Pellegrino. His math dictated a very long cable between the engines and habitable cargo, yes, to minimize cosine loses on the exhaust and maximize the shadow effect of dense shielding proximate to the annihilation engine. The design for the movie makes some compromises to look good on screen to naive audiences (that's the inference, but I don't know if it's been explicitly stated by Cameron et al.). At best, you'd have a shot of the engines, then a looooong pan along the tether, then the cargo. (In the history of TV and movie SF, there are plenty of documented cases of ships that have been redesigned to be horizontal, to fit the orientation of the screen.)

Yup, I was glad ground effect vehicles are shown in mainstream media though sea dragon's purpose is something i despise

there's a pretty good reason not to do that, it would poison the planet with assloads of fusion fragments from their swanky antimatter doped engines, apparently it didn't. guess thats a little hard to write around so they ignored that bit of science.

Do you really think it's that easy and cheap? You need an infrastructure and corporate defense force to mine, extract and defend the whole process.

@@SHVRWK no I was just talking about getting rid of the na’vi

@@haramberinokripperino7770 They can't do that without destroying the environment and the resources they need, also it takes many more ships and fuel than they have. I think specifically engineered biological weapons and viruses/diseases as well as manipulation of the indigenous would be a better alternative. Should learn from the European colonialism, it wasn't just genocides and slavery.

@@SHVRWKwell if they only need unobtanium there is no problem in simply glassing the planet and mining it afterwards

Yes I absolutely agree with that statement. Give us more Force Recon

If you haven't read the books, the design lineage of those new ships won't be obvious, but the lore is there. The problem is that they're trying to compress two or three different books into the final season, which doesn't leave much room for worldbuilding.

@@talideon I think the series is going to end with the book Babylon's Ashes due to the time gap between that comes between that book and Persepolis Rising. I suspect however we might get a new series that cover the later books given some aspects in this season.

My mouth was hanging open at that scene. It's so unbelievably epic for a space movie, and it's NOT EVEN a space movie! And then every other vehicle in the movie is just all killer no filler. You get the palpable sense that the director of this movie is the type of dude who designs submarines in his spare time.

It was epic, I just wished they used some other ship design for Maybe a heavy duty bring your whole planets assets kind of ship because its weird that all those ships carry that many people and equipment to build an entire city

@@julianforrer478 Wouldn't be surprised if we see something like that in the next couple movies after the mentions of Earth dying. Like some kind huge colony ship. Thus far, what we've seen seems to be for the sole purpose of exploration as opposed to colonization. That and the mention of the spider bots constructing buildings in a week. Would eve kind of follow with the direction of the story and the parallels to the colonization of North/South America.

Well, bridgehead city (the RDA base in way of water) is designed around San Diego harbor and is eventually supposed to be able to support 2 million people, so yeah, colonization is going to play a massive role in the next movies.

The theory behind laser sails is that once you get to a destination you set up lasers in solar system. Then they can be used to accelerate and decelerate craft. Obvious problem is getting to new destinations. So the movie covers that by the ship having an antimatter drive. I think the other problem is that its probably slow to accelerate and decelerate with laser sails so depending on the cost of drive propellent it might just be easier to use the antimatter drive in some circumstances depending on time/politics/payloads

The radiators are the front and the mirror like structure (shield) is the behind. In the acceleration process a foldable sail is deployed from the front of the spacecraft and impulsed by lasers shooted from earth, with the shield at the back protecting the ship from said laser. Then comes the confusing part. The sail is retracted, the ship flipped and the shield extended forwards to protect from space dust. From this point on the ship travels "backwards" because you need the shields at the front and because you need a long period of deceleration using your main engines when closing it to Pandora. Upon arrival, the Venture Star will orbit the planet, unload crew and equipment, load Unobtanium and fire it's engines again to accelerate towards Earth, and once it reaches cruise speed will flip again to deploy the shield and be ready for deceleration upon arrival.

Thanks, guys! I knew about laser sails, but was getting confused by the diagrams flipping around. It's definitely an unusual ship! 😉

@@grantwhite3044 Nit pick here, but it should be stellar system (which translates directly to 'star system'). Solar system refers specifically to the Sol star system, which is the one Earth redides in (our stars name is Sol).

@@moteroargentino7944 thanks you, now I understand.

That is sadly the case with essentially all the human equipment and the biology of Pandora. So much of it actually is well thought out, practical, and realistic. But no time is actually spent on it.

I'd definitely love a video on the sea dragon. I watched the movie a few weeks ago and I immediately recognized what it was.

If you use energy, eventually it *all* becomes waste heat ("waste" as in "low quality" as in "not enough of a thermodynamic difference to extract work"). If you don't build dedicated radiators, your ship's surfaces will be radiators by default -- which probably means your interiors won't have the temperatures you want (liquid hydrogen cold, humans well below boiling, etc.).

Too bad the story is is so generically stupid. Seriously there is so much lore behind the humans tech and Pandora's biology. And so much of it is cool while still making sense.

@@hanzzel6086 Generically stupid? Never seen a movie about taking control of alien bodies to interact with the actual aliens whilst negotiating to end a war and establish mining rights, but whatever you say. I don't give a shit how many people say, "It's just Pocahontas in space," or, "It's just sci-fi Dances With Wolves with aliens!" It's a fine story and I really liked it and the characters in it.

@@ODST_Parker I agree. Most many movies share the same 20 plots, why is this one singled out for it?

@@xronalmighty Exactly! Star Wars was an extremely generic plot, but what makes it great is everything else. You can do so much to make a story unique and amazing, it can be the simplest, most basic story in the world.

Well, one of the attractions of North America for the English was all of the old-growth forests with trees tall and straight enough for building big ships with huge masts. Timber was one of the first major exports.

@@MonkeyJedi99: The English wanted those huge masts to build ships that could go places other than North America, and also to fight the Spanish and French navies. What's the motivation in the Avatar universe? Who (besides the blue monkey people) are humanity fighting, and where else are they traveling? None of that info that would justify the lengths they're going to obtain Unobtainium are described, at least not that I've seen.

Unobtanium is supposed to be a room-temperature superconductor. That kind of material would be unbelievably useful for far more than just spaceship engines.

@@joratto2833 Truth!

@@joratto2833: ...fair enough.

Vacuum makes great insolation. That's why thermoses have vacuum between the inner bottle and outer layer.

You are correct, if thrown out into the vacuum of space you wouldn't freeze instantly *looks with stern disapproval at Mission to Mars*

If you put a living body in a vaccum they would boil. For the same reason water does. Its why you only live for about a min or so as your body is boiling amd thats ... Prob real painful

@@TheMonolith20001 But wouldn't your for example mouth or tongue freeze, at least superficially? All that boiling is stealing heat very fast.

@@ilenastarbreeze4978 I wonder how long one could survive, but i'm thinking you would suffocate before boiling to death, the human body is very good at retaining pressure so it's not like your skin would split open, skin is very tough, you would begin to suffocate almost instantly since you wouldn't be able to keep air in your lungs... i think.