For All Mankind

Everything in this show started ignoring hard science once they got past the initial base on the moon. And even then, it severely ignored the issues with low gravity on human biology (reproduction is basically impossible) and all the radiation issues on Mars. And don't get me started on them needing propellent when they supposedly have fusion based engines (there is enough ambient Hydrogen in space, especially within the Ort Cloud to serve this purpose) and the idea of landing on a moon using air braking and no deceleration burn. And for them to get from Mars to Titan that fast (or hell from Earth to Mars in the time frames they mention) they would start running into serious issues with time dilation making communications much more problematic beyond the 90 minute signal delay. The science went out the window with this show to make room for more virtue signaling. I am not watching the spin off where we will get to see how the Soviets were just misunderstood and the real enemy was Capitalism all along..... I swear my eyeballs ricochet on the back of my skull every time I see one of the fucking zoomer fucks say the phrase "Late stage Capitalism".

Having said that, the idea that a cold war would drive innovation is very plausible. It is easy to forget how many tech jumps we made in the 60s entirely because of the Cold War and the associated space race. Unfortunately when we lost our boogieman (or swapped them out for some cave dwelling fundies in the middle east) the focus changed to bullshit social stuff, which are luxuries that can only be afforded during times of prosperity and peace. Insert we traded the stars for Africa meme here. And the girl boss shit, holy fuck. Any woman on this show who is normal and likeable ends up getting killed off or written off, especially if they are even vaguely attractive/charismatic. If you are a psycho and/or a lesbian you get batman levels of plot armor. Every one of them the writers spend time on is a fucking terrible person or outright crazy, except for maybe the cop chick helping the rebels out. And now that Ed is dead, the men are not much better. The Nork guy and Dev are the only two who can act worth a shit and are relatable.

Cybsled said:

Unless you're breaking physics, you still need to propel something out the end of your spaceship to move forward. Vacuum is a vacuum for a reason: hydrogen molecules are in space, but too spread out to actually be practical to harvest on the go to use as a propellant. You'd need to carry something with you to use to propel your ship, regardless as to your power source.

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Space is not a true vacuum. There is hydrogen all over the fucking place. If you can contain a fusion reaction magnetically, which is what the show suggested (and seems the likely direction of nuclear fusion) then you can certainly scoop it up magnetically while in flight. The point of them having fusion engines was to circumvent the current limitation on interplanetary flight we currently face regarding physical fuel for the purpose of that series.

ShakyJake said:

I mean, getting to Titan, landing, etc is an extraordinary, extraordinary effort. There is no freaking way they could do that in the timeframe the show suggests. I'm not even sure why the writers went there. Ganymede or Europa would've been *maybe* believable since it's "next door" to Mars.

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Both of those moons have largely been ruled out as possible locations for life in the current day, but Titan is enough of an unknown that it could serve that possibility. And they went off the reservation the moment the tech in the show caught up to current levels and the NASA advisers stopped being useful for keeping things authentic. IMO they should have stuck with their whole finding microbes in underground ice on Mars thing and hinted at the microbes originating from space as a teaser.

But even ignoring the hard science issues of Titan visits, they still play fuck fuck games with the time frame of traveling from Earth (and lets be generous and say the Moon) to Mars. For a perspective, the fastest manmade object to ever exist was a probe they did a grav assisted slingshot around Venus a while ago. It reached a velocity of 6 percent the speed of light and basically was heat shielded like crazy because it was designed to get really close to the sun. The fastest manned object is still Apollo 11 which was less than 1/10th the velocity. The real issues are ambient radiation and not turning the crew into chunky salsa from rapid velocity changes.