[carapace]

How about the Klingon disintegrators that stop at the soles of your boots?

Star Trek is "Wagon Trail" in space. Star Wars is, I think, space opera. The Expanse gives a nod to hard science, and I respect them for trying, but e.g. the gravity is always either 1 or 0 g. i'm not complaining, I think realistic sci-fi would be kind of boring. Like the first half of "2001: A Space Odyssey", it was basically Dr. Heywood taking a plane. A freaking awesome plane to space, but still.

I have a "100 Sci-Fi Movies" DVD set with lots of old movies from a span of decades, and it's pretty clear that at least some sci-fi did start as attempts to do a kind of scenario planning, but there has always been "speculative fiction" depending on how you categorize things. Was Plato's Atlantis science fiction?

[gkfasdfasdf]

> e.g. the gravity is always either 1 or 0 g

In the Expanse TV show yes, it seems that way. However I suspect that is more due to keeping production costs down. In the books, gravity varies all over the place depending on what moon/planet/rock/station the characters are on, and even goes into details describing the differences of spin gravity near the center of a station vs outward.

[carapace]

Yes, sorry, that's what I meant: the TV show. Thanks for pointing that out.

At one point they use CGI to show off Coriolis force on the asteroid, and I took that to be a kind of message from the show, "We know about this stuff but it's too expensive to do all day every day, so here's some science "fan service"." Like I said, I respect them for it. :-)