In The Orville episode, "Pria," Capt. Ed Mercer (Seth MacFarlane) tells Pria Lavesque (Charlize Theron) his ship is powered by a Dysonium quantum drive capable of speeds in excess of 10 lightyears (ly) per hour. This speed scale is far more intuitive than Star Trek's warp factor but how exactly does it compare? Could the...
In The Orville episode, "Pria," we learn that the ship can travel upwards of ten lightyears (ly) an hour. Like the warp factor scale used in Star Trek, this is a measure of a ship's speed. To determine which ships are faster, whether the Orville is faster than any of the ships that have borne...
The Ceres Station in the series The Expanse is built from the dwarf planet Ceres. This planetoid converted to space station is home to some six million residents and has anywhere between 800 to 1,000 ships docked on any given day. The dwarf planet has an average diameter of 946 kilometers (588 miles) with a...
On February 13, 2017, Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, was murdered at a Kuala Lumpur airport with VX nerve agent, a particularly terrible chemical weapon. In an assassination plot that is stranger than fiction, the deadly chemical agent was delivered as a binary compound. Two women, allegedly believing they were...
Two hundred years in the future, humanity has colonized the Sol System -- Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt, and some of the Outer Planets -- in the TV series The Expanse. Resources are scarce on Earth and the planet relies heavily on resources from the Belt to run its global economy. Despite migrating to...