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[–] 22 points 3 weeks ago (8 children)

I love the space battles in the early Expanse books. They are essentially

There's a ship visible several thousand kilometers away…

Shit, they've armed weapons

Firing countermeasures

They will pass in 30 seconds at an appreciable fraction of C

BRAAAAAAAAP

battle over

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  • [–] 18 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    There's a sequence in a Larry Niven book where a ship sees some missiles inbound from across a solar system. In order to avoid them, they have to spend several hours at high-G thrust, nearly killing a bunch of the crew. It's a long, slow chapter of high tension, it obeys the laws of physics, and it's excellent.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    I'm a fan and collector, but that doesn't sound familiar from the portion of my collection that I've read through. Do you recall anything else?

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  • [–] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 child)

    I'm pretty sure it's either The Mote in God's Eye or The Gripping Hand.

    Edit: Checked, and it's most of the last couple of chapters of The Gripping Hand. I fudged some of the details from not having read it in a long time, but the basics are there; spaceships jockeying for strategic advantage across an entire solar system, balancing fuel and orbits, and crews doing their best to withstand painful acceleration.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago

    A 2kg tungsten projectile out a chain gun, with no gravity or atmosphere, is just madness. One of my favorite parts is when they evacuate the Rocinante's atmosphere before going into battle. They don't explain with some bullshit exposition, but one would hope it's obvious after they get hit with PDC rounds.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Ship-to-ship combat is like that in the Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell. Hours or days of waiting and preparing, trying to get in the enemy's head to guess what they'll do, and coordinating the fire and last minute acceleration/maneuvers of your fleet, then the automatic programs carry out those orders and you see who died. It's really well done.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 weeks ago

    I love hard scifi. Gonna check this out. If you guys want something in return; I think the children of time series is cool for actually handling the vast distances of travel. >!(I don't think the expanse for all its glory counts on this front because it's just explained with "aliens")!<

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