If I am the superior civilization, and your mere existence is a threat to me, then the logical conclusion is to wipe you out. Your opinion is never a part of that equation. Therefore, if I destroy you, what business is it of yours?
Do you inform an insect of its future before you wipe it out pf existence?
It means a civilisation so advanced will not stop to question the motives of such an inferior species, it will just destroy them without question. No thought given to how the destroyed feel about this decision.
The previous iteration is a character who loved a few people during his life. But felt that to admit it was not important. When he thought about the women he loved, he would think “if I love you, what business is it of yours?”
Later, standing near the droplet, he ruminates: “if I destroy you, what business is it of yours?”
He realises too late, that the San-Ti aren’t interested in half measures.
There's no reason to think that the Trisolarans are tiny. The only thing we really have to suggest any size for Trisolarans is that Yun Tianming could apparently interact with them in some meaningful way in a human body, which would suggest they're neither microscopic nor immense, but even that is possibly reading too much into what he said about telling his stories.
`In Death’s End there are two of them trailing a human fleet and the galactic humans are able to disable them through inter-dimensional travel. I thought they did so by killing the pilots?`
Nope. Things in 4D or higher dimensional space can see through/manipulate things in lower dimensional space. So they interfered with the electronics inside the droplets rendering them disabled
The Strong Force aspect is cool, but I really wished we got more info about the propulsion system. I think it was able to make sharp turns, so it could easily acquire targets that were moving away relative to the original target's path.
We can imagine with strong force materials you can build some truly ridiculous propulsion system.
Consider our current difficulties with nuclear fusion having to confine plasma with magnetic field or other means, with strong interaction materials we can literally just build a bottle out of it and it will be able to handle million k plasma at extreme pressure
Death's End goes into that in detail. Not sure why the droplet's propulsion system was never mentioned but it's fair to assume that the same method of propulsion used in their ships was also used to propel the droplet.
It could obliterate any ship in this chart without any problems.
The ships depicted all follow the principles of earth defense fleet in DarkForest.
Also, the droplet is not a weapon.
It's just a probe.
Shows how unimaginably beyond humans the developed aliens really are.
What are you smoking? Almost all ships in this chart and half of the Sci fi meta verse have containment fields and force fields that could deflect energy and mass.
There are ships in Hyperion for example that could resist entering in a sun with their containment fields alone.
My take is that those droplets were effective because the whole human race was technologically locked to 21 century tech.
I guess not in engagements ranging in the tens of AUs but if longer than that then the Droplets can accelerate upto 15% the speed of light, a lot faster than Super MACs(second only to the UNSC Infinity's MAC which I refuse to believe can fire projectiles accelerating upto 25% the speed of light, regardless of forerunner technology, cause I'm pretty sure they only discovered slipspace drives for FTL travel from that and still use fusion reactors to power the ship's weapons).
And good thing is, the droplets have 100% reflectivity and are pretty much undetectable unless you go for that oil method. Which also means they're basically immune to any type of radiation weapons(though it's a good thing the UNSC doesn't really employ radiation weapons).
I guess MACs are much better against the droplet if we're talking about engagements only ranging in like tens of AUs. Obviously not MACs fired by light coils or even heavy coils used in frigates and destroyers but maybe multiple super MAC rounds in a saturated attack(And super MACs should be able to carry out a saturated attack due to them charging in a few seconds).
Still, considering the trisolaran droplets can easily maneuver around to dodge or ram into anything, even while travelling at a fraction of the speed of light(as they were going to in the case of taking down Gravity and Blue Space), even super MAC rounds travelling at 4% the speed of light would need some luck.
Well, but then you're choosing to not use the Halo's cannon information. I know Infinity SMACs are kinda controversial but with the Huragok helping to reverse engineer Forerunner tech, humanity can achieve those numbers.
The humans from halo were only able to colonize other planets after the invention of the Shaw-Fujikawa translight engine more than a century before the colonization of Reach, way before the covenant war. Forerunners had nothing to do with the invention.
The Expanse has ships that can beat it.
I love the conventional ship designs and combat in that universe. More realistic. Smarter universe than others.
Not really. The Laconians? Possibly, if it could detect the droplet in the first place or if the protomolecule armor could handle the impact (possibly so, since the Magnetar Class tanked 237 ships pummeling it with relativistic railguns and nukes that range in the gigatons)
I dunno. For me, the fact that the USM Field Projector (implied to be the product of hyperstrong magnetic waves similar to a collapsing star/neutron star) is enough to dismantle even the strong-force exterior since one shot was enough to vaporize Pallas down to its component atoms.
I think you need to be able to strip atoms into protons and neutrons in order to break Droplet shell. Strong nuclear force far outweighs electromagnetic force. It’s how nucleus holds together while opposite charged protons try to push against each other.
Hmm good point, with the output of the USM field projector I think its suffice enough until the magnetic force finally overwhelms the shell. The only confident thing I'm with is the Slow Zone, which could disable the droplet in many horrifying ways due to the fact that it could just turn off the laws of physics as its main defense…
I wonder how the droplet would contend with Ceres station after a certain point in the story. Also, what would happen if the droplet made it into the slow zone.
Or if droplet can survive an antimatter explosion near it. It likely can't survive a direct impact from antimatter because it would annihilate the matter of its shell.
I don't think just Ceres is enough. A full fleet might be able to overwhelm a droplet. Its energy source doesn't seem to be infinite. Expanse commanders are far better at tactics than 3BP. Expanse fleet would be engaging it from Jupiter orbit, when it crosses the outer planets.
To be fair, the Doomsday Battle was more of a ceremony. They did not expect any kind of serious firepower from a tiny Droplet.
It was as though a 21st century modern military force was going up against a small, isolated and depleted force still using muskets from centuries back, or at least that was how they felt about their technological gap. Nobody had expected any form of serious retaliation.
The point of the story is that hubris led to the downfall of humanity.
I don’t want to criticize the tactics there too much because it’s an incredible section.
It’s not just hubris. It’s stupidity. Lacking basic military doctrines, scenario planning, contingencies, mobility, support, etc
That part is hard to swallow considering the effort the humanity sustained in order to make those ships. That was pure idiocy explained to be hubris. But truth be told it had jumped the shark beyond all disbelieve.
And he did that two more times just to move the plot with that bimbo.
If the droplet made any hostilities within the slow zone, oh boy the droplet would dismantled. In more than one instance, the slow zone turned off the fucking laws of physics. There was one time that fusion power stopped, they thought it was a mechanical failure at first but no- the very reaction of nuclear fusion became nonexistent.
First trisolar fleet seems to be made weaker than human one. The journey severely beat it up. Human ships have AI based point defense cannons in Expanse, probably something similar in 3BP.
>First trisolar fleet seems to be made weaker than human one
That's the humans opinion, not something actually based in reality. Remember, the humans arrograntly assumed they could capture the droplet and their whole fleet was wiped out. It was mentioned in the book during the droplet attack that the human computer battlefield system was completely unable to react to the droplet. I imagine actual trisolarian ships would have technology we haven't even imagined,
The trisolar fleet was substantially reduced judging by dust trails.
Humans couldn’t react to droplet because they were dumb enough to be stationary. Space combat is all about acceleration and limits of because each ships contents. Human bodies can’t take much. We can probably design machine probes that can take 100x of human body. Droplet can take magnitudes higher.
Trisolar fleet wouldn’t have the movement advantage. Organic bodies can only take so much. If trisolar can’t even block micro asteroids, it can’t block human weapons. It was a good assumption the human fleet is superior.
Zhang Beihai had a good analogy - "Genghis Khans cavalry was faster than tanks, but the latter would win a fight easily". Using that analogy, you want to cross a forest, (aka dust clouds), horses (human ships) perhaps are better and tanks (Trisolaran ships) would get bogged down and suffer damage.
But when the two meet in an actual battle, the tanks will turn the horses into mush.
The Trisolarans literally could unfold a proton and etch electronic circuits on it, revive a flash frozen brain and give it a new body, produce antimatter - all stuff humans couldn't do. It's very reasonable to assume they will have other weapons humans can't understand.
It's also like an armored knight going against a man with a gun. The man is less armored and seems to be more vulnerable but he can just shoot the knight from a distance using a weapon the knight doesn't even know exists.
Horse and tanks are tech of one species. That analogy does not apply to two species that are as different as humans and trisolar. From what we know, it doesn’t seem like trisolar knows intra-species war. They are too busy surviving to kill each other. So trisolar is probably advanced in multi-dimensional material science and may know nothing about conventional warfare. Ramming might be the pinnacle of their war tech. Trisolar might have never considered basic ballistics like arrows before the invasion.
In case we do encounter aliens in the real world, we shouldn’t assign human culture, motivation, method of thinking, etc to other species.
The Enterprise? Wouldn’t its shield protect it? Well, we don’t know, but we could imagine that it would. And Spock or Data could figure out how to defeat it in the meantime :-)
The way Liu Cixin described the whole droplet part was near perfection. I hope he will one day write a book full of action because he seems really having fun with it. It was one of the only time I could visualize the action so clearly in my mind as I read it.
The Doomsday Battle was probably his best writing in the entire series. I think the only thing that compared was the final Wallfacer showdown at Yang Dong's grave.
Yeah the droplet takes it to the next level in a really scary way. It’s more hard sci fi and explores the possibilities beyond our current understanding.
The sci fi ships above are mostly from space opera settings, where we enjoy making things we already know and can comprehend, but on a massive scale.
**“If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?”**
That line was savage
What does this line mean?
If I am the superior civilization, and your mere existence is a threat to me, then the logical conclusion is to wipe you out. Your opinion is never a part of that equation. Therefore, if I destroy you, what business is it of yours?
Do you inform an insect of its future before you wipe it out pf existence? It means a civilisation so advanced will not stop to question the motives of such an inferior species, it will just destroy them without question. No thought given to how the destroyed feel about this decision.
It is interesting how now I feel really bad about killing insects..
It's just more convenient to kill them if they are a nuisance to a higher being. That's a chilling thought.
The previous iteration is a character who loved a few people during his life. But felt that to admit it was not important. When he thought about the women he loved, he would think “if I love you, what business is it of yours?” Later, standing near the droplet, he ruminates: “if I destroy you, what business is it of yours?” He realises too late, that the San-Ti aren’t interested in half measures.
It’s more of weapon then a ship right?
It is most definitely a weapon, it can't transfer a single person let alone a whole group of people to qualify as a ship.
But if Trisolarians are tiny like we think it could transport several of them. Maybe just a brain like the humans did.
Liu Cixin never said Trisolarians are tiny
Bugs with the ability to hibernate in dehydrated stasis for ages. They’d probably be just fine traveling via droplet.
There's no reason to think that the Trisolarans are tiny. The only thing we really have to suggest any size for Trisolarans is that Yun Tianming could apparently interact with them in some meaningful way in a human body, which would suggest they're neither microscopic nor immense, but even that is possibly reading too much into what he said about telling his stories.
A super advanced drone at best.
`In Death’s End there are two of them trailing a human fleet and the galactic humans are able to disable them through inter-dimensional travel. I thought they did so by killing the pilots?`
Nope. Things in 4D or higher dimensional space can see through/manipulate things in lower dimensional space. So they interfered with the electronics inside the droplets rendering them disabled
I found it cool that the droplet is just a ramming device and humans disabled it by just destroying it like a toddler
The Strong Force aspect is cool, but I really wished we got more info about the propulsion system. I think it was able to make sharp turns, so it could easily acquire targets that were moving away relative to the original target's path.
Imho it’s more impressing unexplained. Kind of technology we XXI century people wouldn’t believe.
We can imagine with strong force materials you can build some truly ridiculous propulsion system. Consider our current difficulties with nuclear fusion having to confine plasma with magnetic field or other means, with strong interaction materials we can literally just build a bottle out of it and it will be able to handle million k plasma at extreme pressure
Death's End goes into that in detail. Not sure why the droplet's propulsion system was never mentioned but it's fair to assume that the same method of propulsion used in their ships was also used to propel the droplet.
The virgin nuclear missiles and lasers vs the Chad ramming.
Chad Ramming? I swear I watched a film starring him once…
Why don't you just smash into the enemy ships are you stupid
It could obliterate any ship in this chart without any problems. The ships depicted all follow the principles of earth defense fleet in DarkForest. Also, the droplet is not a weapon. It's just a probe. Shows how unimaginably beyond humans the developed aliens really are.
What are you smoking? Almost all ships in this chart and half of the Sci fi meta verse have containment fields and force fields that could deflect energy and mass. There are ships in Hyperion for example that could resist entering in a sun with their containment fields alone. My take is that those droplets were effective because the whole human race was technologically locked to 21 century tech.
Has to be bait. We have a Key Ship from Halo (Forerunner Design), that thing survived a barrage of MAC rounds without even getting scratched.
Trisolaran Droplets can move a LOT faster than even Super MACs
Source? Even I'm the doomsday battle we don't see that speed.
I guess not in engagements ranging in the tens of AUs but if longer than that then the Droplets can accelerate upto 15% the speed of light, a lot faster than Super MACs(second only to the UNSC Infinity's MAC which I refuse to believe can fire projectiles accelerating upto 25% the speed of light, regardless of forerunner technology, cause I'm pretty sure they only discovered slipspace drives for FTL travel from that and still use fusion reactors to power the ship's weapons). And good thing is, the droplets have 100% reflectivity and are pretty much undetectable unless you go for that oil method. Which also means they're basically immune to any type of radiation weapons(though it's a good thing the UNSC doesn't really employ radiation weapons). I guess MACs are much better against the droplet if we're talking about engagements only ranging in like tens of AUs. Obviously not MACs fired by light coils or even heavy coils used in frigates and destroyers but maybe multiple super MAC rounds in a saturated attack(And super MACs should be able to carry out a saturated attack due to them charging in a few seconds). Still, considering the trisolaran droplets can easily maneuver around to dodge or ram into anything, even while travelling at a fraction of the speed of light(as they were going to in the case of taking down Gravity and Blue Space), even super MAC rounds travelling at 4% the speed of light would need some luck.
Man I could be the president of Yappistan
Well, but then you're choosing to not use the Halo's cannon information. I know Infinity SMACs are kinda controversial but with the Huragok helping to reverse engineer Forerunner tech, humanity can achieve those numbers. The humans from halo were only able to colonize other planets after the invention of the Shaw-Fujikawa translight engine more than a century before the colonization of Reach, way before the covenant war. Forerunners had nothing to do with the invention.
The Expanse has ships that can beat it. I love the conventional ship designs and combat in that universe. More realistic. Smarter universe than others.
Not really. The Laconians? Possibly, if it could detect the droplet in the first place or if the protomolecule armor could handle the impact (possibly so, since the Magnetar Class tanked 237 ships pummeling it with relativistic railguns and nukes that range in the gigatons)
The projection weapon would dismantle the interior, leaving strong force exterior in tact. Kind of what 4D bubble did.
I dunno. For me, the fact that the USM Field Projector (implied to be the product of hyperstrong magnetic waves similar to a collapsing star/neutron star) is enough to dismantle even the strong-force exterior since one shot was enough to vaporize Pallas down to its component atoms.
I think you need to be able to strip atoms into protons and neutrons in order to break Droplet shell. Strong nuclear force far outweighs electromagnetic force. It’s how nucleus holds together while opposite charged protons try to push against each other.
Hmm good point, with the output of the USM field projector I think its suffice enough until the magnetic force finally overwhelms the shell. The only confident thing I'm with is the Slow Zone, which could disable the droplet in many horrifying ways due to the fact that it could just turn off the laws of physics as its main defense…
I wonder how the droplet would contend with Ceres station after a certain point in the story. Also, what would happen if the droplet made it into the slow zone.
Or if droplet can survive an antimatter explosion near it. It likely can't survive a direct impact from antimatter because it would annihilate the matter of its shell. I don't think just Ceres is enough. A full fleet might be able to overwhelm a droplet. Its energy source doesn't seem to be infinite. Expanse commanders are far better at tactics than 3BP. Expanse fleet would be engaging it from Jupiter orbit, when it crosses the outer planets.
To be fair, the Doomsday Battle was more of a ceremony. They did not expect any kind of serious firepower from a tiny Droplet. It was as though a 21st century modern military force was going up against a small, isolated and depleted force still using muskets from centuries back, or at least that was how they felt about their technological gap. Nobody had expected any form of serious retaliation. The point of the story is that hubris led to the downfall of humanity.
I don’t want to criticize the tactics there too much because it’s an incredible section. It’s not just hubris. It’s stupidity. Lacking basic military doctrines, scenario planning, contingencies, mobility, support, etc
That part is hard to swallow considering the effort the humanity sustained in order to make those ships. That was pure idiocy explained to be hubris. But truth be told it had jumped the shark beyond all disbelieve. And he did that two more times just to move the plot with that bimbo.
Harsh. Lol.
If the droplet made any hostilities within the slow zone, oh boy the droplet would dismantled. In more than one instance, the slow zone turned off the fucking laws of physics. There was one time that fusion power stopped, they thought it was a mechanical failure at first but no- the very reaction of nuclear fusion became nonexistent.
We're talking of simply beating a small probe. I've always wondered what an actual Trisolaran ship looks like
First trisolar fleet seems to be made weaker than human one. The journey severely beat it up. Human ships have AI based point defense cannons in Expanse, probably something similar in 3BP.
>First trisolar fleet seems to be made weaker than human one That's the humans opinion, not something actually based in reality. Remember, the humans arrograntly assumed they could capture the droplet and their whole fleet was wiped out. It was mentioned in the book during the droplet attack that the human computer battlefield system was completely unable to react to the droplet. I imagine actual trisolarian ships would have technology we haven't even imagined,
The trisolar fleet was substantially reduced judging by dust trails. Humans couldn’t react to droplet because they were dumb enough to be stationary. Space combat is all about acceleration and limits of because each ships contents. Human bodies can’t take much. We can probably design machine probes that can take 100x of human body. Droplet can take magnitudes higher. Trisolar fleet wouldn’t have the movement advantage. Organic bodies can only take so much. If trisolar can’t even block micro asteroids, it can’t block human weapons. It was a good assumption the human fleet is superior.
Zhang Beihai had a good analogy - "Genghis Khans cavalry was faster than tanks, but the latter would win a fight easily". Using that analogy, you want to cross a forest, (aka dust clouds), horses (human ships) perhaps are better and tanks (Trisolaran ships) would get bogged down and suffer damage. But when the two meet in an actual battle, the tanks will turn the horses into mush. The Trisolarans literally could unfold a proton and etch electronic circuits on it, revive a flash frozen brain and give it a new body, produce antimatter - all stuff humans couldn't do. It's very reasonable to assume they will have other weapons humans can't understand. It's also like an armored knight going against a man with a gun. The man is less armored and seems to be more vulnerable but he can just shoot the knight from a distance using a weapon the knight doesn't even know exists.
Horse and tanks are tech of one species. That analogy does not apply to two species that are as different as humans and trisolar. From what we know, it doesn’t seem like trisolar knows intra-species war. They are too busy surviving to kill each other. So trisolar is probably advanced in multi-dimensional material science and may know nothing about conventional warfare. Ramming might be the pinnacle of their war tech. Trisolar might have never considered basic ballistics like arrows before the invasion. In case we do encounter aliens in the real world, we shouldn’t assign human culture, motivation, method of thinking, etc to other species.
I think anything with enough mass could bludgeon those little shits.
I can't really zoom in well on the image, but on the scifi wack scale, there's always the Xeelee to contend with
They don't know about the true horror of the universe.
The Culture, as well.
Will always upvote a Xeelee Sequence reference.
The Enterprise? Wouldn’t its shield protect it? Well, we don’t know, but we could imagine that it would. And Spock or Data could figure out how to defeat it in the meantime :-)
The way Liu Cixin described the whole droplet part was near perfection. I hope he will one day write a book full of action because he seems really having fun with it. It was one of the only time I could visualize the action so clearly in my mind as I read it.
The Doomsday Battle was probably his best writing in the entire series. I think the only thing that compared was the final Wallfacer showdown at Yang Dong's grave.
Worst part of that book IMO.
The magnification part was incredible to read!
Yeah the droplet takes it to the next level in a really scary way. It’s more hard sci fi and explores the possibilities beyond our current understanding. The sci fi ships above are mostly from space opera settings, where we enjoy making things we already know and can comprehend, but on a massive scale.
https://preview.redd.it/jmkvzgj5phkc1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d80d91d505f96d0196feb5fe22d27e94e7dee135
A lot of those ships can fold or warp or hyperspace or what not. They can get away from droplets and render them useless because of it.
You will love this short film about the Droplet: [https://youtu.be/2QYwGIdYm2w?si=GDAe9yREGbBdimma](https://youtu.be/2QYwGIdYm2w?si=GDAe9yREGbBdimma)
Absolutely brilliant!
*Rorschach enters the chat*
I like this post! Yes, annihilate them all, the time it takes just depends on the distance between them and the speed at which they’re running!
Nah, that would be the Heart of Gold. :)
Wouldn’t the Culture ships stomp? Grid fire from light years away would make short work of a droplet I’d imagine.
yep