The Expanse and its compatibility with OA

[The Astronomer]

I'm pretty sure Expanse was written before we discover that half of Ceres is actually made out of water. The author acknowledged that and even wrote an essay (...or, well, whatever you call it) on that.

Speaking about dry Ceres, in EG the 'Cerean' class planetoid is still described as 'rock dwarf'. Might want to change that. If anybody's interested, they could make a new thread in General Setting.

Vesta, on the other hand, is mostly rocky. The class should be renamed after that object.

There is already another class named after Vesta: a planetoid that has experienced some volcanic activity early in its life. Since Vesta is the only known asteroid where there is evidence of volcanic activity, we should keep it.

On Starlark: thanks for visualizing Starlark's radiators. It's kind of, well what do I say, really straightforward and hydrogen is a vastly superior choice...if not for how it's annoyingly hard to store. I don't know how far tech in OA went at the point, but you still need to keep it liquid, or even solid, and worry about how individual hydrogen molecule could escape from the tank walls through gaps in the tank molecules...

On lasers: even if we can't build bigger ones, we can always shove many of these smaller ones together. Is there is any reason a big laser would be less efficient than smaller ones?