The Expanse: Rocinante vs Pella | Detailed Battle Breakdown

Spacedock breaks down the epic clash of the Rocinante and Pella in #TheExpanse Season 6.

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Battlezone II Music by Carey Chico

Spacedock does not hold ownership of the copyrighted materiel (Footage, Stills etc) taken from the various works of fiction covered in this series, and uses them within the boundaries of Fair Use for the purpose of Analysis, Discussion and Review. Produced by Daniel Orrett. Owner/Executive Producer at Spacedock.

_“Good Marines shoot at where the enemy is. Great Marines shoot at where the enemy is going to be. Godlike Marines make the enemy go there.”_ - Bobby Draper, probably.

[noirangel]

Imagine making a 360° no-scope a tactical maneuver.

The Expanse never ceases to impress.

[edwardbuckner]

I love bobby "fuck it we tried" Then launches the nukes. LOL, She is a true warrior. Always looking to get the job done.

[Calendyr]

The tactic of having multiple weapons with various travel speed hit the target at the same it is called "Time on target". It is a very effective way of preventing the defender to be able to deal with each attack individually. It was used effectively in Babylon 5 when the Centauri battlecruiser attacked the station.

[positronicfeed]

The Azure Dragon capture was pretty good too. I loved how the Roci's hull was left glowing red hot every time it passed through the Dragon's drive plume.

[kumisz]

In the book, the Pella did dodge to starboard repeatedly which gave Bobbie the idea, but she also engineered a situation where they would dodge to starboard anyway by having her missiles coming from their port side, so they would sideskip away from the missiles.

[Specter]

Really the only problem with the space battles in The Expanse is that their is not enough of them.

[ravennightingale]

Expanse really out here trying to occupy the entire Top 5 best space battles ever put to screen all by itself

[paulbobenhausen]

Honestly, I kind of like that the free navy just makes mistakes, espescially facing a railgun. I generally tend to find hyper competence by weird rebel groups and pirates in symmetric warfare to be a bit immersion breaking, and honestly a touch lazy. I think the Expanse has done a great job at showing that Inaros forces are at their strongest when they're doing things traditional planning would never have foreseen, and having them be really good at traditional combat almost takes away from that to me?

[crunchynutter]

The retrofitted belter ships are unlikely to have top-of-the-line military-grade sensors of purpose built warships like like the Pella and Roci, which might be another factor in how Holden’s crazy-Ivan shot worked.

This could be why Holden decided to take his first shot at one of the belter ships instead of the Pella. Since the element of surprise only applied to the first shot, if the odds of success were the same no matter the target, it would have made most sense to take the first shot at the Pella, by far the biggest threat. If the Roci crippled the Pella with the first shot, it should have been able to comfortably handle the two remaining belter ships. The only reason why you wouldn’t want to shoot the Pella first is if you think it’s better sensors (and also expected better pilot) would have given it too high a chance of dodging the shot.

[Justin-oggu]

I really loved how Marcos said (in this same episode?) that the Free Navy was going to pick apart the UN and MCRN forces with hit-and-run tactics.

Then as soon as he pride gets involved he "goes Inner" and charges haphazardly at the Rocinate who decisively defeats him with a literal hit-and-run tactic.

[CptHer]

I am so sad to see The Expanse go after just two more episodes. Season 6 is really bitter sweet to me.

What I really like about The Expanse battles is how they are different from each other. They're all their own scenarios with very different resolutions which go far beyond Star Trek's or Star War's usual battles of ducking it out until one side has no more shields and explodes.

[davidbecquer]

I feel like the show did its absolute best to recreate this book chapter, and they did an outstanding job all things considered. However, in my humble opinion the book sequence just cannot be topped. The tension, the desperation, and the teamwork between Bobby (as the gunner) and Alex (as the pilot) just cannot be topped...

[lucasrembold]

In the book the ship always dodge the same way, Boby even remembers a instructor of hers talking about how doing anything more than 2 times is a mistake

[julias]

Really the only thing that didn't translate over from the books was the incredibly punishing transition between high-g and free fall and back the crew had to endure every time the Roci flipped to fire the rail gun. The show often does a good job factoring in the physiological constraints of the folks onboard these ships, and it added so much tension as written in the book, so it's a shame it didn't really make it into this scene. Otherwise, this was very satisfying.

[YourArmsGone]

The expanse has the best detailed space battles. Like in the episode where they are chasing down the spotting ship, you could see the hull glow red every time they got too close to the drive cone. The little details make rewatching them so much fun.

[fatboyslim]

On the rail gun range, you need to take into account that the target is also moving(Edit: accelerating) in opposition to the round therefore the closing speed is higher and the effective range is greater.

[Richy]

One thing I am loving with the new season is the camera work on the ship exteriors. They're taking their time to show off the details of the amazing ships they've created, and I'm absolutely loving it!

[OptionZero]

Isn’t Bobbie’s tactic a small scale version of Marco’s own “stealth meteorite” tactic, with the PDC rounds playing the role of small, effectively invisible projectiles?

[gunfumaster]

My guess for the PDC's is that the Corvette-class Martian frigates have a pretty huge amount of point defense for a small vessel. The Morrigan-class destroyer is like 3/4ths the size of a Corvette-class and only has 2 PDCs, whatever class heavy frigate the Serrio Mal is from the season 5 finale had the same amount of PDC's as the Roci, but was much larger, heck the Pella is a light cruiser, probably many times the size of the Roci and the Pella only has 9.

You put 6 point defense cannons on a ship whose size normally would warrant 3-4, you're gonna need a LOT of missiles to overwhelm those defenses since those missiles have a very small target with those unusually high defenses.

Also neat little detail, on Holden's console for the railgun, it says "1 kg Tungsten slug loaded." The light railguns seem to be about the same caliber as the PDC's, which are 40mm shells. A 40mm Bofor shell weighs about 2 ish pounds, which is about one kilogram. Goes to say just how much more damage a projectile can have just by going faster.