Solar System Vs. Galaxy
POSTED BY: MadJack
UPDATED: Tuesday, January 11, 2005 17:41
VIEWED: 40136
PAGE 12 of 14
Book sez:
"After the Earth was used up we found a new solar system and hundreds of new Earths were terraformed and colonized. The central planets formed the Alliance and decided all the planets had to join under their rule. There was some disagreement on that point. After the war, many of the independents who fought and lost drifted to the edges of the system, far from Alliance control. Out here, people struggle to get by with the most basic technologies. A ship would bring you work, a gun would help you keep it. A captain's goal was simple; Find a crew, find a job, keep flying."
- transcription of Book's prologue from televised Firefly.
So that settles that, I guess.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Jujansin:
Grounded, look a little more closely at what I wrote. I theorized that because the crew of Serenity are not hesitant to stop to investigate derelicts and such, yet their travel would require high speed, they probably use a non-inertial drive, that is, a drive that displaces the ship without giving it velocity. Thus, such a drive could be assumed to require constant input of energy.
If they used an inertial drive that accelerated them, they would be hesitant to stop because it would require fuel to do so, then to get up to speed again.
I don't think the imagery used on the show is consistent with anything other than classical fuel-based propulsion.
Having said that, I would say there is no complete scientific description of the Firefly universe, mainly due to the fact that Joss doesn't care enough about these kind of details to include them. Which, I suppose, is fair play.
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Well, Grounded, I see your point concerning the visuals. The engine certainly looks like it is ejecting some reaction mass when operating, but after thinking about the other observed properties, it seems more likely to me that that effect is simply a side effect or somesuch. I still see a non-inertial drive as the only explanation so far for Serenity's capabilities and behaviour.
As to these explanations being unnecessary, I also understand where you're coming from, and in the large majority of cases, a predetermined or canonized explanation of how the ship and how technologies behave is not necessary. Once, however, a writer begins creating stories with the assumed capabilities of the ship and technologies as a central premise, he needs to have a cohesive model for, if not how things work, what they do. Otherwise, eventually, a writer will probably write himself into a corner. Joss has avoided this well for the most part, but when you're doing any kind of fiction that involves technologies or phenomena that we do not have today, it's always helpful to establish a model for how things operate.
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Did you see the link someone posted to the Joss interview? He basically said no FTL and single system - so why do we need to invent new drives?
An explanation for Serenity's capabilities and behaviour is that the writer's thought certain things would be a) good for the story or b) cool looking. It seems likely they didn't know certain things would contradict or rule out different modes of propulsion.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Grounded:
Did you see the link someone posted to the Joss interview? He basically said no FTL and single system - so why do we need to invent new drives?
Well, Joss' comments seemed, to me, to be very ambiguous and unsure. I can understand that he doesn't want to deal with the nitty-gritty of the 'verse's setup, but my point stands that a coherent and rational explanation for the setting is an extremely good thing to have. And a single star system, unless it contradicts pretty much everything we know about planet formation, cannot support ~70 1G planets in the habitable range. So because, in my mind, it simply cannot be in a single star system, some form of non-reaction-mass (i.e. convetional) propulsion must exist to allow for the extremely high speeds required to get around. (Don't make me bring out the math!
)Quote:
Originally posted by Grounded:
An explanation for Serenity's capabilities and behaviour is that the writer's thought certain things would be a) good for the story or b) cool looking. It seems likely they didn't know certain things would contradict or rule out different modes of propulsion.
Hey, I'm as much for making things cool and interesting as the next person. But if you have writers deciding how things work solely based on what they want for a particular story or event, eventually they're going to seriously contradict themselves, and that is definitely not cool. It hurts the all-important suspension of disbelief.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Jujansin:
And a single star system, unless it contradicts pretty much everything we know about planet formation, cannot support ~70 1G planets in the habitable range.
But you're forgetting one thing Jujansin, terraforming. We know that terraforming was used to make the planets habitable. With terraforming involved, being within the habitable range (i.e. distance from the sun) doesn't matter. They can simply use certain technology to make the planets habitable regardless of where they are in a system.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Conscience:Quote:
Originally posted by Jujansin:
And a single star system, unless it contradicts pretty much everything we know about planet formation, cannot support ~70 1G planets in the habitable range.
But you're forgetting one thing Jujansin, terraforming. We know that terraforming was used to make the planets habitable. With terraforming involved, being within the habitable range (i.e. distance from the sun) doesn't matter. They can simply use certain technology to make the planets habitable regardless of where they are in a system.
Well, I'm assuming that they have some pretty powerful terraforming tools, and could convert anything, a planet or a moon, from slightly inside what would be Venus' orbit to something roughly near Saturn into a habitable world. Any closer in or farther out, it doesn't matter how good your technology is, there's just the wrong amount of heat; you reach a point where nothing that would allow human habitation can be effectively used. However, that many (~70) worlds of approximately 1-gravity size probably would not occur even in that very generous margin in a single system. Of course, we don't know everything about planet formation, but I doubt that that many rocky planets would form in such incredible density.
Still, I can see the argument from both sides, and I'm a lot more ambivalent than I was before. Now we just need Joss to have one of his minions figure out how it works to satisfy our compusive fannish curiosity!
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I don't think there is "a coherent and rational explanation". I don't think there was an attempt to conceive one beforehand and so we end up with what we have - a mish-mash of 'heights' of technology and a bunch of vague distances and timescales. Even if the series had continued I don't think they'd have established a model - I suspect it would have been more like Star Trek, in which science is bent to shape the plot.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Grounded:
I don't think there is "a coherent and rational explanation". I don't think there was an attempt to conceive one beforehand and so we end up with what we have - a mish-mash of 'heights' of technology and a bunch of vague distances and timescales. Even if the series had continued I don't think they'd have established a model - I suspect it would have been more like Star Trek, in which science is bent to shape the plot.
You're right, they probably didn't think about it. It'd just be kind of nice, though, to have an explanation, so that, in addition to being a hopelessly obsessed fan, is why I'm theorizing and hypothesizing (could I be so vain as to imagine that the people involved with Serenity read these boards?). I just think that an explanation would make it feel more real, that's all. And lastly, why would we want to make our beloved 'verse at all like Star Trek? (or at least not like Enterprise!)
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