The FireFly Tech Manual [Cont.]
POSTED BY: citizen
UPDATED: Sunday, October 23, 2005 01:07
VIEWED: 6873
PAGE 2 of 3
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Originally posted by Fletch2:
The problem that the RPG has and that any Tech manual will have is that science in the "verse" doesnt really work and that stuff quoted in one episode doesn't get carried through in others.
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Trek tried fairly hard to keep consistancy, even having people vet scripts to try to keep them consistant, Joss didnt do that because he didnt care, he's telling the story of 10 BDHs not inventing psudo science for a bunch of frustrated fanboys. The verse as shown is not consistant enough to be rendered as a tech manual.
Actually since the FireFly series and the Serenity film don't use science as a plot device (unlike Star Trek) they are actually much more coherent. Star Trek is full of gaping holes.
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If it IS one solar system then it cant support 50 planets because the habitable area for a star is narrow. Look at our own sun, move in towards Venus and it's too hot, move out to Mars and it's too cold. There would be no way to fit the orbits of 50 worlds into that one habitable zone.
So lets say we go with multiple stars. Problem here is speed and distance. In a cut line River gives the speed of Serenity at full burn as being 100,000 miles an hour, sounds pretty fast until you realise it would take you 9 months to get just from Earth to Jupiter (assuming they were at alignment.) Since things can not be closer together without problems ships MUST be able to travel faster. This is backed up by the visual companion that says that the original colony ships from earth took a generation to get to the new system. At Serenity max speed (according to River) you could make Proxima Centauri in 28,000 years!
Firstly theres one system. Thats canon. If you think that you can't have that many habitable planets around one star (ignoring binary and trinary systems and such) you need to talk to KayleeRulesAll. She's done the math and it turns out that the FireFly system is entirely possible, if improbable.
As for your question regarding Serenitys top speed and the speed of the colony ships you have to remember that Serenity is an interplanetary vessel, and the colony ships are intersteller. Even Star Trek doesn't use the same drive systems for interplanetary and interstellar travel.
It is also perfectly possible for the planets to be closer together.
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If you know physics you'll know that when the engine blew in "Out of Gas" Serenity should still have been moving forwards at the same speed that she was before, it's called conservation of momentum. However when the engine blew she came to a dead stop because otherwise there would have been no danger and no story. However in "War Stories" the ship fires the engines powers down and drifts towards Niska's -- so in that story conservation of momentum worked because otherwise there is no story.
Theres no evidence for Serenity coming to a dead stop. In fact out in space you would not be able to tell if something is moving or not. You can tell if something is moving relative to something else, but if there both moving in the same direction and at the same speed they will appear stopped.
In fact Serenitys entire drive system is based around coasting. They burn the main drive and then coast the rest of the way (most of the time).
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The verse as shown is not consistant enough to be rendered as a tech manual.
It's a lot more consistent than Star Trek. Star Trek contradicts itself countless times, and when it's not doing that it's throwing around meaningless psudo science to explain everything.
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you Beeeer Milkshakes!
Even though I might, even though I try,
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Watch the "River in the cockpit" sequence from the movie again. The nav computer shows seven stars each with a small solar system, look in the visual companion if you want to see a closeup of the graphics. That appeared on screen so it is "canon" but then so is one big solar system with a SINGLE star.
I'm not nit picking here, it's there look at it.
If we determine that the verse is a cluster system (ie chose one of the two "canons" to rest the series on) then distances become important. For a stable environment to exist to support life (a much more complex thing that just if things will fit orbitally) then stars in a binary, tertiary or cluster system would have to be far enough away to not adversely effect the core planets in another star's solar systems. That is a big distance.
The point about Rivers cut "100,000 mph top speed" line is that it shows that it doesnt matter to Joss if any of this works. To a scientist 100,000 MPH is insignificant speed even for interplanetary travel, science is about the small stuff. In contrast an artist doesn't worry about the intracies of canvas making, all he cares about is that a canvas is there when he wants to paint a picture.
And you are right Trek had YATI's galore, BUT it ran for what, 18 years through 8 movies and four modern series? Firefly has problems with 15 episodes and 1 BDM.
It isn't intended to be pinned down, and there is no point whining about "canon" either because if episode 21 of the series had needed an exploding sun for some reason we'd have had it. The verse is mutable to allow for the telling of tall stories. The stories are not straitjacketed by canon or the needs of the verse. Personally, though it drives the fan boy in me nuts I like it that way.
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As a final note, you said that someone had worked out how to fit all those planets into the orbit of one star. Do you think Joss did that? Do you think that before the series started he sat down and crunched the numbers or do you think he just needed a 'Verse big enough to support 4 or 5 seasons of a TV show?
He says he doesnt write science fiction. He's a story teller, the verse is a backdrop to tell a story. HE isn't worried about it HE doesnt have to prove that you can fit 50 worlds around one sun it's just there. Fanboys like you and me worry about it, we're the kinds of folks that talk N class stars and multiple orbital planes to justify what was after all just a TV writer's decision as to what worked best for his show. It doesnt matter to Joss, he has the verse he needs to tell the stories he wants about the people he likes. WE'RE the ones that want a tech manual, we're the ones that has to have it make sense.
Don't suppose you know the power output of a shuttle craft warp core in milicochrans do you?
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An explanation as to why there are fifty odd habitable planets in one system. One word Terraforming.
When the original explorers from the solar system got here they probably found at least one habitable planet if they were lucky and no more. The other worlds would be created later as settelment increased with the older colonies forming the Alliance and the more recent the indipendants.
This rather explains Miranda, it was originaly an outer uninhabitable planet (think Pluto) that the Alliance decided to turn in to a model colony.
A bit improbable perhaps but by the time Serenity is set they would have had several centuries to refine the technology and, as we know it all went horribly wrong.
Rabbit 2
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Rabbit, no terraforming doesnt explain it. All Terrafoming does is make a world capable of supporting an earth like environment... Earthlike.
Stars like our sun put out energy as light and heat. Closer in you have more light and heat, further out you have less. That is why Mercury is a furnace with liquid metal pools and Pluto is a fridge pretty close to absolute zero.
It's like the three bears, some places are too hot, some too cold and just a few... just right. In our own solar system the habitable band is very narrow, as close in as Venus is too hot, Mars is too cold. Now it might be possible with hypertech to terraform those two worlds, though I suspect neither would be habitable to the point where you could venture out in the kinds of clothes our BDHs wear. You will never be able to Terraform Mercury or Pluto, they are too small and too far from the habitable zone of our star.
Terraforming doesnt cut it. If we tried to fit the Verse's 50 habitable worlds into out solar system MOST of them (or at least all our BDH visited in coats and T-Shirts) would have to somehow co-exist between the orbits of Venus and Mars. Perhaps you might get a world or two orbiting BIG gas giants but they are unlikely to be hot enough for shirt slieve explorers.
Terraforming is a possible method we might someday use to convert planets within the habitable band of a star into worlds fit to colonise. "Terraforming" as used in the show is a plot device to explain why you can have 50 worlds that all look like southern California. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by Fletch2:
Watch the "River in the cockpit" sequence from the movie again. The nav computer shows seven stars each with a small solar system, look in the visual companion if you want to see a closeup of the graphics. That appeared on screen so it is "canon" but then so is one big solar system with a SINGLE star.
I'm not nit picking here, it's there look at it.
Are you sure there stars, I remember that the screen is only up breifly... Unfortunatly I haven't seen the movie for awhile and my visual companion still hasn't materiallised so I can't really look for myself.
If it really shows multiple stars, with FireFly planets around them, then it was a mistake. Not really a flatout contradiction as it appears on screen very breifly, and is more likely a mistake by the FX team. On the otherhand the single system is constantly reffered to, and I believe even Joss has outright said that FireFly is based in a single system.
So I'd say it isn't a contradiction within canon FireFly, but that it is a contradiction with canon FireFly...
As for the speed of Serenity I've never seen it listed, or mentioned, anywhere.
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It isn't intended to be pinned down, and there is no point whining about "canon" either because if episode 21 of the series had needed an exploding sun for some reason we'd have had it. The verse is mutable to allow for the telling of tall stories. The stories are not straitjacketed by canon or the needs of the verse. Personally, though it drives the fan boy in me nuts I like it that way.
This is a situation that happened continually in ST, yet is highly unlikely to happen in FF because ST is (more or less) about the technology, where as FF is people driven. It doesn't explain advanced tech, nor does it use bizzare science (blackholes/wormholes for instance) as a plot device.
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As a final note, you said that someone had worked out how to fit all those planets into the orbit of one star. Do you think Joss did that? Do you think that before the series started he sat down and crunched the numbers or do you think he just needed a 'Verse big enough to support 4 or 5 seasons of a TV show?
No, I'm pretty sure he didn't. But you said that the FF 'verse is impossible, where as the numbers say otherwise. It's a happy coincidence, but there it is.
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Don't suppose you know the power output of a shuttle craft warp core in milicochrans do you?
No, but the points mute cause all ST units are different from episode to episode
.I can tell you that the 'Hard' science behind the ST warp drive proves it doesn't work. The accepted theory is of the Aculbiere Warp. I won't go into the theory, but I'll tell ya this:
The mathematics suggest it would require more energy than the rest energy of the entire universe to form one...
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WE'RE the ones that want a tech manual, we're the ones that has to have it make sense.
Your dead right there. But to be honest I think some of the explinations we've come up with are *WAY* better than the stuff you'll find in ST tech manuals. Check out the B5 tech manual ( http://www.b5tech.com/ ), the science section is probably the closest thing to what we're trying to achieve.
What we're actually aiming for is not a FireFly tech manual, it's more a FireFly (the ship) owners manual. A technical document on the workings of the ship.
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you Beeeer Milkshakes!
Even though I might, even though I try,
I can't
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I agree with most of what you say fletch2. In Firefly/Serenity the term Terraforming is used as a plot device and nothing more. The thing is, Earth apparently is located slightly outside the Sun`s current habitable zone, suggesting that once a world has become habitable it tends to remain so unless something catastrophic happens. (Like developing intelligent life maybe?) So there are clearly other factors to consider.
In any case, the term Terraforming is a bit vague.
Its a catch all term thats been used in Science Fiction for decades and its only recently that its come to be asociated with specific processes that may just be usable on Mars.
As with most Science Fiction, if we knew in detail how all this stuff actually worked we`d be doing it rather than just writing fiction about it.
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Rabbit, two words
Large moon.
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Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
If it really shows multiple stars, with FireFly planets around them, then it was a mistake. Not really a flatout contradiction as it appears on screen very breifly, and is more likely a mistake by the FX team. On the otherhand the single system is constantly reffered to, and I believe even Joss has outright said that FireFly is based in a single system.
So I'd say it isn't a contradiction within canon FireFly, but that it is a contradiction with canon FireFly...
As for the speed of Serenity I've never seen it listed, or mentioned, anywhere.
Yes they are stars (they have a glow effect to the graphic. ) They appear both on screen and in the Visual guide. The speed is from a line of Rivers that is in the script but cut from the film, probably because someone pointed out to Joss that 400,000 miles is not a big distance in interplanetary terms.
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This is a situation that happened continually in ST, yet is highly unlikely to happen in FF because ST is (more or less) about the technology, where as FF is people driven. It doesn't explain advanced tech, nor does it use bizzare science (blackholes/wormholes for instance) as a plot device.Quote:
Firefly only had 15 episodes. If you looked at the first 15 episodes of original Star Trek you wont see anything there either. Star Trek TNG decided they needed to explain things, that went against Rodenberry's principle never to explain anything.Quote:
I can tell you that the 'Hard' science behind the ST warp drive proves it doesn't work. The accepted theory is of the Aculbiere Warp. I won't go into the theory, but I'll tell ya this:
The mathematics suggest it would require more energy than the rest energy of the entire universe to form one...
Back in 1964 it sounded really practical and they DID have a science advisor and it was considered a reasonable idea. Is Tau Zero a bad book because Buzzard Ramscoops dont work? No, at least they made the effort. As originally described Niven's Ringworld doesn't work either, they have had to tinker with the explanation for it every time they come up with a new book.
I look forward to reading the math to fit 50 worlds in the inhabitable area of a star, we did it a few months back but only by choosing a very exotic solar type as the central star and assuming that it "inherited" planets from other older stars that had since died. The chances of discovering stable quantum wormholes in our back yard were more likely than this solar system existing.
Personally I'm happy to say that Firefly was just a show, sit back, relax and enjoy the action.NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
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Back in 1964 it sounded really practical and they DID have a science advisor and it was considered a reasonable idea.
I believe Miguel Alcubierre actually proposed the Alcubierre warp in 1994.
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Is Tau Zero a bad book because Buzzard Ramscoops dont work? No, at least they made the effort.
I wasn't aware that the Bussard Ramscoop had been proved to be unfeasable. Michael Zubrin and Dana Andrews have proved one type of Ramscoop as unfeasable, but not all ramscoops.
Plus, wow, someone else who's read Tau Zero, it's a great book!
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I look forward to reading the math to fit 50 worlds in the inhabitable area of a star, we did it a few months back but only by choosing a very exotic solar type as the central star and assuming that it "inherited" planets from other older stars that had since died. The chances of discovering stable quantum wormholes in our back yard were more likely than this solar system existing.
Personally I'm happy to say that Firefly was just a show, sit back, relax and enjoy the action.
Fair enough. But as I said, the Tech manual won't go into that. It's purely about the 03 variant of the FireFly class
.More insane ramblings by the people who brought you Beeeer Milkshakes!
Even though I might, even though I try,
I can't
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