Technology in the 'verse

POSTED BY: zeke023
UPDATED: Friday, October 31, 2003 03:24
VIEWED: 21912
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CHRISTHECYNIC

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 4:37 PM

No idea why it posted twice on me.

ZEKE023

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 5:10 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:

No, no it couldn't. For that to work the floors would have to be rotating. If you look at B5, the station, you will see that the ground on the station is the hull, which is rotating. This isn’t true for everything so I assume that they have a form of artificial gravity but it was simply more efficient to use rotation.

Not the B5 station. The cruisers. There was a single rotating segment that supplied gravity. Obviously not through any science we can understand today - but it is a common thread in sci-fi. no?

CHRISTHECYNIC

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 5:36 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
Not the B5 station. The cruisers. There was a single rotating segment that supplied gravity. Obviously not through any science we can understand today - but it is a common thread in sci-fi. no?

I have no idea, I don't think the ever gave a reason why that did what it did what it did, so we can't tell if it would work in firefly. I don't think it was spinning when the power was off in Out of Gas, so that would mean it doesn’t give the gravity (but I am not sure o this point).

JIMMYJAMES

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 7:45 PM

that spinning part of the cruisers in B5 was where all the ships crew was. the front half of the ships was where all the fighters were kept... this is of course my assumption. it would seem to make the most sence. if you've seen 2010 you will notice that ship has that same spinning thing. well that's were all the crew stayed on that ship most of the time and when they were in other parts of the ship there was no gravity, so i'm just assuming that the artists and designers of B5 copied that idea.

and there is no way that little spinning thing on FF creates gravity. i think it's related to the engine. probably even connected to it in some way hence the engine inside rotating. who knows :)

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do you know what the chain of command is? it's the chain i go get and beat you with till you understand who's in rutten command here

THEGN

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 8:30 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by JimmyJames:
and there is no way that little spinning thing on FF creates gravity.

There's no way anything else on that ship creates the gravity we see there either, but if you have to make something up, that sounds good to me. ;)

I liked the way Babylon Five made use of centrifugal motion to simulate gravity. This is really the only realistic way of generating a "gravity-like" environment in zero-g or free fall. Also I liked the way the little ships moved in space, using rotating thrusters and reaction control thrusters. Babylon Five took its share of liberties, after it was essentially fantasy, but the use of realistic science made the fantasy seem very plausible. Although I didn't get a chance to watch much of it. What I saw was good.

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In the Dark Ages, Romano-Celtic Britannia was over-run by Viking-like cultures collectively called the Anglo-Saxons. They were led by warlords called Drytinns, and the greatest warriors among them were the Thegns.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 8:39 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
communication
Are there becons to boost signals over long distances?

In OoG they send out a beacon.

ZEKE023

Thursday, June 5, 2003 12:27 PM

beacons
I was thinking more along the lines of beacons from planet to planet in order to boost signals or relay stations to receive signals and send them out again strong.

I'm thinking that FTL radio has to exist from planet to planet (system to system) in order for the cortex not to have a significant amount of lag. Every sci-fi ever has FTL radio (and none of them explain it - except for maybe Star Trek, and they use Tachions).

However, it doesn't seem like the ships have FTL radio - since they need to be really close to somewhere to get good audio and even closer to have visual. This would not be a problem if they could send info faster than light, no?

gravity
JimmyJames - Huh. I never really thought about that... but I think you're probably right. The crew must all be in the spinning part - cause as I recall, it was pretty big.
Nonetheless - the more advanced races in B5 (the vorlons and the membari) had artificial gravity that *just worked*.
I think that firefly gravity is like the later.

engines
so you think that engine is a fission reactor?
They make reference to the Reavers using an "uncontained" engine - and it being suicide. That, to me, screams "fission reactor".
Any thoughts?

-Zeke

PS: Thanks for helping me out with this. You guys rock!

FARADAY

Thursday, June 5, 2003 2:02 PM

Beacons:

Keep in mind that a beacon can be either a physical device or a transmission signal.

So when Mal says "You get that beacon sent?" he could have been talking about a little cry-baby type device -or- he could have been asking whether Wash sent out the SOS signal using the radio. I tend to think he meant the latter, but you could speculate either way.

Also keep in mind that even if you have FTL signals, they're not necessarily limitless. You could still have a signal that degrades over great distances to the point where it's no longer decipherable.

One could speculate that planet-based transmitters such as the ones used for the Cortex are really huge, allowing them to transmit over greater distances than ship-based ones. Each planet (moon, asteroid, whatever) then acts as a repeater, picking up the signal and re-broadcasting it so it goes even further. There could also be strategically-placed deep space repeaters that do the same thing.

If you go with that interpretation, then it's possible to imagine a scenario like what happened in Out of Gas: a ship gets so far away from a planet or repeater satellite that it no longer has access to the Cortex. The only things it can communicate with are ships within the range of its smaller ship-based transmitter, and the chances of there being someone around (since you're out in the middle of nowhere) are very slim.

THEGN

Thursday, June 5, 2003 2:38 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
beacons
I was thinking more along the lines of beacons from planet to planet in order to boost signals or relay stations to receive signals and send them out again strong.

I'm thinking that FTL radio has to exist from planet to planet (system to system) in order for the cortex not to have a significant amount of lag. Every sci-fi ever has FTL radio (and none of them explain it - except for maybe Star Trek, and they use Tachions).

However, it doesn't seem like the ships have FTL radio - since they need to be really close to somewhere to get good audio and even closer to have visual. This would not be a problem if they could send info faster than light, no?

Beacon might not be the right word for what you are talking about, but it's probably a small matter.

On your question of faster the light communication, you're drawing on a lot of assumptions here. A signal does not drop off in intensity because it is moving slower then c; rather it is the geometry of the system that causes the signal to decrease. If such geometry applied to this fictional faster then light communication, one would expect that it would also fall off in intensity similarly. So based on what you're referring to here, one might expect that it would make no difference whether the signal was traveling slower or faster then light. It is the geometry, not the speed of the signal that dictates the decrease intensity. [All other factors being equal.]

(Although technically, the signal couldn't travel slower or faster then light. Light always travels at c, no slower or faster.)

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
engines
so you think that engine is a fission reactor?
They make reference to the Reavers using an "uncontained" engine - and it being suicide. That, to me, screams "fission reactor".
Any thoughts?

I don't know what they mean by "uncontained" nuclear reactor. If the reaction is not contained, then you essentially have a bomb. If by "uncontained" they mean no shielding, then there would not necessarily be an explosion, but the amount of radiation coming off an unshielded nuclear reactor is enough to kill a man very quickly (within hours or minutes), Reavers or otherwise I would guess. So I really don't know what they meant by "uncontained." A nuclear fission reactor is not the only kind of reactor that requires containment. Any kind of nuclear reactor would require some kind of containment.

(Technically, even a wood burning steam engine requires containment. The term is really quite vague.)

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In the Dark Ages, Romano-Celtic Britannia was over-run by Viking-like cultures collectively called the Anglo-Saxons. They were led by warlords called Drytinns, and the greatest warriors among them were the Thegns.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Thursday, June 5, 2003 5:05 PM

The beacon would have to be a physical thing because it is constantly trasmiting, otherwise it wouldn't mess up the other ships for more than a momnet. So it couldn't just be a signal, because it is sending out a singnal.

Becuse of the limited range of their signals it only makes sense to have beacons around all over, if we assume that FTL signals degrade quickly everything we know about the radio makes sense.

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