Technology in the 'verse

POSTED BY: zeke023
UPDATED: Friday, October 31, 2003 03:24
VIEWED: 21912
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ZEKE023

Thursday, June 5, 2003 5:46 PM

I agree with all of what has been said.

communication
It seems to me that given the crew's off handed comments and given what we can deduce from the senarios of the episodes (especially OoG) - I think that the are booster stations like FARADAY mentioned above.

And Theign - you're right. All types of communication would degrade over distance.

engine
the engine turns to create electricity (just like a nuclear power plant turns a carbine). I would imagine that's why life support is linked to it - because it needs electricity to work. It needs containment - without whcih it would be "suicide" (not uncomfortable as with a wood stove - but "suicide"). It needs to be refueled (a fusion reactor would need to be refueled every five years or so depending on its size... maybe less frequntly - remember stars are big fusion reactors - and they last billions of years).

arguments for multiple star systems based on Out of Gas
FACT 1: Using information trasmitted by radio waves - a mesage could go one AU in 5 days. The distance between planets in any given system is SIGNIFICANTLY less than one AU. It would only take a matter of hours for radio waves to get to Mars (depending on its current distance from Earth)

FACT 2: A system could only support planets within its life zone. There are only so many planets that can fit in a life zone - and the more there are the less distance is between them.

FACT 3: We have never seen any reason to conclude that any story has taken place under multiple suns (i.e. in a bianary system). Meaning, there is always a nightfall - we never see two suns, etc.

For these facts, I can deduce that if Firefly took place in a single solar system, the plot line of OoG would be a moot point. The odds of them not being able to contact another ship within radio broadcast distance would be astronomical. And that's with the technology of today - not 500 years in the future.

THORNKIN

Thursday, June 5, 2003 6:01 PM

"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."

Babylon 5 was a complex Universe. Some races (like the Centauri) had artificial gravity. Others, like Earthforce, didn't. That is why the station rotates and why the larger ships had a rotating section--to create the effect of gravity. Many of the alien races had it and so their ships could be constructed differently.

THEGN

Thursday, June 5, 2003 6:53 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
FACT 1: Using information trasmitted by radio waves - a mesage could go one AU in 5 days. The distance between planets in any given system is SIGNIFICANTLY less than one AU. It would only take a matter of hours for radio waves to get to Mars (depending on its current distance from Earth)

FACT 2: A system could only support planets within its life zone. There are only so many planets that can fit in a life zone - and the more there are the less distance is between them.

FACT 3: We have never seen any reason to conclude that any story has taken place under multiple suns (i.e. in a bianary system). Meaning, there is always a nightfall - we never see two suns, etc.

For these facts, I can deduce that if Firefly took place in a single solar system, the plot line of OoG would be a moot point. The odds of them not being able to contact another ship within radio broadcast distance would be astronomical. And that's with the technology of today - not 500 years in the future.

Couple of mistakes here. ;)

First of all, a radio signal would travel one AU in about 8.317 minutes.

Second of all, we cannot say that the distance between planets in any given system will be much less then one AU. This is technically incorrect. Most of the time, the distance between most planets in our solar system is more then one AU. But it would actually take only a matter of minutes for a radio signal to reach Mars from Earth; at most, about 20 minutes. The distance between moons of a gas giant, might be less then one AU. But the distances between gas giants would be much larger; probably several AU.

Thirdly, if the Firefly system was a binary system you would not see a double sun and it would be unlikely that nightfall would ever be affected. The distance between two stars in a binary system is generally pretty large. Half a lightyear on the low end, maybe less, to two or three lightyears on the upper end, maybe more. From those kinds of distances the companion star might not even be distinguishable from other stars in the sky.

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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.

ZEKE023

Thursday, June 5, 2003 7:17 PM

THEIGN,
wait - let me think this out. If a radio signal can travel an AU in 8 minutes (give or take) - then it could travel the length of our whole solar system in less than an hour.

No - admitidly, I don't know much about the sizes of solar systems outside of our own - however, how can you explain being anywhere within a soloar system and not being able to contact a planet, or another ship between planets, within a few hours (that was the time right?)

My calculations say that it would take 5.2 hours for a radio transmission to go from the sun to Pluto (if Pluto is 5 billion km away).

Now my math might be a little off - but even if it is - the real question here is:

Can you feasibly design a solar system where you can have so many habitable and teraformable worlds as appear in the show where you could not send a radio signal to a single other habitable world within a few hours?
(keep in mind that ships will be traveling on the shortest courses between habitable worlds at any given time)

ZEKE023

Thursday, June 5, 2003 7:23 PM

Hey...
can communication be coded on light and shot in a direct laser? Is this how information travels across fiber optics right now? Couldn't communications be aimed at a hub and shot there - and then shot from hub to hub and then finally to a final destination?

This makes more sense than filling up space with radio signals.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Thursday, June 5, 2003 7:26 PM

Also remember that the life zone around a star does not need to remotely resemble that around our star, and the life zone can be extended through manipulation of things such as atmosphere. It would be possible with enough messing abbot to make a planet as distant from the sun as Pluto habitable, why someone would go through the trouble of messing about that much is beyond me, but it could be done.

Add to this the possibility of a much larger life zone around a hotter star and you have a one-system possibility. Is it one system, they never make that clear, it is clear that there is a center, and that other things rotate around the center (wheel never stops turning, wouldn’t matter to the people on the rim if they weren’t the outside edge of said wheel.) Also we know that the civil war was not intergalactic, but rather interplanetary. Sorry it said intergalactic civil war in there somewhere so I had to respond.

ZEKE023

Thursday, June 5, 2003 7:37 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
Add to this the possibility of a much larger life zone around a hotter star and you have a one-system possibility.

but the point is that you would have a to have a life zone three times the size of our whole solar system in order for the plot of Out of Gas to make any sense. I don't think that's possible
And that's not even considering ships passing between planets!

Not only this, but the ship would have to be constantly traveling closer to its destination based on its inertia when the engine gave out. (Ships can't stop moving in space without thrusting in the opposite direction - except in Star Trek Nemisis).

How can you account for that kind of distance in a single system?

CHRISTHECYNIC

Thursday, June 5, 2003 7:41 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
Can you feasibly design a solar system where you can have so many habitable and teraformable worlds as appear in the show where you could not send a radio signal to a single other habitable world within a few hours?
(keep in mind that ships will be traveling on the shortest courses between habitable worlds at any given time)

They were intentionally getting where they wouldn't be detected, thus they would have aimed for a spot where there were not easy signals. Interference might make radio a bad choice, and light expands thus weakening the signal, unless you were to use a laser (like you said) but that wouldn't work for an SOS because you don't know where to send it. It is conceivable that there would be a place (many places actually) out of the line of sight of laser communications.

All kinds of things cause radio interference, and it might be that in the space of the system high quantitys of EM radiation make radio non viable. There is more but I type so slowly that if I tried there would be a new topic going by then.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Thursday, June 5, 2003 8:02 PM

Does anyone know how far a radio signal would travel before it faded into the background? The distance would of course be relative to the strength and the frequency of the signal, and of course the amount of background. We can assume that a ship would have a very small transmitter compared to planet based things, and of course space based background would have to be taken into account if we were to assume a “loud” area of space. I don’t think they use radio communications on Firefly, but I’m wondering about this.

ZEKE023

Thursday, June 5, 2003 8:02 PM

I poseted this question on the fox site - hopefully a cast member can speak to this.

On a side note:
speed of travel between worlds, fuel consumption, communication speed...?

What else is necessary for RPG rules?
(aside from general game mechanics, obviously)

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