The Firefly/Serenity Solar System
POSTED BY: FraserBW
UPDATED: Tuesday, March 7, 2006 10:55
VIEWED: 27197
PAGE 4 of 11
Quote:Yeah, and then after settling thirteen or so new colonies, they created a race of robots, called Cylons, which later rebelled and destroyed their colonies forcing them to flee the Cylon tyranny in the last battlestar, Galactica which leads a rag-tag fugative fleet on a lonely quest towards a shining planet known as earth!
Originally posted by TenthCrewMember:Quote:
Originally posted by aahhaaa:
Does raise a possibly useful point- did they send colony ships to only one place? Might be a way to get Serenity out of Fox's grasp once & for all!:]
Y'know, what *IF* after the settlers of the current system, others managed to leave but head elsewhere...I think you have a great idea there...
Now to pitch it to Joss and Co.
I think it could work!
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Qui desiderat pacem praeparet bellum.
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Random thoughts on the verse.
Question? Do we believe that smaller suns have more planets because of some particular gravitational theory or have we come up with some new gravitational theory based on finding more planets around small suns?
I'm curious now. I know most planets discovered are due to watching the various stars movements (wobble) caused by their planets orbits.
A larger sun would make it harder for a planet to cause observable movement. Maybe larger suns DO have more planets but we can't detect them because they don't cause enough "wobble" for our current technology to observer it.
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As to the "glowy" bits in the verse map, Go all the way back to Arthur C Clarks 2001 to get to the idea of compressing Jupiter and igniting it to form a mini-sun for it's moons to make a mini-solar system...
Since the verse has the technology to affect gravity, it seems like a possibility that they took the largest gas giants in the system and compressed them into lightbulbs. 
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dc4bs
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Quote:
Originally posted by dc4bs:
As to the "glowy" bits in the verse map, Go all the way back to Arthur C Clarks 2001 to get to the idea of compressing Jupiter and igniting it to form a mini-sun for it's moons to make a mini-solar system...
I remember in high school a teacher told me the estimated amount of mass needed to turn Jupiter into a sun, no idea what it was though. Of course if you can alter gravity you don't need to add any mass.
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Quote:I think it’s about 70-80 times the mass of Jupiter, which puts Jupiter safely within the realm of planet, as it is unlikely that it could ever gain enough mass anytime soon to develop into a star.
Originally posted by christhecynic:
I remember in high school a teacher told me the estimated amount of mass needed to turn Jupiter into a sun, no idea what it was though. Of course if you can alter gravity you don't need to add any mass.
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Qui desiderat pacem praeparet bellum.
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Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
That equation is to work out the total time that has passed on a journey based on the time for an outside observer and the speed of the craft.
The speed of the craft (v) is 0.5c. The time of the journey for the outside observer (t) is 8.6yrs.
That is a simplification as it doesn't take into account acceleration and deceleration. A Bussard Ram Scoop would be operated at 1g acceleration (which would also give earth norm gravity to the ships occupants) for half the journey, and then 1g deceleration for the last half.
At half the speed of light time dialation isn't particularly noticable. At higher velocities it becomes far more apparent.
Yes, thanks for that info. I noticed the relative time difference wasn't very far off on the math. So what we need to know is how far the colony ship could travel accelerating at 1g and then decelerating at 1g in the time it took them (probably between 100 and 200 years).
I didn't think about using the momentum of acceleration to create artificial gravity. This would be essential for people born on the trip to develop normally as they grow. (No explanation of how Serenity is able to generate artificial gravity perpendicular to its direction of travel or while stationary, but with a low budget TV show you can't be floating your staff around the set every day.) Would the colony ship basically stop its engines halfway, or would it need to turn around and reverse its propulsion to maintain the 1g environment and need to flip the furniture on all the decks?
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For the record, I was a supporter of the multi-system hypothesis. Given the contradictory information presented in the series, it wasn't unreasonable, but now that Joss has clarified the shape of his playground, we have to discard old ideas.
We can assume that the exodus fleet didn't pick their target solar system at random. The stellar system that we now think of as "The 'Verse" was undoubtedly chosen precisely because it had an abnormally large number of potentially terraformable planetary bodies. There's no way of knowing whether such a formation is "normal" or "common" at this time, because we just don't know enough about stellar systems other than our own. (Our current technology can barely detect extrasolar planets at all, and only if they are jovian or superjovian in size, with smaller terrestrial planets implied only by orbital wobbles in the larger bodies.)
Given that the technology of the 'Verse includes things far beyond current knowledge (such as gravity control and reduced-inertia drives--see the RPG for detail on the latter), the ability to terraform a broad variety of worlds quickly is no greater stretch of the suspension of disbelief than a magical FTL drive, certainly less than a "Genesis Device". From a dramatic point of view, Joss has simply chosen a different set of theoretical impossibilities to build his world with than Lucas or Roddenberry did, but that doesn't make them less valid.
And the dramatic forces inherent in a single large-but-bounded star system are much different that those in a wide-open universe like those in Star Trek/Star Wars; for one thing, it explains why the Independents didn't just find new worlds to settle on. There ain't any, at least none you can reach in a lifetime. No Mexican border for former Confederates to escape to...
"You can't enslave a free man. The most you can do is kill him." -- Robert A. Heinlein
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Quote:
Originally posted by dc4bs:
Random thoughts on the verse.
Question? Do we believe that smaller suns have more planets because of some particular gravitational theory or have we come up with some new gravitational theory based on finding more planets around small suns?
I'm curious now. I know most planets discovered are due to watching the various stars movements (wobble) caused by their planets orbits.
A larger sun would make it harder for a planet to cause observable movement. Maybe larger suns DO have more planets but we can't detect them because they don't cause enough "wobble" for our current technology to observer it.
------------------
As to the "glowy" bits in the verse map, Go all the way back to Arthur C Clarks 2001 to get to the idea of compressing Jupiter and igniting it to form a mini-sun for it's moons to make a mini-solar system...
Since the verse has the technology to affect gravity, it seems like a possibility that they took the largest gas giants in the system and compressed them into lightbulbs.
------------------------------------------
dc4bs
The latest extra-solar planet to be discovered is a Neptune sized body orbiting a red dwarf star 1/3rd as massive as the sun. The planet's orbit is only 1/10th the distance of the orbit of Mercury from the sun. The French coauthor of the article, Xavier Delfosse, suggests "Our finding possibly means that planets are rather frequent around the smallest stars." These smaller stars are actually very common.
This suggests that a system made up of 20 planets closely spaced together may be most likely around a small star. As I think about how planets form, the weak gravity of a smaller star might be key in forming a system with a large number of planets and moons. At 8 planets, our system is pretty spartan compared to the Firefly system. Perhaps a higher gravity of a larger sun tends to pull the early planets together more and create fewer final planets. But it also could be a factor of the size of the Accretian disk that forms around the protostar. Perhaps a thicker disk would form more planets over a smaller orbit interval. I don't know what the size relationship between star size and its accretian disk mass is. We really need to have some solar system models run on software to see what combinations produce a Firefly-like system.
Then we'll know what size star to look for in the exsisting galaxy to be the potential home to Serenity and its crew.
Oh, and oh yeah, collapse gas giants into stars, thanks a lot captain sarcasm.
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True about choosing the right planet. The technology to investigate these extrasolar systems is in the process of being built and launched now. Satelite arrays that can scan star systems from orbit are only a decade away. Certainly within our lifetime we would be able to find many systems with Earth-like planets in it. And have a good idea of what the system is made up of. We'll know more about the frequency of planet arrangements then.
Quote:
Originally posted by RocketJock:
For the record, I was a supporter of the multi-system hypothesis. Given the contradictory information presented in the series, it wasn't unreasonable, but now that Joss has clarified the shape of his playground, we have to discard old ideas.
We can assume that the exodus fleet didn't pick their target solar system at random. The stellar system that we now think of as "The 'Verse" was undoubtedly chosen precisely because it had an abnormally large number of potentially terraformable planetary bodies. There's no way of knowing whether such a formation is "normal" or "common" at this time, because we just don't know enough about stellar systems other than our own. (Our current technology can barely detect extrasolar planets at all, and only if they are jovian or superjovian in size, with smaller terrestrial planets implied only by orbital wobbles in the larger bodies.)
Given that the technology of the 'Verse includes things far beyond current knowledge (such as gravity control and reduced-inertia drives--see the RPG for detail on the latter), the ability to terraform a broad variety of worlds quickly is no greater stretch of the suspension of disbelief than a magical FTL drive, certainly less than a "Genesis Device". From a dramatic point of view, Joss has simply chosen a different set of theoretical impossibilities to build his world with than Lucas or Roddenberry did, but that doesn't make them less valid.
And the dramatic forces inherent in a single large-but-bounded star system are much different that those in a wide-open universe like those in Star Trek/Star Wars; for one thing, it explains why the Independents didn't just find new worlds to settle on. There ain't any, at least none you can reach in a lifetime. No Mexican border for former Confederates to escape to...
"You can't enslave a free man. The most you can do is kill him." -- Robert A. Heinlein
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Quote:
Originally posted by RocketJock:
Given that the technology of the 'Verse includes things far beyond current knowledge (such as gravity control and reduced-inertia drives--see the RPG for detail on the latter),
"You can't enslave a free man. The most you can do is kill him." -- Robert A. Heinlein
The info in the RPG is not nescessarily canon, in the main its just some guys who watched the 15 episodes and had a copy of the movie script. They made things up to try and explain what they saw on screen, so if Serenity didn't loose gravity in "Out of Gas" they decide that means that gravity generation is so efficient it takes almost no power rather than the more obvious one that TV doesnt film zero Gee scenes when spacecraft break down.
It bugs me, because the tech they "explain" is actually as difficult to do as FTL and breaks several big laws of physics that even FTL doesn't.
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Fletch, I'm not a big gamer, but one of the things I did want to see in the RPG is the gravity explination, you couldn't give me an outline of it could you?
I have my own ideas about the gravity myself, but I'd like to hear the rpg explination first.
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
Remember, the ice caps aren't melting, the water is being liberated.
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