The science of FireFly.
POSTED BY: citizen
UPDATED: Monday, January 2, 2006 17:07
VIEWED: 9314
PAGE 4 of 7
Look, my problem wasn't with your political opinion. For a start you made political statements from the outset here, and we have a place for that, the RWED.
Also if you look at the last statement of my first post you'll understand, largely, why my first response was the way it was. I have no problem with you remaining here IF you stick to the topic, and refrain from attacking me or anyone else.
Your initial post was an attack, if you merely wanted to point out a grammar mistake then fine, I'd of thanked you. But you didn’t do that. You said, in other words, you want to Lampoon Blair and Bush when you're the idiot. Not a good way to start, especially when you've only joined today and this is the only thread you've posted on. It screams of Troll.
If you want to discuss the original topic, fine, stay and your posing of a question (which I'll get to in a subsequent post) is the only reason I've now responded. If you want to continue with politics I'll tell you again, that's what the RWED is for.
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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Quote:
Originally posted by PsychicRiver:
Well, Mr Smarty Pants, if you're sooo smart, then explain to me, how River turned that stick into a gun in Objects in Space?!
It was always a gun, River was hallucinating, and saw the gun as a stick. Deep down she knew it was a gun, hence the line:
"It's only an object; it's not what you think."
Simple, really, you clod
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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Quote:Clearly, if follows directly that River had in her possession a Siemens stick-to-gun re-atomization replicator with Bausch&Lomb infrared bifurcation lens for accurate stick discrimination. Duh.
Originally posted by PsychicRiver:
Well, Mr Smarty Pants, if you're sooo smart, then explain to me, how River turned that stick into a gun in Objects in Space?!
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Qui desiderat pacem praeparet bellum.
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spaceshiplover, to answer your question.
Quote:
Originally posted by spaceshiplover:
I would like to ask about how they generate gravity. That is something which is often never discussed in science fiction. I notice there is a spinning ring on the ship. Is this the thing which produces gravity? If so, how does it do it when it is obvious that the living areas are not spinning.
Gravity is not generated by centrifugal force in the FireFly 'verse. A point proven if by no other instance, the pilot episode when gravity is turned on in the airlock during the salvage mission. The spinning section is to do with the main 'FireFly' drive. The section responsible for generating Gravity is a ring just behind the drive unit but in front of the spinning section you mentioned.
The Gravity generator is ringed in red here:
Obviously given an Einsteinian universe gravity is the effect of warped space-time on matter. But what causes this space-time warping?
Theoretical:
By the 26th century the Graviton had been discovered. The graviton is a particle of Zero rest mass, and as such has wave like properties due too Wave-Particle Duality. The Graviton is not a particle in the normal sense, in other words the sense that a Positron Neutron or Electron is a particle. In fact the Graviton is an absence of space-time within our space-time frame, much like a Bubble of CO² in a fizzy drink is an absence of that liquid. Unlike the bubble, however, the Graviton has no contents and as nature abhors a vacuum space-time ‘rushes in’ to fill this void.
This causes a pinching of local space-time as the Graviton passes through. A concentration of Gravitons causes increasing gravity effects due to the increased pinching of space-time. Gravitons are created by Matter of finite mass as a side-effect of interactions with space-time and the Zero-point energy field.
As the Gravitons from a body will spread out in all directions the warping of space time, and thus the force of their attraction, reduces by the inverse square of the distance from the body. This is backed up by the following equation:
g = G M / r²
Where g is the gravitational acceleration
G is the gravitational constant
M is the mass of the body
r is the distance from the body
Thus in order to generate artificial gravity (or for that matter anti-gravity) you need to generate and direct gravitons in a controllable fashion.
Serenity’s Gravity Generator
The gravity generator on the engineering section of Serenity generates gravity through induced interactions with the Zero-point energy field. That is it interacts with the ZPF in away that is consistent with an object of much greater mass, without the increased mass.
This is achieved by ceramic super-conducting rings spinning within an electro-magnetic field, which induces the creation of Gravitons between the spinning rings. The Gravitons are then directed and propagated throughout the ship, much like electrons through copper wire, via the gravity and inertial dampening grids. These can be turned on and off, in whole or in part as desired.
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Quote:
Orignally posted by Spaceshiplover:
Do they ever speak to how they travel faster than light?
Serenity does not and can not travel faster than light.
In fact the Firefly 'verse has no FTL drives.
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Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
As ScorpionRegent said, the bullet is travelling at a much greater velocity due to the speed of the platform it was fired from.
This site has information on the effects of very high velocity impacts, including an image of a crater in the Space shuttles front window caused by a flake of paint:Quote:
Running into large objects is bad at any speed, but running into something as small as a grain of sand can be destructive for high-speed travelers. In 1983, a small paint flake struck the space shuttle Challenger with such force that it gouged a small crater in the front window4.1 (see the picture above). The damage was so great the window had to be replaced after the flight (costing $50,000). Many windows, in fact, have been replaced over the years because of this problem. It is the speed of the impact that makes these small objects so destructive. If the shuttle had been hit by an object 1/35th the weight (mass) of an aspirin, it would have struck with the impact of a .30 caliber bullet.
http://www.biblehelp.org/ufo4.htm
Hmm ... so you have to apply relativistic physics .. let's see .. assuming a speed of say ... half of the speed of light?? Sure .. why not.
Oh, just for the hell of it, let's assume Vera is a high-quality miniature Rail Gun too, capable of accelerating .50 caliber sized rounds up to 1/10th of the speed of light.
Let's see .. combining those gets 59.5% of the speed of light (relative to any objects outside of the ship that would measure the ship's speed at 50%*c). At 0.045 kg at rest, the .50 cal round would gain approx 80% more mass relativistically, becoming 0.081 kg. That's a whopping kinetic energy of 230 trillion Gigajoules.
Been a long time since I've applied any physics equations, but that seems like enough to blow through a bitty window. Would've been ok to see one shot slag a 1 foot hole through the whole place ... BOO for missed special f/x opportunities!
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My question is ... why are people still able to die??
We should have a fairly decent grasp of nanotechnology by the end of this century alone. That should mean nearly instantaneous healing. On top of that, eventually, we should have man-made computing speeds and sizes comparable to human brains (predicted by Moore's 'law' to happen within 30-40 years).
This should mean that even if someone *were* to actually be killed, they might have had a copy of their brain downloaded into a safe place at some time before and could, therefore, be replaced by an exact clone. That clone could even be completely synthetic (ie. no organs). Robo-Jayne would kick some serious a-s. 
One could even contemplate having multiple clones of one person working together. Hmm ... it might work in a limited case of personalities, but most people have even a small amount of vanity that would abhor having such an exact clone. Game Theory would predict that even a small amount of vanity would eventually have to escalate into the copies trying to eliminate each other before the other ones tried to eliminate them.
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Quote:Oh sure! Take the easy way out...
Originally posted by citizen:
It was always a gun, River was hallucinating, and saw the gun as a stick. Deep down she knew it was a gun, hence the line:
"It's only an object; it's not what you think."
Simple, really, you clod
PsychicRiver
"Two by two, hands of blue."
"We'll take care of each other. I'll knit!"
"I swallowed a bug."
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Thank you very much for all of this information. I appreciate it. I am a great lover of Science Fiction and spaceships in particlular. The science of many spaceships are woefully lacking in many of the shows. I say this with some sort of 'authority' as I have spent four years in what can pass as our 'society's' closest thing to a spaceship, a nuclear submarine. I was on the U.S.S. John Adams, SSBN 620(B) for four years and I know the type of machinery it takes to support 'life' at least at our technilogical levels. I realize, of course, that the ship in Firefly is at levels of technology way ahead of ours, but physics is physics and it takes some sort of equipment to support life no matter what the level of technology.
So, to answer another post, there is no FTL travel in the Firefly universe, how then did they get to another solar system? Are all the planets in the shows in the same solar system? Are they in different solar systems?
It is these things that interest me.
BTW, does anybody know of any plastic model kits for the ship existing? Does a kit exist of the Serenity and if so, how can one get one?
Thanks so much.
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On the subject of why peopel do not die, I think it probably has a lot to do with the power struggle that erupted on earth before the colonization (when the US and China were left as the only super powers.) They deverted their atention to space travel and space exploration (much like the US had aginst the USSR)
On the subject of water, dehyrdated water du! ;)
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