Where did Mal get the money for Serenity?
POSTED BY: ncbrowncoat
UPDATED: Friday, January 20, 2017 21:40
VIEWED: 24769
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Heres how i see it:
Perhaps Mal did some work on a big cargo ship after the war and its aftermarth. Their, he saved up his part of the cut/profit the crew made(he has no family or home to go back too) until he has enough to run a small ship of his own, and thus his freedom.
plausible possibly?
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Quote:
Originally posted by PhoenixRose:
Speaking of mechanics, has anyone ever wondered how Bester was able to get Serenity running again when he didn't seem to know that much about the engine?
Hey, I've had a lot of mechanics work on my truck that were dumber than a brick, but somehow they got the job done.
One other question I have about Mal buying Serenity is what the salesman was doing at the time - Trying to sell him a big shiny ship. So how much money did Mal really have? I know when I go to a car dealership or something they always try to sell me something I can't afford, but I still think that the other ship was WAY more expensive than Serenity.
I do think that Mal would have been able to save some money up. He didn't have anyone to support, and if he was on a ship the room and board would be included. Any money he made would be put away.
Does anyone know how long after the war it was when he bought the ship?
"We may experience some slight turbulence, and then... explode."
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It would make sense that he maybe worked on other ships for a year or two before buying Serenity, as a hired gun perhaps. Lots of war vets get offered jobs as mercs; my grandfather, a 2-tour chopper pilot in Vietnam, was tempted by such offers when he came back home and couldn't find a job. Such experience would also give Mal a chance to make contacts like Badger and the like.
Combine that pay with his Independent sargeant's back wages, and he probably had enough to get started.
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PhoenixRose, et al:
Man, I've gotta get me one of those Visual Companion thingies...
Without ever having seen it anywhere, I've always concluded that Mal's homeworld of Shadow was destroyed during the war. So, pretty good guess on my part, hmmm?
I figured all those little moons, given Earth normal gravity, as Zoe says in the pilot, entailed the application of an artificial gravity generator. Similar to the one Serenity uses, but on a planetary scale. Then, I further surmised, "What would happen on say, Earth's Moon, if such a generator were switched off and the Moon's natural 1/16th G was instantaneously returned?" Answer: The Earth normal atmosphere -- at Earth normal pressure -- would leap away from the satellite's surface like a coke bottle shaken and then uncapped, and uproot everything from vegetation and its topsoil, to a significant amount of surface water, to the majority of manmade structures, as though sucked away by an enormous shop-vac.
So, there's your destruction of Shadow. Not one warhead fired. Simply an executive override of the gravity generator from an orbiting cruiser-cum-administrative office, and poof!, everything bigger than a burrowing rodent dead. In fact, if you wanted to minimize the damage so you could reuse the planet without losing several hundred years of terraforming work: Turn off the generator for only an hour or two, then turn it back on. An hour or two would kill all larger land-based life forms, but a significant portion of the aquatic life might survive in the insulating oceans. When you turn the generator back on a couple of hours later, things -- like vegetation and its topsoil, et cetera, as above -- would immediately start falling back toward the body (from a great height), and even the atmosphere would be mostly recaptured over the course of the next few months. If you were the Alliance/BlueSun, therefore, you might have to make some repairs, but still avoid having to start from square one.
One last thing -- and the thing that suggested this scenario to me in the first place, lo, these many years ago -- the line from "The Ballad Of Serenity": "Burn the land and boil the sea...". I'm not entirely certain (because I'm not a chemist), but it at least seems possible that free nitrogen -- the chemical element present in our own atmosphere that keeps our oxygen from spontaneously burning everything it touches -- that was not covalently bonded would separate from the oxygen in Shadow's atmosphere, like oil from water when the pressure started renormalizing to (example) 1/16th Earth normal, since nitrogen is a lighter element, only mixed with oxy in our atmo by means of gravity and resulting atmospheric pressure. All that suddenly free oxygen -- coupled with the presence of electrical discharges from vacuum-destroyed high tension wires and lightning storms (atmospheric friction) would serve to "(flash-) burn the land". Sudden reduction of gravity to hold a "sea" to the planetary body, in addition to the sudden removal of atmospheric pressure to push down on its surface (think 'surface tension'), might cause it to appear to "boil", even though it might not actually boil as a result of tremendous heat of any kind, but rather as a reaction to a sudden lessening of the weight of air pushing down on it.
So, there's your "burn the land and boil the sea", done in a very cost-effective and 'fiscally responsible' way. I'm certain the Alliance shareholders would prefer such a solution to recalcitrant human inhabitants, rather than irradiating an otherwise productive world for several thousand years. They could be back up and running at full agricultural output within 5-10 years...
Utterly inhuman? You betcha. But, would you put it past the Alliance? Well, I certainly wouldn't. I can see them doing that without a moment's hesitation or a single twinge of conscience. In fact, I feature this scenario in my nascent (meaning, 'never gonna be finished') fanfic, titled "Shadow". Y'all
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Wow, zoid that... that... Wow.
You sure we never get to see this fanfic? Because you've got some great theories as to how things went down.
As for the Companions being canon, I believe they are. The "Brief History of the Universe" that I drew from above was written by the man himself, there's an interview with him as well, and all scripts are in their original form, exactly as the writers wrote them. The Firefly Companion doesn't have some of those tasty details, like a history of our BDHs written by Joss, but it has costume details written by the actual costume and prop people, and interviews with the actors, and again the scripts as they were written.
Short answer: Yes.
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Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without. - Gautama Siddharta
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Very intresting ideas, Zoid. BTW I remember reading a sample of "Shadow" in an earlier thread. It was very good work. I hope you do finish it.
Well, I guess it's off to Amazon for the Visual Companion.
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I always thought that the dead Shadow thing came from the RPG. Where is it in the Visual Companion?
Don't get me wrong, I think it makes sense to Mal's character that his home was destroyed. But I'm always trying to keep my canon straight. 
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It is in "A Brief History of the Universe circa 2507 A.D." starting on page 12 of the Serenity Visual Companion. There is a LOT of great information in that History, despite it being just four bitty pages.
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Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without. - Gautama Siddharta
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PhoenixRose replied, in part:
Quote:
...You sure we never get to see this fanfic?...
Yeah, unfortunately, I am pretty sure. It's only half-finished at 70-some pages right now, and I haven't added anything to it in going on four months. I'm pitiable, really. This is why I'm not an author. I can't finish anything. "Plans that either come to nought, or half a page of scribbled lines."
Besides, I explore other things -- like how Mal and Zoe became 'entangled' during the war -- that many would probably have a hard time believing or accepting. Briefly, and to wit, Zoe was a samurai trained in the 'Way of the Gun' for the Alliance, when Mal found her, and rescued her from a group of would-be Independent rapists. She was the sole survivor of her unit, and her leader is killed by Mal himself. (NB: I've got the actual Japanese words that mean 'hereditary liege lord', as well as 'way of the gun' in the fic). She sees herself as a ronin, fit only to die, but latches on to Mal as her new 'leader for life', because he has (through sheer luck, as usual) defeated her warrior lord and is a man of honor, an embodiment of her own warrior code.
See? That's gotta go against everyone's grain...
Be happy.
Respectfully,
zoid
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"I aim to misbehave." -Capt. Mal Reynolds, Serenity, a.k.a. 'the BDBOF'
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zoid, you have way too much free time! Use some of it to finish your fan-fic, and you'll get a whole bunch of fans all wearing brown coats following you around and hanging on your every word.
BTW, liquid water exposed to vacume will boil away at any temperature, so your reference to "boil the sea" makes perfect sense. I'd never thought about it before now, but you have a very interesting theory about Shadow.
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