Where did Mal get the money for Serenity?
POSTED BY: ncbrowncoat
UPDATED: Friday, January 20, 2017 21:40
VIEWED: 24769
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Quote:
Originally posted by mal4prez:
I don't know about any rebound effect, but if gravity suddenly shut off, everything on a planet would definitely take off because of the planet's spin.
Quote:Centripedal forces were present on Mars yet Mars loss of atmosphere still took a great deal of time. I don't think Centripedal force would swing it significantly.
On the subject of turning off the gravity generator, one thing that's been overlooked to this point is the effect of centrepital force. Remember, Shadow is a spining planet. If the gravity was suddenly reduced to 1/16th of what it was, the atmosphere would spin off like a spiral galaxy.
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citizen wrote:
Quote:
Centripedal forces were present on Mars yet Mars loss of atmosphere still took a great deal of time. I don't think Centripedal force would swing it significantly.
Ahhh... But Mars has maintained a constant gravitational 'field' since it formed. To anyone's certain knowledge or best approximation, so has every other planetary body in the universe, with the exception of those suffering some cataclysmic event that would rapidly reduce its mass. Nothing -- to anyone's knowledge -- loses or gains gravitational attraction without a corresponding loss or gain in mass (or rate of acceleration, but let's not go there).
That's what I meant when I said an actual observation of such an event would be difficult to obtain: It just never happens that a volume of atmosphere at Earth-normal pressure -- spread across something as massive as the Earth itself -- suddenly gets compressed by less than an Earth-normal gravitational field. I don't know if that helps imagine it better, or not...
So here's another thought experiment. Say you are on the Moon, and that you have filled a large balloon with typical Earth gases to precisely the same atmospheric pressure as found on the Earth at sea level (approximately 14.7 lbs. per square inch). If you totally rupture the balloon, so that all the gases are immediately released from containment in 1/16th of Earth-normal G, what do you suppose the gases would do? Would they escape slowly from the balloon, or would they fly away at a higher rate than they would on Earth?
Expand the balloon to encompass the entire globe of the Moon, and then rupture it completely as above. Would the gases escape more slowly than with the smaller balloon, faster than with the smaller balloon, or would they escape at the same rate?
Or maybe better yet: Imagine bursting a balloon on Earth that has been filled with air compressed to 16 atmospheres, or 235.2 psi...
Somebody else mentioned hurricanes. Remember what those actually are? Massive low-pressure zones. And they're not even 'low' compared to the low pressure zones you'd get all across the face of the globe by magically reducing Earth's grav to 1/16th of its normal 'pull'... And there would be no containment as with hurricanes by surrounding high pressure areas or gravity to hold it to the planet's surface.
We used to have all kinds of mathmaticians and scientists hanging around these parts. I'd really like to hear somebody break it down in a realistic way. I'm just doing it intuitively; but it occurs to me that you couldn't mess with a planetary body's enveloping atmosphere without drawin' back a stump. There's a lot of entropy in one o' them things...
Respectfully,
zoid
P.S.
Remember: There's no such thing as gravity, the world sucks. (A joke. Is this thing on?)
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"There's that word again: "heavy". Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the earth's gravitational pull? " -Dr. Emmett Brown, Back To The Future
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Well actually some theories suggest that Mars gravity has reduced, so I hear, but personally I don't hold much stock in them.
But there are theories for Mars atmosphere loss that suggest that Mars had more atmosphere than it's gravity could hold on to. I suspect the extra gas would have come from volcanic emissions in that scenario. Mars 'dies' its volcanic emissions cease but it still takes thousands (millions) of years for it's atmosphere to reduce to current levels.
I'm not sure the balloon analogy works all that well. If I've learnt anything from astrophysics its that our conventional Earth bound intuition is usually wrong up there. A popping balloon is a violent explosion because you have a lot of air under a lot of pressure trying to pass through a very small hole that also acts as a weak point in the surrounding material. This is totally unlike the gravity switch off scenario.
Point is a balloon with a really big hole in it doesn't pop. I think a closer analogy would be if the entire skin of the balloon was to become porous (since there is still gravity acting on it). You wouldn't get an explosion, you get a gradual deflation.
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citizen:
Sure, the balloon analogy works. When someone releases a weather balloon, they don't fill it all the way up. In fact, they just fill it enough to get it airborne. But as it rises into 'thinner' air (i.e., higher altitude atmosphere at lower pressure), the balloon expands to its full size.
It's all about the pressure.
That's why it's more like a popping balloon than one that gets slowly drained. A small pinhole causes a total catastrophic failure of the structure in which the compressed air is held. This would be analogous to an immediate reduction in gravity, which holds air compressed to the surface of the Earth, by its own 'weight'.
This has been fascinating. I can tell we're both sorta immovable on our opinions. But it's been fun scouring Wikipedia for supporting facts... 
Respectfully,
zoid
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"I aim to misbehave." -Capt. Mal Reynolds, Serenity, a.k.a. 'the BDBOF'
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No because the balloon analogy gives one specific faliure point, gravity would reduce over the entire area, not one tiny point like a small hole, so there would be no bottleneck, larger hole, less 'push'.
Further more gravity does not act like the skin of a balloon, it's different, and the effects of gravity not being there anymore would likewise be wholly different 
.
But yeah, it might be best to leave it there, we seem to be moving toward the possibillity of arguing in circles...
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zounds! double-post!
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As far as how Mal paid for Serenity, I say he ripped off some Alliance facility and broke into the vault or something like that.
Quote:
I think so, I tend to think of it like this:
FireFly/Serenity/Books written by Joss: Canon
Books not written by Joss (VC's, Novelisations): Canon except where they directly contradict the above.
RPGs and Fan speculation: Not canon but as good as you can get where they don't contradict the above.
That's basically how the Star Wars canon works.
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Hear me, for I am a scientist. (ding ding ding do I get a prize?? ) physics and math majors for undergrad baby, and a phd in geophysics.
um, sorry for flashing all that. It's just so you know I'm not making this up. Much.
The Mars analogy doesn't work. Neither does any comparison to any known planet, because in the `verse we live in right now gravity does not change like what Zoid is talking about. In fact, I never heard about the gravity of Mars changing. The only way it could have is if Mars lost mass, which seems unlikely... It may have lost atmosphere, but not gravity. (uh, there are theories as to how that happened, but those are not for here and now.)
In the fictional situation where gravity is artificially created, the increased force of gravity would make many more gas molecules "stick" to the planet then would have naturally.
Let's get mathy. All the atmospheric molecules are in a state where the inward pulling and outward pushing forces balance. What does this include? I'd say:
Inward: natural + artificial gravity
equals
Outward: centrifugal (spin), solar wind (shears off outer layers), and the internal pressure of the atmosphere ie temperature ie molecules bouncing off eachother
there may also be magnetic stuff - Van Allen belts. But let's ignore that, okay? It's further out and smaller. And weird.
If you suddenly - and I mean suddenly - turn off the artificial gravity, which in this case is 15 times the natural gravity (to go from 1/16 to 1 g), you lose 15/16 of your grip on the atmosphere. The outer thin layers will get stripped by solar winds, but the biggest effect would be everything going off tangentially. Like Zoid said - it would look like a spiral galaxy.
From the surface, if you were bolted down and could watch from a stationary point, everything would appear to rise up but curve slowly toward the west as you follow a curved path beneath it.
Sorry Zoid, but I don't think the oceans would boil - not the way water in a pot boils. They'd be too busy floating away with most everything else. They would gradually turn into water vapor, but you wouldn't be able to see that in all the chaos.
I also don't think the pressure loss would be immediate, not like flipping a switch. It would take some time for the atmosphere to strip off, but the dropping pressure would do nutty things. There would be high pressure gradients causing insanely strong winds, crazy temperature gradients, water condensing into huge dense clouds and heavy rain (snow/hail/etc??) - but keep in mind the rain/snow/hail would fall at 1/16 g and also it would fall into the rising water and air, so who knows what that would look like! Also - insanely good lightening...
It'd be a fabulous time. Um - in the way that good end-of-the-world disaster books are fabulous.
Zoid - I wish I'd thought of this!
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How did Mal get the money to purchase Serenity and get her running?
He was a Companion, of course.
Servicing men rubbed him raw. Hence his iritation with Inara.
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Old thread, lots of good ideas.
Just wanted to comment that from what I've heard, Zoe wasn't in the Overlanders until two and half years after the war started.
Although I've always thought she might have been part of a militia family for the Rim that took itself very seriously, and the Alliance's victory put her and any surviving family out of a job.
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