My theory about guns in Firefly
POSTED BY: Ringwraith
UPDATED: Thursday, January 2, 2003 01:21
VIEWED: 41138
PAGE 6 of 15
Not to mention the sensitivity of sold-state components to electromagnetic pulse attack. Right now, an EMP attack requires an atomic explosion, but I've heard talk of EMP weapons that use conventional explosives. And in the Firefly universe, they would seem to have some pretty cool magnetic technology, if that levitating train uses magnetisim to hover. So they could probably build an EMP weapon that doesn't use any explosive at all!
Consider this scenario:
Evil Genius: "Surrender, or my cyborg warriors with their pulse laser weapons will reduce your enclave to a molten puddle!"
Intrepid Rebels: "Nuts!" And they toss a single EMP grenade at the EG's army. Pulse lasers inoperative. Cyborgs unable to move a single cybernetic muscle. Single Intrepid Rebel, armed only with a can opener, takes EG and his entire army prisoner.
JOSH, WHERE'S MY CHECK???!!!
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Going back to Solar Systems (with hundreds of planets!) vs. Galaxy...
Maybe there are a few systems connected by wormholes. That way there is no hassle with FTL engines and the statement by the blue gove guys 87 million miles etc... as long as you count going inbetween wormholes as zero distance.
As for projectile weapons I'm willing to bet the Alliance has EMP weapons but also have EMP hardened guns while the poorer guys can't afford the EMP hardened guns so they do without.
May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May you be in heaven an hour before
The Devil knows you’re dead.
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Delurking now, and to get right in the middle of a conversation -
A thought on how one solar system could have hundreds of earth-like worlds: According to my (admitedly sketchy) reasearch, a solar system with a blue sun, one of the hottest stars in existence, could have a biosphere (range for earth-like planets) hundreds or thousands of times wider then the biosphere for our sun, with room for hundreds of inhabitable planets. Of course, this is a cheat - blue suns are fast-burning, short-lived, and unlikely to have planets at all - but I can see Joss looking at a solar system with nearly endless frontier worlds and just thinking, "Cool!"
Besides, if there was FTL travel, the Independents would just pack up and find planets too far out for the Alliance to control.
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Interesting. Joss has mentioned something about "blue sun." But wouldn't then everything in the system then be tinted blue?
--- Joe
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i think SadGeezer is wrong about everyone carrying laser pistols 500 years in the future for the following reasons:
1: the Serenity is an unarmed cargo hauler.
2: revolvers and projectile weapons don't require power like say laser weapons. a projectile weapon is simple to make powder and bullets if one knows how and has the materials. lasers require power and it may be massive and impratical to have backpacks or a portable energy module that is heavier than the gun itself. projectiles probably are simpler to use in many situations because an EMP pulse fries electronic weapons like laser pistols.
3. Projectile weapons are probably cheaper than laser pistols.
4. Projectile weapons don't require much technology to build.
5. Projectile weapons don't require one to recharge an energy cell when there might be no power to recharge your weapon or can't buy one.
Those are the simple facts. projectile weapons will still be around 500 years in the future and probably mored advanced than now. But look at how it took the projectile weapon to develop. A long time. Have a better one.
Be Seeing You,
David Blackwell
ENTERLINE: http://enterline2.tripod.com/enterline
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The blue sun would tint everything blue. The system could, however, be double star system with the second star a yellow one. So we get the wider band of planets/moons able to be terraformed but we also get the yellow tint (at times).
And what about gravity...The moon (I think it's a moon, correct me if I'm wrong) in "The Train Job" seems to have earth gravity.
EDITED to make it semi-coherent and the gravity bit.
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May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May you be in heaven an hour before
The Devil knows you’re dead.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Hobbes:
The blue sun would tint everything blue. The system could, however, be double star system with the second star a yellow one. So we get the wider band of planets/moons able to be terraformed but we also get the yellow tint (at times).
And what about gravity...The moon (I think it's a moon, correct me if I'm wrong) in "The Train Job" seems to have earth gravity.
This is from the unaired pilot Serenity -
Select to view spoiler:
In the pilot, Serenity, it is clearly mentioned that there are hundreds of worlds in the same *solar system*.
Also there's a discussion about how some of the worlds are doing badly because (very rough paraphrase) "they do the basic terraforming, install the *artifical gravity* etc, and just drop a bunch of people on their with few supplies. Some are making it, some aren't"
Which speaks to both the gravity issue and the differing levels of technology one.
Shug
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slight correction
Select to view spoiler:
they don't specifically mention *artificial* gravity - they just say that in the terraforming process they tried to make the worlds as similar to earth as possible. They list a number of elements one of which was gravity. Maybe it's a nitpick but that's not the same as artificial gravity - which would be an awesome technology.
That's what happens when I try to rely on my memory.
Shug
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Indeed. They obviously do have artificial gravity, since Serenity always seems to have "up" and "down". But if there must be some practical limit to this tech. If they were able to fiddle with gravity on a planetary scale, they wouldn't bother with terraforming planets -- it'd be a lot easier to just build giant space habitats.
Forgive me for pointing this out: the opposite of artificial gravity is natural hilarity.
About moons: a moon is not necessarily smaller than Earth. A moon is just a non-luminous body that orbits a planet, which in turn is a non-luminous body that orbits a sun. (A luminous body is a sun, no matter what it orbits.) I think all the moons in our solar system are smaller than Earth, though maybe some of Jupiter's bigger moons come close.
Now, there's been talk of terraforming our moon, and Mars, which both have which relatively low gravity. But that'd be pretty hard -- the atmosphere isn't gonna stay put. Also, nobody on Firefly seems to have the kind of health issues you'd get from being raised on a high- or low-gravity world. So apparently all the worlds are roughly the same gravity as earth.
Here's my latest theory. Some time in the late 21st century, somebody discovers a solar system that's generally a lot more massive than ours. Now every sun has a kind of "life zone" -- the region where a planet is far enough away to keep water from boiling away, but not far enough to lock up all the water in ice deposits. There are three such planets in our own solar system, but one (Mars) is too small. Venus is about the right size, and might be terraformed in a century or two.
But why settle for just one new world when you can have hundreds? Because this new system has a bigger "life zone" (bigger sun) and a lot more rocky matter, there are a dozen or so planets that catch just the right amount of heat from the sun.
Better yet, the outer system contains about 20 gas giants. Like the gas giants in our own system (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune), these planets are almost-Suns. That is, they're not big enough to get a solar fusion cycle going. But they do put out some heat, and that's enough extra heat so that each gas giant has a life zone of its own. And each has another half-dozen Earth-sized moons.
None of these planets has an oxygen atmosphere. Which sounds bad -- but is actually a good thing. Free oxygen isn't stable -- it always reacts with something to form an oxide. So you only have free oxygen when you have life forms that turn the oxides back into free oxygen. (Like plants do.) And you don't want to settle a world that's evolved its own life -- it's bound to have evolved differently from Earth life, and even a small difference would create a dangerously toxic environment for your settlers.
So you start from scratch. Your first wave of colonists takes up residence in space habitats. They capture comets and carbonaceous asteroids and bombard the earth-sized planets and moons. This fertilizes the planets with enough water and complex chemicals to get life started. Then they seed the world with microbes and plants to kick-start the ecology. Finally, they sit back and wait for the next wave of colonists, which is timed to coincide with the completion of the teraforming process for the first few planets.
Now this kind of artificial ecology is not going to be very complicated. The complexity of earth's ecology, with its thousands of species of interdependent plants, animals, and microbes, took hundreds of millions of years to evolve. Maybe you can hurry the process a little -- but you can't compress all that evolution into the century or two before the second wave arrives. So you settle for a few basic life forms, just enough to keep the oxygen cycle going long enough for the settlers to introduce new species -- in particular, the crops and livestock on which they subsist.
This primitive, artificial ecology explains the bleak landscape on all the worlds Serenity visits.
JOSS, WHERE'S MY CHECK???!!!
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Quote:That's kind of a distinction without a difference. Maybe cockroaches are smarter than we are, but in such an alien way that we'll never appreciate their intelligence. So for our purposes, roaches remain stupid bugs, no matter how smart they are to each other.
Originally posted by Heritage:
Personally, I'd like to believe that in the vastness of space, there is intelligent life out there - I just think that a) we'll probably never run into it, and b) if we did, it would be so unlike our concept of 'intelligence' as to be completely incomprehensible.
JOSH, WHERE'S MY CHECK???!!!
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