FTL?
POSTED BY: Staleek
UPDATED: Saturday, January 12, 2008 13:55
VIEWED: 8146
PAGE 5 of 5
Quote:Yeah, there's all sorts of reasons as well of course. Joss doesn't write all the scripts, so there could be things in the script that he then decides on the day of filming, or during post, he doesn't want to appear in his 'Verse.
Originally posted by asarian:
Yes, shooting scripts != canon! They are a valuable source of information, at times; especially in the area of figuring out what Joss initially had in mind for some scenes. But the aired episode is what goes, in terms of canon.
Quote:No problem, it's given me something to do while in bed ill over the Christmas period. Not to mention I'm particularly interested in real space drives, since I'm writing a book on the subject :).
Thanks, btw, for your other contributions in this thread: it was most enlightening. :)
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I have looked for and not found the printed formula I saw for max travel speed in this verse.
However, I did run across another reference of Firefly's speed.
In BDM River states that from Miranda to Mr. Universe is 367,442 miles and at maximum burn Serenity can get there in under 4 hours. This translates to faster than 91,650 miles per hour, and also less than 122,480 mph (or else it would be 3 hours.)
This means less than 1,000 hours per AU, or about 40 days. It's still at least 30 days.
With the formula I can't relocate stating max speed is 16 days per AU, this means max speed - likely many Alliance craft - is at least 2 times faster than Serenity's speed at "max burn" and is more like 2.5 times Serenity's speed.
Hope this helps. Still looking for that dang energy/speed formula I read.
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lol, don't mean to hijack the techy thread and all...
But every time I see that title, I think of the "computer speak" For The Loss... just wanted to point it out s'all... 
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Various bits:
Quote:
Originally posted by SigmaNunki:
Are you sure about that? Because, the description of one engine type does not the exclusion of everything else make.
Trouble is, FTL is widely believed to be fundamentally impossible, so in a given SciFi universe "no FTL" is what a scientist would call the the "null hypothesis".
According to General Relativity, FTL travel is equivalent to time-travel and lets you create all sorts of impossible causality violations. If you allow FTL you have to start contriving a whole set of bizzarre and arbitrary physical laws to prevent Mal becominmg his own grandfather.
If you apply Occams Razor (put crudely, always take the simplest valid explanation) then FTL is deeply implausible, whatever unobtanium-fueled magic space-warp jump drive you postulate.
Apparent instances of FTL communication in Firefly could just be sloppy writing. Some SciFi writers use the idea of "quantum entanglement" - which is a real phenomenon, the effects of which do seem to propagate FTL - as a way of FTL comms. In fact, this is central to the very real technology of "quantum cryptography" which has been demonstrated experimentally and will be commercially available Real Soon Now. Sadly, in this case there *is* a well established set of bizzarre rules - quantum mechanics - to get in the way and all you can "transmit" FTL is a random number "key" that conveys no information until the encoded message, following along at good 'ol 3x10^8 m/s catches up (and then only in the impractical "thought experiment" version - the workable version needs several exchanges over a conventional comms link just to agree on the key - the magic that "entanglement" brings to the party is that its impossible to evesdrop on the process).
As for the shape of the 'Verse and the number of stars... "Serenity" pretty much stated that it was a single - "solar" system but with "dozens of planets and hundreds of moons".
Now - imagine a star, somewhat larger than ours, so that the "goldilocks" zone - where the temperature is just right for habitable planets that look suspiciously like the coast of California - is big enough to cover the "central worlds" and ensure high property prices that keep out the hoi poloi.
Now, further out you have the Jupiter-like "gas giants" which have dozens of moons each. However, that far out they would tend to be far too cold for life (like the moons of Jupiter and Saturn). Howver, if - when the system formed - one or two of the planets got *much* bigger than Jupiter then they could have ignited to form stars, even without a helping hand from a black monolith. Perhaps that could make the other gas-giant moons warm enough to be habitable? The distances to the "outer stars" would change dramatically as they orbited, so such moons would have extreme, variable climates and probably end up looking like, well, the interior of California... Hmm.
Works for me!
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Quote:Well, that's fine if Serenity uses some sort of reactionless drive that can go from 0-max instantly, but if she needs time to accelerate, there's no such thing as a maximum speed, only maximum acceleration. In other words you can't extrapolate linearly like that. At any rate those numbers sound a little low, that distance would mean Mr Universe's Moon is in Orbit of Miranda, which sort of brings in to question why Mr Universe hasn't become Reaver chow and how come Miranda is still secret? I'm pretty sure that line is cut from the final movie, and for good reason.
Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
In BDM River states that from Miranda to Mr. Universe is 367,442 miles and at maximum burn Serenity can get there in under 4 hours. This translates to faster than 91,650 miles per hour, and also less than 122,480 mph (or else it would be 3 hours.)
This means less than 1,000 hours per AU, or about 40 days. It's still at least 30 days.
With the formula I can't relocate stating max speed is 16 days per AU, this means max speed - likely many Alliance craft - is at least 2 times faster than Serenity's speed at "max burn" and is more like 2.5 times Serenity's speed.
At any rate, the relevent equation to get the acceleration is:
a=(4d)/t^2
For your numbers (distance in meters and time in seconds) that equates to:
a=(4*591,340,578)/14,400^2=~11.4ms=~1.16g
Which would mean that Serenity could traverse an AU in:
t=2*sqrt[d/a]=2*sqrt[149,598,000,000/11.4]=229,108=~63.5 Hours or about 2.5 days.
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Quote:That's true, though Daniel Greenberger and Karl Svozil have shown that the laws of quantum mechanics enforces consistency protection.
Originally posted by ImNotHere:
According to General Relativity, FTL travel is equivalent to time-travel and lets you create all sorts of impossible causality violations. If you allow FTL you have to start contriving a whole set of bizzarre and arbitrary physical laws to prevent Mal becominmg his own grandfather.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/quantum-world/dn7535
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Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
which sort of brings in to question why Mr Universe hasn't become Reaver chow and how come Miranda is still secret? I'm pretty sure that line is cut from the final movie, and for good reason.
Sounds like someone has been doing a great job of cutting out hostages to fortune like that! However, you still get the feeling (esp. in the BDM) that all the planets and moons are pinned to fixed points in space rather than orbiting.
All this speculation on the tech is great fun (and part of the joy of SciFi) but its worth touching base occasionally and remember that the most important laws in the 'verse are "narrative causality", "dramatic mechanics" and "the general and special theories of production budgets". Hence:
(a) We have artifical gravity because its too darned expensive and awkward to film every scene in simulated zero-G (honourable mention to the 1980s BBC series "Star Cops" which gave it a ruddy good go).
(b) No FTL - this show is about the end of the Wild West, the USA after the Civil War and what the old soldiers, pioneers and cowboys do when the police and tax collectors start to arrive at the New Frontier. If the 'verse had FTL then Mal would probably be off boldly going where no man had gone before or picking a side in some conflict in a galaxy far, far away (and much happier for it). Also, we don't want them to pop back to Earth That Was to see the folks (and probably fall through a time warp and crash in 1950s Roswell - Its The Law
) Putting FTL in the 'verse would be like building an airport in Deadwood...(c) Max travel speed in 'verse = (plausible size of a mega solar system) / Tmax, where Tmax = 1 Year / (episodes per season) - i.e. the plausible time that can elapse between stories without additional explanation.
So, you can cross the 'verse in a few weeks or hop between moons in hours or days, which is pefect for dramatic purposes - long enough to make communities fairly isolated and complicate communication and law enforcement, short enough to gloss over between acts.
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