system or galaxy - what are the facts?

POSTED BY: Tiger
UPDATED: Wednesday, July 14, 2004 21:46
VIEWED: 23608
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HOBBES

Sunday, July 11, 2004 7:46 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
For one thing they describe the “hard burn” in one of the commentaries as a “fusion explosion behind the ship"

Does that remind anyone else of Project Orion?

If not then it was a 60's (I think) project to bypass the whole chemical engine inefficency thing by basically creating a spaceship with a big dumbbell for a back end. Then you drop a series of nuclear bombs in the dumbbell and viola you get moving pretty fast.

Of course there was the whole multiple nuclear detonations in the atmosphere bit so it never got off the ground.

-------------------------------------------------
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.

ANONYMOUSPOSTERCHILD

Sunday, July 11, 2004 8:20 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Hobbes:
Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
For one thing they describe the “hard burn” in one of the commentaries as a “fusion explosion behind the ship"

Does that remind anyone else of Project Orion?

If not then it was a 60's (I think) project to bypass the whole chemical engine inefficency thing by basically creating a spaceship with a big dumbbell for a back end. Then you drop a series of nuclear bombs in the dumbbell and viola you get moving pretty fast.

Of course there was the whole multiple nuclear detonations in the atmosphere bit so it never got off the ground.

-------------------------------------------------
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.

ACtually, there are experiments involving fusion propulsion right now, and they are significantly different from project Orion. They do off a very high-propulsion speed, but to construct one would leave us with a hugh, bulky, highly-radioactive engine.

GUNRUNNER

Sunday, July 11, 2004 8:22 PM

Yep Orion Drives have been compaired to the Firefly Engine several times. Ofcourse on Firefly ships can have both Jet Engines and Orion/Fusion Engines so a spaceship dosn't leave a trail of radation when taking off.

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AMNESIAC

Sunday, July 11, 2004 9:09 PM

Have a couple friendly disputes with the whole single system theory. If they don't have interstellar travel, how did they get to this new single star system? Also a single star system would be much easier to observe by the alliance than a huge portion of interstellar space. With current technology, we can observe objects as big as alliance cruisers (asteroids) from hundreds of millions of miles away. Also a single star with all of humanity orbiting around it is huge, but it is a much smaller frontier than the entire galaxy. I think the one system plan just makes it more difficult to tell the Serenity/Firefly story. It also, in my mind, makes the suspension of disbelief a little less suspensiony. We know one star system relatively well, and we know that in the middle of it is a pretty average star. We look up and see billions of stars just like this one. This star system has maybe two out of eight and ½ planets capable of supporting life, and the second one is Mars, and quite frankly it’s a big mostly if not entirely dead desert. So I think that Einstein is taking a little nap, and that Serenity is traveling faster than the speed of light via technology that is as mundane to the crew as the internal combustion engine is to us. I mean they’re already beating the laws of physics with a baseball bat with the whole artificial gravity thing. It takes a rock the size of a planet to generate a gravity field of 1g in this universe, and the shuttles on serenity have no problem with it. There really are stars up there, with vast distances between them, and little balls of dirt like earth circling around them. To keep the show/BDM grounded why not use what’s already there, and in Buffy/Angel writer speak; the flabotanum (I hope that’s how it’s spelled) is faster than light travel. We haven’t heard the characters talk about it, because the writers don’t know how it could conceivably work without getting all ‘reverse tachyon beam’ on us. The science of course isn’t what’s important, but it is the back drop the characters play in front of. The more detailed and down to earth out the back ground, the easier it is to believe the story. I find it easier to ignore the Einstein’s relativity loophole than the restructuring of what we know about solar systems and space loophole. Plus it’s bigger, more mysterious, and more exiting to have the frontier be something as big and open as a galaxy.

DIEGO

Sunday, July 11, 2004 11:26 PM

>1. A large star could hold a large solar system. This covers a >lot of the arguments made. A large star would be blue...hence, >the Blue Sun corp. A large star has a much larger habitable >zone (the volume around the star that roughly recreates Earth->like conditions) that could easily hold 70+ habitable or >terraformable planets/moons.

I like the idea of connecting the Blue Sun Corp with a large, blue star- it's pretty clever. But I don't see any reason inherent to the Single System Hyptohesis that we have to reconcile all 70+ worlds with a single system. The characters visit only a few worlds and some of them they return to multiple times. Maybe some of the planets are in other systems but were colonized independently during the diaspora/exodus period 500 years before and are inaccessible to our BDH. They would know about these sister civilizations by radio and might even keep up a very slow correspondence across the light-years. But there's nor reason that humanity would put all its eggs in one basket- especially after the apprent demise of earth.

SLOWSMURF

Sunday, July 11, 2004 11:55 PM

Uh....because the ship was moving slower than they would walk almost?

Yeah, thats good for interplanety travel. I think they would've siply turned the reaver ship around(or serenity, same thing) had they thought this through ahead of time, but they did not. There is no way to justify it, it was a technical error plain and simple.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Sunday, July 11, 2004 11:57 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Amnesiac:
Have a couple friendly disputes with the whole single system theory. If they don't have interstellar travel, how did they get to this new single star system?

This is not meant to be hostile, I am merely frustrated.

Sometimes I just want to hit people over the head wit a rock. This is one of those times. I mean no offense but this is the truth.

Haven't you listened to anything that was said? No one said they interstellar travel. They said they were incapable of FTL travel. The question becomes the time span involved.

This has been discussed many times and there are many possible explanations. Let's just name two:
1 They (the population of earth) were cryogenically frozen and moved there on a sleepership. As far as they are concerned when they wake up no time has passed. It would be odd, to say the least, for them to suddenly decide that centuries have passed, especially considering that time is relative.

2 While we’re talking about relativity, what if they had really fast ships? Moving near the speed of light. Well in this case not much time would pass for them now would it? No. Not much time at all. So even though they may travel hundreds of lightyears slower than light hundreds of years wouldn’t pass for them.

HONEY

Monday, July 12, 2004 2:14 AM

This discussion has brought up an issue that's bothered me since I first saw the pilot, and since it involves Reavers, I'm hoping it will be addressed in the BDM.

In introducing reavers to us, two 'facts' were given, 1) that reavers are men who've gone mad 'on the edge of space,' and 2) that every year, reavers are pushing out more and more. After Zoe makes this last statement, Mal says, "It's getting crowded in my sky."

Which is it? Are the reavers on "the edge of space" (an image of the outer rim of the system comes to mind), or are they in between the core and the outer colonies? Maybe "the edge of space" refers to the edge of civilized space, i.e., the core of the system? This second interpretation fits the facts better, especially if you consider space to be a very large place, and well, they gotta eat. It would make more sense for them to operate in space where there are more victims to encounter.

What's everyone else's take on this?

THEREALME

Monday, July 12, 2004 3:01 AM

As far as the relative velocity between Serenity and the Reaver ship in the pilot, we are talking RELATIVE velocity. These two ships could quite possibly be zooming very quickly across space relative to some planets in orbit, but RELATIVE TO EACH OTHER they could be rather slow. This works especially well if we assume that they are heading more or less in the same direction.

But they were clearly travelling at right angles to each other, right? We saw it!

Not necessarily. True, they were moving at perhaps a handful of miles per HOUR with respect to each other, but what if they were both moving at ten miles per SECOND with respect to Patience's home? That would make their courses nearly identical in speed and direction.

That's my bogus explanation, anyway. Frankly, I think the writers/directors/producers did something lame in order to build dramatic suspense.

As far as the System vs Galaxy debate, I'm quite convinced that Joss doesn't care, and perhaps doesn't even understand the difference between one system, several systems, a galaxy, and a universe.

But let's work with what we have.

The most telling episode for me regarding this debate is Out Of Gas. In a single solar system, it is unlikely that you can be "out of range" of a radio signal. Oh, you could wonder if anyone will be looking your way. But I don't think a reasonable radio would be out of range. If you are caught in between systems, however, then the radio signal could take years to get to anyone.

Also, the earlier Mal talks to Zoe about no matter how far the arm of the Alliance reaches, they can always go a little bit farther.

This doesn't work. Even if you assume that the sun is blue and therefore hotter and with a bigger life zone, you will run into a finite border beyond which you cannot reasonably go. The outer planets, even of a blue sun, will be covered with nitrogen snow or something. Uninhabitable.

For me, FTL travel and psychic powers are no more amazing than artificial gravity, and I see no reason to swallow the one and balk at the others as "unrealistic".

I think that we are dealing with, perhaps not a galaxy, but perhaps a few tens of star systems. That makes the most sense to me.

The Real Me

HELL'S KITTEN

Monday, July 12, 2004 4:29 AM

I have two things to add. Kinda minor, but here they are:

1) This isn't directly related to the topic, but I've always wondered this: What is considered "canon"? Is it the episode transcripts? The DVD episodes with the deleted scenes? Shooting scripts? Any number of the various writer's draft iterations? Outlines? Beat sheets? How far is appropriate for "canon"? Cuz I have an awful lot of those things and have seen some of what could be called more 'definitive' answers. But if these aren't considered "canon," there's not much point in bringing it up.

2) If it were a multi-system kinda 'verse, wouldn't it have been a bit risky for Tracey to mail himself to Mal & Zoe? I mean, how would Tracey have known to which Post Office in all the 'verse to mail himself? Aside from the fact that Mal avoids the Core Planets, of course. (Personally, I think that was just a story telling device and not too much shoulda been read into it.)

Okay, well fine, three things.

3) While I tried to read most of these posts, I may have missed this, sorry; feel free to slap me around if it's already been discussed. Has anyone taken into account in their opinion the fact that it took 6 months to get from Persephone ("Shindig") to Jiangyin ("Safe")? I'm really not sure what that means to either side of the argument. Just curious what ya think, is all.

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