OoG mistake...
POSTED BY: chronicthehedgehog
UPDATED: Friday, October 8, 2004 16:47
VIEWED: 9229
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Maybe it's just me forgetting some bit of dialogue in the episode and it was all explained but why did the ship stop? There's no friction in space so the ship should have been constantly moving in a straight line once the catalyser blew even with the engine not turning. It's only a little thing but it's been bugging me for a while now. Anyone got an explanation?
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Who said it stopped? Speed is relative. It may appear to be stopped when nothing else is passing by to see a direction and speed relationship. Many shots show Serenity " coasting " .. and I would hope, but not seen it, that reverse thrust would be used to brake for a period of time before planet fall. ( That is why Serenity's engines can rotate 180 degrees ).
The engines were running for thrust to build speed to get to destination when it blew, so it just coasted after that, but no where near the spped to make planet fall in time to be alive when they got there.
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Why say you it stopped?
Things ejected from the ship would have been moving at a speed relative to the ship and would have drifted along side it; perhaps even drifting back towards it as the only local source of any gravity. that explains the flotsam and jetsam around the ship. The ship appears motionless from outside, but as space is rather empty there is no frame of reference. It could be drifting along a quite a clip.
It would just take WAY too long to drift to anywhere with civilization, since Wash had them way off the radar. Wash said that what should be a short trip would take them the better part of a week. And they only had a few hours of air and no heat.
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I don't think it stopped - I just assumed that they couldn't change their trajectory and head to get repairs, so they were dead in the water. Not literally stopped, but figuratively stopped. But I remember something about the commentaries on the pilot - when they passed the reaver ship the first time, they should have both been travelling so fast that they barely saw each other, but it played out as if they were slow-moving ocean liners. They acknowledged that that was innacurate (I don't remember if it was an accident or if they took creative liberties with physics for the sake of heightening the drama), but I'd imagine that the would say the same thing if the ship literally stopped in OoG.
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It COULD have stopped, if it was using inertialess drives. Since they can control gravity, it's not a big leap to assume they might also have an inertialess drive. If so, the ship can counteract momentum, so only moves when its drive is on! This could also prevent the crew from being splattered against the walls during maneuvers like the Crazy Ivan...
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Well, I figured the sudden expulsion of explosion and gas might have stopped their forward motion.
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Another question which is sort of relevent - in OiS is Serenity still? Because how could Earley jump down onto the ship like that?
I thought that was very odd for a long time, but then with the crew, including Wash asleep at the time would they simply bring the ship to a halt rather than have the autopilot take over?
It LOOKS like it's moving because the "spinney bit" is still rotating. However I assume this is less to do with propulsion and more to do with keeping life support etc online...
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The comments about Serenity probably not being stopped make sense from the momentum standpoint. However, while it may not be completely stopped, it would have to have slowed considerably when they vented the fire (which included some debris) out of the cargo bay door. That venting would have slowed their forward progress to some unknown degree - impossible to say how much.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Littlemanlovesfire:
Another question which is sort of relevent - in OiS is Serenity still? Because how could Earley jump down onto the ship like that?
That's another relative motion situation. When Early matches his velocity to Serenity's the two ships would appear stationary one to the other. With no active thrust taking place on either ship they should remain in exactly the same positions relative to each other forever, unless acted upon by an outside force. They could be traveling at tremendous velocities relative to the rest of the 'verse, but are unmoving relative to each other.
Only qualification is that when Early jumps from his ship he's applying a small, but significant amount of force to his ship (law of motion stuff here) that should start his drifting away from Serenity. I'll go with an autopilot feature here to compensate for that, as when Early hit the edge of his ship in that glancing blow before spinning out into space, the ship twitched then righted positions.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Littlemanlovesfire:
Another question which is sort of relevent - in OiS is Serenity still? Because how could Earley jump down onto the ship like that?
Movement is relative. When the space shuttle docks with the international space station, they're traveling at close to zero m.p.h. relative to each other, but they're both going about 20,000 m.p.h. relative to the surface of the earth. The important thing concerning said docking is that their speed relative to the earth is meaningless - they're not landing on the earth, they're docking with each other at a very safe relative speed of almost nothing.
Same holds for Early landing on Serenity. Both ships may be going 200,000 m.p.h. (or probably a lot more) relative to the closest planet, but as long as their relative speeds are identical, they don't appear to be moving at all if you just look at the two ships.
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