Map of the Verse discussion
POSTED BY: jewelstaitefan
UPDATED: Tuesday, April 30, 2024 08:33
VIEWED: 49136
PAGE 14 of 18
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:http://pics.fireflyprops.net/TVIN-2.01.pdf
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
The linkys I posted in the OP for The Verse In Numbers do not seem to get me there.
Does anybody have a current valid linky for TViN?
Version 2.01 - July 2012 - Updates and corrections made to the ‘Timeline’. ‘KD-FA’ added to Dragon’s Egg L4 (Castaways) and numerous asteroids added to ‘Halo’ of the White Sun System
http://pics.fireflyprops.net/PACE-ARC-2.0.pdf
Astrogation Reference Charts carefully extrapolated from J. Chris Bourdier’s White Paper
Thanks a bunch!
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Quote:
Originally posted by ElectricLion:
You do know that according to QMx, the fastest ships in the Verse are the great big Dortmunders, and they can go only 10% of light? Serenity's top speed is supposed to be somewhere around 7%. The arks from Earth made the 40 LY journey in 120 years because they were frakking hauling some gorram ass at an unheard-of 34% of light.
And I need to remind you that for all the focus on Beaumonde, the only way to make Beaumonde-to-Lilac work is to break something else.
Knew the Arks went at 1/3 SoL, from Serenity Companion. QMX must have provided that data after we were trying to conjure current potential. Thanks for the info.
After 300-400 years, space travel went backwards to slower. Putting a propulsion system from an Ark into a tiny Operative speedboat would not increase it's max velocity? Hard to believe. Not saying you have quoted wrong, but that seems retarded unless some external or artificial reason.
I have not been trying to fix Beaumonde. I was under the impression you were attempting to search for a remedy, or compromise, or such.
I had pointed out the errors in the data so that those interested could follow along with the inconsistencies, and decide how much they wish to invest in the various possibilities, and to help them avoid pitfalls in their fanfics. This thread used to have over 10,000 views, and I had been told it was partly due to writers using it as reference for their storymaking. I have told them I am fine with that, and they were welcome to use anything we resolved here. Or not.
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With the reference of TViN (thanks to second for linky), I see that the closest distance Beaumonde can get to Lilac is about 44Au. This is not possible in the 10 hours Mal claims, using episode Safe as the canon data, and assuming Serenity is capable of 1/5 to 1/6 Speed of Light. Top velocity is now claimed to be about 0.50Au/hr, so I will need to recalculate with this factor.
Lilac is second moon of New Canaan.
Closest distance Beaumonde can be to Haven is about 32Au. Haven is first moon of Deadwood.
Closest Beaumonde can ever be to Miranda is about 23Au. Miranda is first orbiting body of Burnham.
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The claim of Serenity's top speed of 7% of Speed of Light (or 0.50Au/hr) is incompatible with canon of episode Safe.
In Safe, to get from Jaingyin to Greenleaf at top speed while Book bleeds to death, will take 10 hours.
Travel distance between these 2 planets, assuming not passing through the center of the Red Sun, is between 6.375Au and 7.312Au.
IF Serenity had instantaneous acceleration to top speed of 0.50Au/hr, then everybody here can clearly see that in 10 hours Serenity would cover 5.0 Au, which falls far short of 6.37Au - that would take at least 12.76 hours.
This claim is preposterous. Sorry.
Even if max velocity of Serenity was 10% of Speed of Light (0.72Au/hr), she would need near instantaneous acceleration to travel 6.375Au in 10 hours.
Unlikely.
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I offered a compromise, to move Kalidasa around in its orbit so that it was between White Sun and Blue Sun, which would cut travel time from months to days, and your response was that it still wasn't 10 hours. My digression into why I never finish anything I try to write was an attempt to illustrate that Joss didn't create a map first. He pulled the number out of thin air. No, the number I gave you wasn't 10 hours. It will never be 10 hours unless I break something else to give that one nonsense number priority.
It's like the Constitution class blueprints that came out 6 years after Star Trek was cancelled. Franz Joseph tried to get things close. He had hours of interviews with GR. But in the end, he had to acknowledge that close was the best he could do. You conviced me: Kalidasa is in the wrong place. Not just for Beaumonde, but for the other worlds as well. Moving the system to the opposite side of its orbit makes a lot of sense. Blue Sun is still out on the Rim, but it's not so horribly isolated. It also puts the worlds of Kalidasa in reach of the Reavers. Considering that the Reavers reached as far as Whitefall, it makes sense that they should occasionally savage the worlds of Kalidasa.
The arks got to 34% of light by having monstrous engines, huge fuel supplies, and by boosting for years, instead of minutes or hours. It's my personal belief (nothing official to back it up, just my opinion) that the arks even dwarfed the Dortmunders. I use as my comparison the first stage of a Saturn V rocket compared to the Service Module. Granted that it's not a very good analogy, but it illustrates the difference between an interstellar drive and an interplanetary drive. Just imagine what you could do if the entire Saturn V rocket (fully fueled first stage included) was already in orbit.
As an aside: I've never liked the "When Worlds Collide" plot point where a tiny little ship goes and 99.9999999% of the planet's population is left to die. So I envision the trip from Earth as being a full-scale evacuation with the entire society's resources, moving tens or hundreds of millions of people, instead of tens of thousands. So these arks would be monstrous, like hollowed-out asteroids or some such. And there would be hundreds or thousands of such ships, along with unmanned cargo ships and automated terraformers sent ahead of the main fleet. It's estimated that our asteroid belt has somewhere around a million asteroids that are roughly 100-150 miles long. Neither Firefly, nor Serenity, has mentioned anything about any form of suspended animation, so I'm interpreting these ark as carrying living populations as well as millions upon millions of frozen ova, both of people and animals.
The ark engines still exist. No technology has been lost. In fact it's reasonable to assume that engine technology has improved in the past few hundred years. But does it make sense to use a full tractor-trailer level engine to move a lunchbox's worth of cargo amoung houses on the same street? Between neighborhoods in the same city? Sure, the big rig is a lot faster once it gets to cruising speed, but a bicycle or R/C drone could make multiple little deliveries while the big beastie is still accelerating.
I realize that my analogies may be more than a little silly, but right now, that's the best way I can think of to illustrate my point.
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Quote:
Originally posted by ElectricLion:
I offered a compromise, to move Kalidasa around in its orbit so that it was between White Sun and Blue Sun, which would cut travel time from months to days, and your response was that it still wasn't 10 hours. My digression into why I never finish anything I try to write was an attempt to illustrate that Joss didn't create a map first. He pulled the number out of thin air. No, the number I gave you wasn't 10 hours. It will never be 10 hours unless I break something else to give that one nonsense number priority.
It's like the Constitution class blueprints that came out 6 years after Star Trek was cancelled. Franz Joseph tried to get things close. He had hours of interviews with GR. But in the end, he had to acknowledge that close was the best he could do. You conviced me: Kalidasa is in the wrong place.
I don't think I said Kalidasa is out of place. All the other bodies in Kalidasa seemed to fit all of the data from BDS, BDM, scripts, etc, or at least before Serenity only capable of 7% SoL - now practically nothing fits. Like Pilot Serenity - would have taken about 10 days to get to Whitehall from Persephone, not 2 days.
Quote:
Not just for Beaumonde, but for the other worlds as well. Moving the system to the opposite side of its orbit makes a lot of sense. Blue Sun is still out on the Rim, but it's not so horribly isolated. It also puts the worlds of Kalidasa in reach of the Reavers. Considering that the Reavers reached as far as Whitefall, it makes sense that they should occasionally savage the worlds of Kalidasa.
The arks got to 34% of light by having monstrous engines, huge fuel supplies,
Again, they don't need huge fuel supplies - just accelerate, then coast for 120 years, and decelerate. Other than collision avoidance, quantity of fuel should have been more closely proportional to top speed, or cruising/coasting speed.
Quote:
and by boosting for years, instead of minutes or hours. It's my personal belief (nothing official to back it up, just my opinion) that the arks even dwarfed the Dortmunders. I use as my comparison the first stage of a Saturn V rocket compared to the Service Module. Granted that it's not a very good analogy, but it illustrates the difference between an interstellar drive and an interplanetary drive. Just imagine what you could do if the entire Saturn V rocket (fully fueled first stage included) was already in orbit.
As an aside: I've never liked the "When Worlds Collide" plot point where a tiny little ship goes and 99.9999999% of the planet's population is left to die. So I envision the trip from Earth as being a full-scale evacuation with the entire society's resources, moving tens or hundreds of millions of people, instead of tens of thousands. So these arks would be monstrous, like hollowed-out asteroids or some such. And there would be hundreds or thousands of such ships, along with unmanned cargo ships and automated terraformers sent ahead of the main fleet. It's estimated that our asteroid belt has somewhere around a million asteroids that are roughly 100-150 miles long. Neither Firefly, nor Serenity, has mentioned anything about any form of suspended animation, so I'm interpreting these ark as carrying living populations as well as millions upon millions of frozen ova, both of people and animals.
The ark engines still exist. No technology has been lost. In fact it's reasonable to assume that engine technology has improved in the past few hundred years. But does it make sense to use a full tractor-trailer level engine to move a lunchbox's worth of cargo amoung houses on the same street? Between neighborhoods in the same city? Sure, the big rig is a lot faster once it gets to cruising speed, but a bicycle or R/C drone could make multiple little deliveries while the big beastie is still accelerating.
I realize that my analogies may be more than a little silly, but right now, that's the best way I can think of to illustraNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Faster than anything we can do today, definitely. Hundreds or thousands of times faster, but even a thousandth of the speed of light is screaming. Numbers in the 50%+ of light are the kind of magical speeds you see on Star Trek -- and that's just the impulse engines. Engines in Firefly are brute force engines. Serenity's side engines aren't much more than really advanced jet engines. Her main drive is a fusion powered pulse drive. But in all cases, it's still a matter of throwing something out the back so that the "equal and opposite reaction" pushes you forward. As your forward speed approaches the speed of the ejected matter (adjusted for mass), the efficiency of the drive decreases, requiring either stronger thrust, or longer acceleration times. Eventually, you'll reach a point where it's just not cost effective to keep the engine running.
In order to reach 50% of the peed of light, you either have to throw out a mass equal to that of your ship at that speed, or less mass at significantly higher velocities until you reach that speed. But if your thrust remains constant, your level of acceleration will decrease as the mass of the ship approaches the speed of your reaction mass.
I'm sorry, but I think we're back to "the ships move at the speed of plot."
When I said that you had convinced me that Kalidasa was in the wrong place, I just meant that you've shown me that Beaumonde is mentioned too prominently in relation to Browncoat activities to be on the opposite side of the Verse from Blue Sun. I'll get with Yellowjacket about putting together a few pages to add to the new release of TVIN, along with some estimated travel times. As with all else in TVIN, the Atlas, and the Map, use or ignore as you see fit. Your enjoyment of the universe is the most important part.
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Quote:
Originally posted by ElectricLion:
Faster than anything we can do today, definitely. Hundreds or thousands of times faster, but even a thousandth of the speed of light is screaming. Numbers in the 50%+ of light are the kind of magical speeds you see on Star Trek -- and that's just the impulse engines. Engines in Firefly are brute force engines. Serenity's side engines aren't much more than really advanced jet engines. Her main drive is a fusion powered pulse drive. But in all cases, it's still a matter of throwing something out the back so that the "equal and opposite reaction" pushes you forward. As your forward speed approaches the speed of the ejected matter (adjusted for mass), the efficiency of the drive decreases, requiring either stronger thrust, or longer acceleration times. Eventually, you'll reach a point where it's just not cost effective to keep the engine running.
In order to reach 50% of the peed of light, you either have to throw out a mass equal to that of your ship at that speed, or less mass at significantly higher velocities until you reach that speed. But if your thrust remains constant, your level of acceleration will decrease as the mass of the ship approaches the speed of your reaction mass.
I'm sorry, but I think we're back to "the ships move at the speed of plot."
When I said that you had convinced me that Kalidasa was in the wrong place, I just meant that you've shown me that Beaumonde is mentioned too prominently in relation to Browncoat activities to be on the opposite side of the Verse from Blue Sun. I'll get with Yellowjacket about putting together a few pages to add to the new release of TVIN, along with some estimated travel times. As with all else in TVIN, the Atlas, and the Map, use or ignore as you see fit. Your enjoyment of the universe is the most important part.
So if the Arks could chuck stuff out the back at more than 1/3 SoL, surely after hundreds of years, the best Alliance can buy could do the same. Why would nothing else be able to approach 1/3 SoL?
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I didn't say they couldn't do it. I said that the arks had huge fuel supplies, and boosted for years.
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If you want to get numbers happy on the subject, you can start with the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation:
Delta v = v(e) ln (m0/m1)
Delta v = change in velocity
v(e) = exhaust velocity
ln = natural logarithm function, or approx 2.718
m0 = starting mass of the ship (including fuel)
m1 = Mass of the ship after boosting (minus the fuel burned)
Simply stated, if you want to move forward at 5 miles/sec, you have to throw out a mass equal to the entire mass of your ship at 5 miles per second, or half your ship's mass at 10 miles/sec, or a quarter of your ship's mass at 20 miles/sec, and so on. The best exhaust for very high speeds is light itself because the light is moving at the speed of light. It just possesses so little mass that it'll take thousands or millions of years to get up to speed.
As a kid, I was excited when I first learned this because that meant that every time I turned on a flashlight, I was igniting a rocket engine powered by light.
The shape of your engine is importat because the faster your exhaust leaves the ship, the less reaction mass you need to get the same boost in speed. We've been using the bell-shaped deLaval nozzles for our rockets for decades because the shape accelerates the exhaust particles up to supersonic speeds. This design is great for a chemical rocket, but I have no idea what sort of shape would be used to get exhaust speeds up to measurable fractions of c.
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