Science and mistakes in Firefly: Ask your questions.

POSTED BY: chrisisall
UPDATED: Thursday, September 8, 2005 08:45
VIEWED: 13068
PAGE 9 of 10

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Originally posted by GreenFaerie:
I hate to burst your bubble, Chrisisall (because until yesterday I liked your explanation best), but according to the official Serenity RPG (approved by Whedon himself), it was generation ships that made the flight from Earth-that-was. No jumpgate.

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No, NO, no no no, no no!
Basically I'm trying to say no. RPGs and such (even official ones) are notrious for being inaccurate...

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Originally posted by GreenFaerie:
Also according to the RPG, the Firefly 'verse is made up of a star system containing a few stars each with their own planets.

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A binary system I can believe (it makes more sense actually) but any more than that and it starts to become pretty unbelievable...
I like the idea of a Binary system, as binary systems are quite common, and would give a lot more room for the habitable planets to 'move'. Theres a whole bunch of interesting orbits that come come from a Binary system aswell, planets can orbit a habitable zone around both stars, follow a figure of eight orbit swapping stars as it orbits, or could orbit just one star of the pair.

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Originally posted by GreenFaerie:
The ship is also said to be "inertialess" but only able to reach 2% of light-speed. That one that doesn't make a lot of sense, but there could be a reason...

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Inertialess drive huh, and one that can only reach 2% of LS...
Hmmm, now that just don't work with modern physics... I'm gonna stick with my intestellar ramjet I think.
Specially since theres no theoritical limit to how close to lightspeed the bussard ramjet can get, just can't ever achieve it.

Q: What do you have when you are holding two little green balls in your hand.
A: Kermit's undivided attention.

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Originally posted by citizen:

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Originally posted by reaverchow:
Maybe he had magnetic boots??? Oh his boots were in loops....or whatever they are called - attached to the hull.

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Magnetic boots of course.

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Of course.

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Originally posted by reaverchow:
And another...my major sci-fi pet peeve (only Babylon-5 has got this right so far, and even they fracked up in "Legend of the Rangers") - any civilization that has artifical gravity wouldn't need reaction based drives (rockets, ion, *fusion* - like Firefly - and even steam - yes, *steam*) they could just turn the gravity field on it's side and go MUCH MUCH faster than conventional reaction based propulsion. Fast enough to reach another star pretty quickly. And like someone else said, they probably could even build warp drives, wormholes, etc...)

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I mentioned the aculbier warp earlier I think. The problem with gravitational drives (ignoring the aculbier warp) is the fact they can't break the light barrier and would crush people on board with inertia and opposing gravitational tides...

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Can't break the light barrier, but can accelerate and travel very fast.

Not sure what you mean by the inertia crushing people - do you mean by the acceleration? Can't you also use the grav generators to cancel that out?

Gravitational tides I didn't consider (especially opposing ones from the ships artifical own internal gravity)...even if you put the grav engines on long booms....

But isn't that what an Alcubierre Warp Drive
does....warp space in front of and behind the ship to create movement? And gravity is just a warp in space....also, you would need exotic matter and neg pressure to create one of those too....

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Wormholes require more than just gravity to form, in order to become stable they need exotic matter and negative energy fields.

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Well, I thought they could form in rotating black holes...

But I have read you'd need exotic matter (which may not even exist) and negative pressure densities (which do with the Cassimir effect, right?) to keep and artifical one open. And it would have to be ULTRA-HUGE (artifical or not) to prevent gravitational tides from ripping a ship apart, or from passage causing it to collapse. (If I remember correctly...been a while since I cracked a physics book....)

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Its also perfectly possible to generate gravity with a conventional drive. You just accelerate at a constant 1g .

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Sure, but in the "down" direction of travel...

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Originally posted by Reaverchow:
But they would experice relativistic time dialation if he went at STL (Slower Than Light) speeds...this means that a journey taking hundreds of years from the view of the outside universe, would only take only decades or less ship's time. So the 500 years could be measured since the arrival.

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Relativistic time dialation is only really noticable at relativistic speeds (speeds approaching the speed of light). Your talk tau getting very close to 0. Beyond that see my earlier post on intestellar travel.

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And pretty close to light if I remember. But I thought we speculated on some kind of ship that could go that speed....

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Originally posted by Reaverchow:
My only HUGE complaint is the solar system model -
all of thoe "70 Earths") and their accompanying gas giants would have to ocuppy a narrow habitable zone around the star called "The Goldilocks Zone", and they'd be constantly bumping into each other, and most been destroyed billions of years ago.

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Well most of thoes are moons of the gas giants and bigger planets . In fact there is probably no more than twenty planetary bodies in the habitable zone, the rest is moons. Its not a stretch if you look at the numbers.

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20 still seems like alot. But I guess if you assume a multiple suns system, that number drops per star. I ain't so good at orbital dynamics, but it would seem that here would be some collisions eventually (esp f

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Originally posted by reaverchow:
Can't break the light barrier, but can accelerate and travel very fast.

Not sure what you mean by the inertia crushing people - do you mean by the acceleration? Can't you also use the grav generators to cancel that out?

Gravitational tides I didn't consider (especially opposing ones from the ships artifical own internal gravity)...even if you put the grav engines on long booms....

But isn't that what an Alcubierre Warp Drive
does....warp space in front of and behind the ship to create movement? And gravity is just a warp in space....also, you would need exotic matter and neg pressure to create one of those too....

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In an alcubierre warp the ship is held within a completely 'flat' area of space-time within the space-warp bubble... As for the rest your right, the AW is impractical even if it is possible, simply because by some estimates it would take more energy to warp space in that way than the enitre rest mass energy of our universe .
I'm not entirely sure you could use gravity to counteract inertia, cause all those different gravitational fields pulling this way and that could likely rip the ship apart.

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Originally posted by Reaverchow:
Well, I thought they could form in rotating black holes...

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Possibly, very if:
Because of its two event horizons, it might be possible to avoid hitting the singularity of a spinning black hole. At the outer event horizon, the properties of spacetime allow objects to move only towards the singularity. However, when an object passes the inner event horizon, the object is able to move in directions away from the singularity, pass through another set of inner and outer event horizons, and emerge out of the black hole into another universe or another part of this universe without traveling faster than the speed of light (following a time-like path).

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Originally posted by reaverchow:
And pretty close to light if I remember. But I thought we speculated on some kind of ship that could go that speed....

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Yep, that would by the bussard intestellar ram-jet. I might add that technically any drive (at least any reaction-based drive) reach relativistic speeds, you just have to keep accelerating .

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Originally posted by reaverchow:
20 still seems like alot. But I guess if you assume a multiple suns system, that number drops per star. I ain't so good at orbital dynamics, but it would seem that here would be some collisions eventually (esp for gas giants big enough to have Earth sized moons - which they would need for Earth-like gravity)

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This was disscussed in another thread, and I believe it was KayleeIsAll who did the math, essentially nature would generate a stable orbit.

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Originally posted by Reaverchow:
Yeah, I know...a MASSIVE stable wormhole that just magically happens to go to a system of terraformable planets...and there are unicorns there
too!

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Well what do you expect when you follow elves riding on the back of dragons?

Q: What do you have when you are holding two little green balls in your hand.
A: Kermit's undivided attention.

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Originally posted by citizen:

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Originally posted by reaverchow:

Not sure what you mean by the inertia crushing people - do you mean by the acceleration? Can't you also use the grav generators to cancel that out?

Gravitational tides I didn't consider (especially opposing ones from the ships artifical own internal gravity)...even if you put the grav engines on long booms....

But isn't that what an Alcubierre Warp Drive
does....warp space in front of and behind the ship to create movement? And gravity is just a warp in space....also, you would need exotic matter and neg pressure to create one of those too....

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In an alcubierre warp the ship is held within a completely 'flat' area of space-time within the space-warp bubble... As for the rest your right, the AW is impractical even if it is possible, simply because by some estimates it would take more energy to warp space in that way than the enitre rest mass energy of our universe .
I'm not entirely sure you could use gravity to counteract inertia, cause all those different gravitational fields pulling this way and that could likely rip the ship apart.

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That's right ship stays still relative to the space around it, space *itself* moves. So it doesn't violate Relativity (was that General or Special? I always forget....)

As for AW being impractical...what about the Micro Warp Bubble idea? (Which sounds like a just a math trick really) - doesn't that lower the energy costs *somewhat*?

(And would make building my TARDIS possible!)

We just need a smart engineer to make it work!

And as for ripping the ship apart...yeah...good point....what if we made a ship that pulled in one direction, and made the interior artifical gravity align along that direction? Heck, or even used the same gravity field for both? So all the pull was in one direction. (Travelers would be going forward feet first, I guess.) Would that work?

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Originally posted by Reaverchow:
Well, I thought they could form in rotating black holes...

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Possibly, very if:
Because of its two event horizons, it might be possible to avoid hitting the singularity of a spinning black hole. At the outer event horizon, the properties of spacetime allow objects to move only towards the singularity. However, when an object passes the inner event horizon, the object is able to move in directions away from the singularity, pass through another set of inner and outer event horizons, and emerge out of the black hole into another universe or another part of this universe without traveling faster than the speed of light (following a time-like path).

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I just starting to re-learn this....time-like path...space-like path....

Bottom line is, FTL travel/communication would mean time travel, and the posibility causality violations....nature may forbid that...then again, it may happen all the time!

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Originally posted by reaverchow:
And pretty close to light if I remember. But I thought we speculated on some kind of ship that could go that speed....

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Yep, that would by the bussard intestellar ram-jet. I might add that technically any drive (at least any reaction-based drive) reach relativistic speeds, you just have to keep accelerating .

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Sure. At one g....shouldn't be a problem....just need LOTS of fuel....and fuel to accelerate the mass of the fuel.... ;) Unless you didn't carry he fuel like in a ramjet...

But could a Bussard scoop up that much intersteller hydrogen to keep up that kind of acceleration *constantly*?

EDITED TO ADD

Oh, and I forget....colser to c (lightspeed) you get, more massive the ship gets, more fuel you need to propell it. 'course, in a ramjet, faster you go, more fuel you collect....('till you hit a bit of space dust and explode!)

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Originally posted by reaverchow:
20 still seems like alot. But I guess if you assume a multiple suns system, that number drops per star. I ain't so good at orbital dynamics, but i

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