The Firefly/Serenity Solar System
POSTED BY: FraserBW
UPDATED: Tuesday, March 7, 2006 10:55
VIEWED: 27197
PAGE 6 of 11
Quote:
Originally posted by StarPilotGrainger:
My big problem with 'one star system' is Out of Gas. Specifically, the notion that they were out of communications range.
What exactly is communications range? Radio signals travel at the speed of light (if they're not using something faster - nobody seems to have communications lag time in Serenity or Firefly). You'd almost have to assume that all the planets were conveniently on the other side of the sun from Serenity for them to not be able to contact someone in a reasonable amount of time for rescue.
However, if you assume slow FTL travel but still STL communications (at least for the most part - core planets might have an Ansible for the Cortex, that ships access with STL radio), you can be way out in the black at a point where it might take months for a signal to reach somebody.
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Well I think we have to assume that faster than light communications do not exsist in the Joss-verse, so yes the beacon that Wash sent out would travel at the speed of light, but that could be hours to reach another ship. And that ship would take much longer to reach them than the radio waves took and Mal would be out of oxygen long before then. Radio signals from Pluto would take 8 hours to reach the Earth in the closer arc of its orbit. If Serenity were going the long way around the solar system based on the planets positions, it could be hours out of the way of any space traffic. If most of the planets were on one side of the solar system, that's where most of the space traffic would be. The ship routes basically have to follow the planet orbits.
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Quote:
Originally posted by FraserBW:
Well I think we have to assume that faster than light communications do not exsist in the Joss-verse, so yes the beacon that Wash sent out would travel at the speed of light, but that could be hours to reach another ship. And that ship would take much longer to reach them than the radio waves took and Mal would be out of oxygen long before then. Radio signals from Pluto would take 8 hours to reach the Earth in the closer arc of its orbit. If Serenity were going the long way around the solar system based on the planets positions, it could be hours out of the way of any space traffic. If most of the planets were on one side of the solar system, that's where most of the space traffic would be. The ship routes basically have to follow the planet orbits.
Ah, but if they couldn't get help by radio, then they couldn't get help at all, and so much of the rest of the episode makes no sense. The shuttles would be more likely to get help by staying put than they would by going out. It's not like they could possibly get in range to be found by a ship if they're not already in range to be rescued by someone hearing the radio beacon - they're much more likely to be found if they stay by Serenity... at least that way they're a bigger profile, there's more chance (even if it's exceedingly slim) of being able to jury-rig a temporary solution, etc.
Star Pilot Grainger
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Radio signals decay. They never said the signal would take to long to reach anyone, they said the signal couldn't reach anyone. Diverting the signal to the navsats would boost it, giving them more of a chance to be heard. It's nothing to do with the length of time it takes the signal to reach anyone.
Now it's true that we can communicate with probes out as far as Jupiter, but they're signals are VERY weak. They also have those HUGE antenna arrays to pick up these signals, which neither Serenity nor most other ships we see, have. It's not unreasonable to assume that the signal would be too weak for anyone to pickup given how far away from the main shipping lanes they were supposed to be.
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Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
Now it's true that we can communicate with probes out as far as Jupiter, but they're signals are VERY weak. They also have those HUGE antenna arrays to pick up these signals, which neither Serenity nor most other ships we see, have.
Damn you and you logic, you aren't allowed to use logic, logic sucks.
Everyone on the board knows that signals decay and you need an obnoxious dish to receive a signal from somewhere as close as an orbiting TV satellite, but no one wants to admit that in the future it might be possible that a signal could decay.
I mean this is the future man.
Every signal sent in Firefly comes in 5x5 no matter how far away the sender is or how cheap their transmitter. The only possible way for someone to be out of range is if their signal couldn't get to someone in time, signal decay is impossible.
At least that's what I've heard. I call it bullshit but since Out of Gas first came out people have been convinced that there is no such thing as signal decay and the only possible explanation was that they used FTL travel to get so far away a radio signal could not get anywhere in time.
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Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
Damn you and you logic, you aren't allowed to use logic, logic sucks.
I... I, I was weak.
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Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
Now it's true that we can communicate with probes out as far as Jupiter, but they're signals are VERY weak. They also have those HUGE antenna arrays to pick up these signals, which neither Serenity nor most other ships we see, have.
Damn you and you logic, you aren't allowed to use logic, logic sucks.
Everyone on the board knows that signals decay and you need an obnoxious dish to receive a signal from somewhere as close as an orbiting TV satellite, but no one wants to admit that in the future it might be possible that a signal could decay.
I mean this is the future man.
Every signal sent in Firefly comes in 5x5 no matter how far away the sender is or how cheap their transmitter. The only possible way for someone to be out of range is if their signal couldn't get to someone in time, signal decay is impossible.
At least that's what I've heard. I call it bullshit but since Out of Gas first came out people have been convinced that there is no such thing as signal decay and the only possible explanation was that they used FTL travel to get so far away a radio signal could not get anywhere in time.
I admit that while I know signals decay, my impression was that within a planetary system it wouldn't decay enough to be relevant, and that yes, when space travel is so widespread and, presumably, communications so standard that Serenity never seems to have trouble getting ahold of anybody at any other time, that in the future they have really powerful transmitters just in case that should get around that problem, except perhaps in the extremely unlikely coincidence that it happened at a time that they were at the other side of the sun from everyone else.
Specifically, I have a bit of trouble believing that a ship could get anywhere in a reasonable length of time that a signal could not. Maybe my perceptions of the physics of the thing are wrong, though, I admit I'm no expert - but then Joss admits to throwing science and logic out the window and people seem to bend over backwards to explain how he's really right after all. ;)
Star Pilot Grainger
"Remember, the enemy's gate is down."
LJ: http://www.livejournal.com/users/newnumber6 (real)
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StarPilotGrainger:
That's kind of the point, signals decay very quickly. I can't pick up radio one from my car if I drive too far away from London.
We need huge banks of transmitters/receivers larger than Serenity herself to pick up signals coming from probes, and the receivers/transmitters on those probes are far larger than anything we see on Serenity. And the size of the dish does matter, it's not just a question of more powerful futur-terrific communications tech.
It's not unreasonable to assume that the space-lanes have booster 'ComSats' that act as relay stations, for the similar reasons there's NavSats (which I assume are navigational buoys).
The Alliance military vessels likely have powerful communications array's which don't require a booster to send a signal anywhere in the system, the same way they probably have advanced navigational equipment that doesn't need NavSats, but Serenity, being a cheap civilian utilitarian vessel doesn't. She's not designed to travel outside of space lanes away from comsats/navsats, so has cheaper simpler less powerful communications equipment.
Think about the difference between a modern ocean going military vessel and a small fishing boat. The military vessel can communicate with home port even when it's thousands of miles away. The small fishing vessel will be out of communications range fairly quickly since it isn't designed to travel far from the shore.
Throwing science and logic out of the window doesn't necessarily mean one is going to be wrong. Star Trek tries hard to keep things scientific and fails spectacularly in every episode. FireFly, by comparison (although admittedly 14 episodes pales in comparison to ST's run) is far more internally and externally consistent, despite not giving a damn about the science.
Links that may interest:
http://dmoz.org/Science/Astronomy/Solar_System/
http://www.spaceref.com/
A page about the likelihood of Earth-like planets.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=13178
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Quote:
Originally posted by FraserBW:
Well I think we have to assume that faster than light communications do not exsist in the Joss-verse...
Sorry, but demonstratably FTL comm does exist in the 'Verse. Following the slaughter on Haven, the Operative talks to Mal in real time, without a noticable time lag and without knowing his location. If they were communicating along the EM band, the Operative would have to be damn close to Mal. The exact time lag would give him distance, and simple triangulation would nail down position. QED.
(Incidentally, there's no contradiction between STL drive systems and FTL communications; we can communicate at the speed of light right now, and have for more than a century, but we still can't teleport matter.)
We can assume that FTL comm requires a working high-output power source, so with ship's power knocked out in Out of Gas they would have been off-line. Being used to relying on FTL comm, any radio or laser-based comm gear on Serenity would probably be strictly short-range.
Poor planning and design, I admit, but so is running all your ship's major systems through a single power source with inadequate back-up. As stupid as driving without insurance--which is something tens of thousands of people do every day because they don't have enough money for insurance. Sometimes you just can't afford to be smart.
Oh, and by the by, while the RPG is admittedly not cannon, the drive system(s) described there do fit the observed technology and travel times of the TV show and movie, so until something better (or at least more cannonical) comes along, I'm sticking with it.
(Of course, the RPG also says communications in the 'Verse are limited to lightspeed. Sigh. Guess nothin's perfect...)
"To me, Faster Than Light makes about as much sense as Slower Than Dark!" -- John Byrne
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Quote:
Originally posted by aahhaaa:
It should be 'relatively' easy to find the Verse... as we live on Earth That Was. Pick a maximum number of light years they could have travelled- that's the center of a sphere centered on us. Even assuming 200 light years, there just aren't that many stars nearby.
The problem with this solution is that we don't have either the top range or top speed of the ships involved. Specifically, we don't know how close the fleet was to "C" during the voyage. Joss says they traveled for a generation--call that fifty years; at relativistic speeds, fifty years of ship time could easily equal millennia for an outside observer. That could place the 'Verse thousands of light-years beyond Sol System.
(Granted, the show and movie both use Christian Era calender dates that imply we're no more than 500 years in the future, but on a one-way voyage I imagine the emmigrants didn't care what year it was back on Earth-That-Was, and only counted their own experienced time as "real".)
"She's tore up plenty. But she'll fly true." -- Zoë Washburn
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Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
StarPilotGrainger:
That's kind of the point, signals decay very quickly. I can't pick up radio one from my car if I drive too far away from London.
We need huge banks of transmitters/receivers larger than Serenity herself to pick up signals coming from probes, and the receivers/transmitters on those probes are far larger than anything we see on Serenity. And the size of the dish does matter, it's not just a question of more powerful futur-terrific communications tech.
Okay, perhaps I was wrong about that - as I said, I'm no expert. I thought Earthbound radio ranges tended to have more to do with the curvature of the Earth and atmospheric conditions you obviously wouldn't find in space, I had no idea that, in space, they dropped off so quickly, but I'll take your word for it.
Though I still think on the whole a multi-star system verse with slow FTL works much better than a single solar system based on what we've been presented.
Star Pilot Grainger
"Remember, the enemy's gate is down."
LJ: http://www.livejournal.com/users/newnumber6 (real)
http://www.livejournal.com/users/alternaljournal (fictional, travelling through other worlds)
Unreachable Star: http://www.unreachablestar.net - Comics & SF News/Reviews/Opinions
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