-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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posted
In B5 Ops, you could always see a rotating star field and shadows from the 'mandibles'.
In Firefly, it's possible that they are in multiple binary star system.. with dozens of planets, habitable mooms, and tereformed worlds. Another thing that occured to me, is that they might be in a very dense star cluster where star systems are within a Ly of each other.. close enough for non-FTL travel between them.
-------------------- joH'a' 'oH wIj DevwI' jIH DIchDaq Hutlh pagh (some days it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps in the morning) The Woozle!
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Those cows were only in the cargo hold for a month. Long enough for them to forget they were cows, but short enough to put those two planetary systems really close to each other without FTL.
If they were at a minimum of 1 LY apart, each episode would cover a year. Unless you want to get into relativity and time dialation.
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The complication there would be the total elimination of "old flame" or "stubborn nemesis" storylines, since once you departed a planet, you'd never again see the people there. If you returned next week, you wouldn't meet your lost love, but her great-grandson instead.
posted
I had an odd thought while watching "Safe" the other night. River stops in mid-ramble to announce that she hears crickets. Crickets. On an alien world in another solar system that was once unihabitable. Did they, like, import the crickets from Earth-that-was?
quote:Originally posted by Jason Abbadon: heck, I could see them lowering the gravity during battle conditions and increasing it tenfold if the sation is boarded or to quell their all-too-frequent riots).
Good Lord! Just attempting to *change* the rotation rate in a station that size would suddenly smash everyone and everything up against one side of whatever room they're in. Yeah, you'd stop a riot easily that way, but I'd imagine you'd have a nasty visit from Dr. Franklin, the dockworkers, and all the station repairmen. Londo and G'Kar would probably also be yelling at you from both sides, and Lord knows we don't need those two on the same side against you!
---{Firefly}--- The crickets probably just stowed away with some cargo somewhere. I would imagine there's also been a lot of rats and cockroaches deposited amongst all the populated worlds.
posted
I've just thought of a really good line of reasoning to prove that Firefly does indeed use FTL travel, even if some of the nomenclature is confusing:
How the heck did all of those millions or even billions of settlers migrate away from Earth in the first place? Without any kind of FTL travel, it would be virtually impossible for anyone to make it out to any other solar system in such a short time frame (around 400 years, allowing for Earth's current near-total lack of spaceflight capability). Therefore, in order to accommodate any large-scale migration, it would be almost a given that there would have to be some kind of FTL capability.
I really don't feel that it would be at all reasonable to have "more than seventy Earths" crammed into one solar system, even if many of them are moon-sized bodies in outer orbits. Even though science fiction often strains credibility, there's still always a sense of some kind of base logic. And having that huge of a civilization -- a civilization that had already migrated from another solar system anyway -- it doesn't make any sense to not have FTL capability.
(Aside on B5: C&C was definitely located just below the central docking bay in the rotating section. You could see it in a few shots, and also the quick zoom-in takes that were in the opening credits in the first few seasons.)
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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posted
Yeah, I actually read that article before I made my previous post. And although I agree that all of those theories are possible, none of them are probable. Think about it from this way:
Humanity sends out many STL probes to nearby stars. This in itself is a technological achievement, considering the fastest speed any Earth-made object has achieved is about 70 km/s (about .23 c, actually), and that was just a couple of tiny, solar probes that didn't have much in the way of engines of their own.
The Earth gets "used up" from all the pollution, overpopulation, and warfare.
One of the STL probes just so happens to find one very-close-by star that has over seventy life-supporting or terraform-able planets and moons orbiting it. This would be such a huge coincidence that I find it almost ludicrous, though admittedly still within the realm of some kind of possibility.
Everyone (or everyone who has money or influence, anyway) picks up and moves -- via STL, again -- to this new star system, in a process that would take at least fifty to a hundred years at sub-light speeds.
So, do you really think that all of Human civilization could reasonably pack things up, migrate for decades, and create a whole new infrastructure, completely without the benefit of FTL propulsion? I sure don't.
Finally, I thought of one more tiny bit of supporting (not primary) evidence. Consider the little puppet show from "Heart of Gold"... specifically, the way the exodus from Earth was portrayed. It wasn't a single migration to one place, but rather a scattering in multiple directions. That in itself suggests a widely-distributed range of settlements, and therefore FTL drive. (Yes yes, I know that the puppet show was very stylized, but IMO the concept that the play was trying to convey strongly suggests "FTL" to me.)
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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quote:Originally posted by Jason Abbadon: heck, I could see them lowering the gravity during battle conditions and increasing it tenfold if the sation is boarded or to quell their all-too-frequent riots).
Good Lord! Just attempting to *change* the rotation rate in a station that size would suddenly smash everyone and everything up against one side of whatever room they're in. Yeah, you'd stop a riot easily that way, but I'd imagine you'd have a nasty visit from Dr. Franklin, the dockworkers, and all the station repairmen. Londo and G'Kar would probably also be yelling at you from both sides, and Lord knows we don't need those two on the same side against you!
B.J.
Actually that's more a tactic for races with generated gravity (or fields that allow a close aproximation). The concept of a "boarding party" on Trek should be laughable between forcefields, gravity manipulation and remote-controlled depressurization of sections. And ust turning off the airflow would have worked just fine on B5- or flooding in anastetic gas.
As to a "stellar cluster", you would definitely still need FTL to make it workable- else you could be on a re-spply run to a colony and arrive to find your clients had died decades earlier (or they no longer use what you're selling).
Alien Crickets are not such a big glitch- she may have been mistaken and was listenig to some native bug with a simmular sound- it's not like you often see crickets when they're chirping, after all. ....of course, we see pine trees on most alien worlds too so....
One possibility is that humans deliberately destroy native ecosystems to make them "human friendly" by seeding hardy (biologically enhanced) plants, bugs, baceria, etc. once a planet is detected in a temperate solar region. Possibly the space probes making the initial discovery drop "bio packages" to make eventual terraforming easier down the line.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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quote:Originally posted by Timo: But you probably would.
The complication there would be the total elimination of "old flame" or "stubborn nemesis" storylines, since once you departed a planet, you'd never again see the people there. If you returned next week, you wouldn't meet your lost love, but her great-grandson instead.
Longevity treatments notwithstanding, of course.
Timo Saloniemi
It'd also pretty much eliminate any repeat clients for Inara and the rest of the companions.
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quote:Originally posted by MinutiaeMan: Humanity sends out many STL probes to nearby stars. This in itself is a technological achievement, considering the fastest speed any Earth-made object has achieved is about 70 km/s (about .23 c, actually), and that was just a couple of tiny, solar probes that didn't have much in the way of engines of their own.
Yes, that was Helios 2, and your (approximate) 70km/s is correct, but that works out to 0.00023c, which is a LOT slower. The fastest interplanetary probe is Voyager 1 at ~17.2km/s, which is about 0.000057c.
posted
Whoops, I converted to meters when I should've left it at kilometers, right? Argh.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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posted
I've been reading the Alacrity Fitzhugh and Hobart Floyt trilogy written by Brian Daley. One of the minor sub-plots (turns major in book 3) deals with these ancient aliens called the Precursors.
Since it's now been firmly established that Firefly is set in one star system, this paragraph I read struck me as interesting.
quote:And so at last, Spica. First magnitude jewel of the Virgin; blue, short-lived supergiant; homeplace of the mightest Precursor work yet confirmed: the Carousel. Twenty-three E-type paradise worlds ina single impossible orbit, blazing gems in an imperial diadem, with no clue as to how the trick was done, confounding and enrapturing Homo sapiens (and incidentally giving lots of people the conviction that their species was the Chosen of the Precursors).
What if that's what happened in the Firefly 'verse? For the most part, people in this trilogy I'm reading aren't interested in the Precursors. They all go about their business. Empires rise and fall, wars are fought, people live their lives and give no thought about the Precursors. It's no big deal to them.
What if the Firelfy 'verse was like that? Somehow this system wound up hosting several hospitable worlds. That's not something that happens in nature. What if it was artifically done? What if it happened long before the Earth was used up and Humanity just happened to discover this system?
And what if it's not that big a deal in the Firefly 'verse. People, for the most part, just don't care, as long as it works.
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Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
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posted
The way the map River pulls up in Serenity looks, it woulD really appear that the "system" is in actually a really tight star cluster, something that I mentioned to bX in the PMS we did while making that map. In fact, I'd actually forgotten about the possibility of us working on it.
Culled directly from the PMs:
Interestingly, the shooting script in the SVC has Mr. Universe noting "headlines on 32 planets"...but we've got 44 not including Miranda here. Of those, only 2 are gas giants. Hm.
I was reading through the SVC more last night & today. I saw the stellar map that very clearly seems to imply (as Simon--I believe--mentioned) that it's a globular cluster. I counted 6 stars with varying planets around them. Yet it's always refered to a A system, not "systems" plural. Indeed, on page 113 in the script, the notation reads "...the solar system, glowing lines connecting all the stars and planets...River pushes to one system, one planet."
At the same time, Joss' memo--& the teacher's intro narration--states quite clearly that they found "a new solar system with dozens of planets and hundreds of moons." What if---& this is a weird concept, but it might work--there's a central star (I seem to remember that in the map) & orbiting around that one are the Central Planets, the Core. As it expands out, not only are there a few other planets out there, but FIVE OTHER STARS each in their own orbital run. Each of THOSE stars has a few planets around it as well (the map shows that quite clearly) & then some of the planets have moons. It would explain the light levels, the heat for the CHZ (think a big munging mess of heat & living areas in the middle) AND allow for the vast multitudes of planetary bodies. That would also allow for a LOT more planets (dozens compared to the 20 you have now) & moons (hundreds to your 24). I think that might be what Whedon intended so that anyone can just...make up worlds as they see fit. Which you (we) could easily do.
A couple smaller things:
The currency bills. They have a solar system pattern. What if that pattern is the system that the planet is located in of those 6 stars? Notice the one shown has that last planet in an orbital plane totally out of line with the rest?
In the "Worlds Of The Alliance" image, Sihnon is shown to has 4 small moon bodies--unnamed--next to it.
On page 14, Hera, Shadow, & Persephone are stated to be outer planets, so it looks like you were right about Hera being Independent territory.
So ther'e probably not even a NEED for FTL.
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