GENERAL DISCUSSIONS

Technology in the 'verse

POSTED BY: ZEKE023
UPDATED: Thursday, October 30, 2003 17:24
SHORT URL:
VIEWED: 16955
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Monday, June 2, 2003 12:04 PM

CHRISTHECYNIC


I've always believed that someone should be able to stand up to their own arguments. When you say that what I have said flies in the face of one hundred years of science that’s a bad thing, when what you say does that’s no problem. Then you move for a counter argument why? The only reason that I can think of is to take attention away from you lack of explanation.

I also think that one person should not have actively stop any others willful ignorance for the second person to take the seriously. Your supposed knowledge on this subject is laughable. I did a search on faster than light information just those words, nothing more. The experiment that I mentioned was the first one mentioned in the first page that came up [in it information was shown to move at four and seven tenths the speed of light].

As I said these results were experimentally verified, and as I tried to explain to you just because something is experimentally verified, or otherwise verified, does not mean that it is true. An example, the theory that the earth was flat was experimentally verified many times, as was the theory that the sun revolved around the earth. Neither of these are true. Further multiple witnesses verified the belief that the Titanic sunk without breaking up (on the surface), the belief that the Titanic broke up on the surface was also verified by multiple witnesses.

Were you to actually care you could have easily looked this up yourself, and found the information. But you chose not to, implying that you do not care who is right and you simply want to argue. On this assumption I wont show you so much as a link to said papers and I will predict that you will say that I’m just making it up.

As far as I am concerned this conversation ended a while ago and you simply haven’t realized yet. I may continue to humor you by responding, or may not. Whether I or not depends largely on the amount of orange juice I have.

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Monday, June 2, 2003 12:10 PM

HOTFORKAYLEE


Wait a second, are you saying the earth isn't flat?
Why am I always the last one to find out about these things?

Quote:
"The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements: energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest."


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Monday, June 2, 2003 12:23 PM

ARCHER


Here we go again with the whole "Earth isn't flat" thing.

LIES!

Zeke- Think the questions about the nature of the 'verse will have to be anwered before we can really expostulate on the communications issue. If we're talking multiple systems, they'd have to have some sort of FTL communications in order to maintain the Cortex.

But we're hung up on the issue of multiple systems vs. one system. Anybody got Joss' phone number laying around?

There ain't nothin' I can't overcome or come to know. So lay your heavy load down on me, strip everything I have away. I am not your prisoner, I am not afraid.

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Monday, June 2, 2003 12:39 PM

CHRISTHECYNIC


Quote:
Originally posted by HotForKaylee:
Wait a second, are you saying the earth isn't flat?
Why am I always the last one to find out about these things?

Quote:
"The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements: energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest."



Here we go, this is good conversation.

My father used to be a card-carrying member of the flat earth society. He stopped paying the dues and thus isn’t anymore. Everyone knows the earth is flat, just like everyone knows that at it’s center is a mass of primordial Coca Cola, which makes it go round. This is as obvious as the fact that we really did go to the moon (if it was just a movie it would have had sex and violence.)

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Monday, June 2, 2003 12:50 PM

CAPTBAGGYTROUSERS


OOookay, to swing this boat gradually back toward Firefly...

I think there might be something to the idea of ".99% of lightspeed" ships that took Earth to a single solar system, or cluster of nearby solar systems ("...whole new galaxy of Earths..."), then dumped 'em. Sleeper ships which contained frozen passengers from Earth-That-Was might have taken a couple of hundred years to get anywhere, hence the culture represented in the 'Verse might be fairly young.

I have often imagined the strong Old West influence on the characters on Firefly is not accidental, rather a social construction created by displaced people trying to re-affirm their identities. The first American settlers in space all-too-strongly identified themselves as cowboys, as most of the world thinks of us yankees now. After a few generations of ten-gallon hats and half-pretended swagger, it became the accepted norm. It's easy!

I mean, how many of y'all adopt a little drawl when posting to Fireflyfans? Honestly, now?

History repeats the old conceits

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Monday, June 2, 2003 2:11 PM

CHRISTHECYNIC


You know you are right, I am horrible at relaying information, it was 1995. To me that’s recent, but I’m sure that to someone as immature as you it was ages ago.

So lets see where this is going now, you went to school for ten years to learn physics, wow amazing ten years (can anyone else say short amount of time?) To recap, ten years at school and you still make the high school mistake of thinking that relativity and quantum physics are both correct. Where did you go to school? If you don’t believe me, believe Hawking, hell you can be the layman you’ve demonstrated yourself to be and read it in A Brief History of Time, the updated version of said book, or The Universe in a Nut Shell. There you wont have any of the hard physics stuff, so your lack of understanding wont hinder you.

I love the twelve year old comment, that is only one of the things that I base my belief in your immaturity on. Next you’re going to call me a meanie right? Or is it poopy head? Come on, if you went to school for ten years I hope you are at least capable of pretending you’ve put that kind of thing behind you.

You should have also learned in your time in school that any source is good if it can point you to information that you can check the credentials on yourself. The Internet is a very good place to do this as you can look something up, either on a reliable site, or go to the library and look into it on your own. Also if you don’t know about something, as you obviously don’t know about this subject the Internet would be a good thing to check before you assume other people are wrong.

Further if the only education into physics you got was at school then I have definitively wasted my time reading what you had to say as you either just got out of school, or there is a good chance that the parts of what you were taught concerning this area are already out of date. The ability to measure in increments small enough to find out if something in laboratory conditions exceeded the speed of light have only existed since 1993.

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Monday, June 2, 2003 2:46 PM

CHRISTHECYNIC


Are you illiterate? I already told you that I wasn’t going to encourage you ignorance by simply handing you knowledge. You should at least have to type something into a search engine, and preferably go to a library.

Start of with the Heisenberg uncertainly principle. This was done by Werner Heisenberg in 1927

Next look into quantum tunneling, first try Eugene Wigner and his student L. Eisenbud and the work they did at Princeton in 1955

You can take a detour to Steven Chu and Stephen Wong at this point but I would recommend skipping to the 1993 work done by Raymond Chiao and his team at the University of California in Berkeley.

The Mozart thing happened later still, that was a team headed by Nimtz.

Now then if you actually care about being correct you will plug these names into a card catalogue and read what happened. If you are lazy you can plug them into a search engine. In fact I waould wager that you will find multiple pages that have all of their names.

If you do this you will be sending bioelectric impulses through that badly neglected bit of graymatter in your head. It’s called thinking, do it more often. If you don’t you will have done exactly what I expected.

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Monday, June 2, 2003 3:25 PM

MAGUINAN


Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
You got those papers yet?

That's what I thought.

Incidentally, what is your background in physics, Einstein? Internet Physics? Theoretical Googling for Physics topics?


{sarcasm}You'd better watch out Thegn. If you get too mean, Chris is gonna take his "Quantum Chromodynamics for Dummies" and go home Talrius style (i.e. in three weeks).{/sarcasm}

Seriously, maybe everyone else is being nice to Christhecynic and Talrius, but I'm more of a "don't-let-the-door-hit-you-where-the-good-lord-split-you" kind of a gal myself.

-maguinan "pack your bags, we're going on a guilt trip" the meanie.


----------------
"That brings us to who we need,
A place where we can save
A heart that beats as both siphon and reservoir." -Jeff Buckley

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Monday, June 2, 2003 3:35 PM

CHRISTHECYNIC


Do you know anything first off I told you it was almost 80 years ago, and I brought you up through 8 years ago, sorry if you can't make it the rest of the way on your own.

The uncertainty principle is the explanation of things such as ground state fluctuations. It states that one can never know both the exact position and velocity. There is also the statement that the product of the uncertainty in position and uncertainty in velocity was always greater than Planck’s constant. Einstein’s thought experiment was meant to disprove this on the basis that information can not be sent faster than the speed of light. The thought experiment was naturally incorrect in it’s conclusions.

Have you learned to read what others say yet? If you do you will discover 1) I have the papers, 2) I have no plans to “give” them to you. 3) I correctly predicted that you would claim that they did not exist, despite the fact that almost negligible effort on your part would give you evidence to the contrary.



Einstein’s IQ was only 13 points higher than mine, and he did incredible things in spite of it. If you think that by sarcastically calling me Einstein it’s going to get anything more out of me than when you called me a twelve year old you are very wrong.

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Monday, June 2, 2003 3:38 PM

CHRISTHECYNIC


Quote:
Originally posted by maguinan:
Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
You got those papers yet?

That's what I thought.

Incidentally, what is your background in physics, Einstein? Internet Physics? Theoretical Googling for Physics topics?


{sarcasm}You'd better watch out Thegn. If you get too mean, Chris is gonna take his "Quantum Chromodynamics for Dummies" and go home Talrius style (i.e. in three weeks).{/sarcasm}

Seriously, maybe everyone else is being nice to Christhecynic and Talrius, but I'm more of a "don't-let-the-door-hit-you-where-the-good-lord-split-you" kind of a gal myself.

-maguinan "pack your bags, we're going on a guilt trip" the meanie.


----------------
"That brings us to who we need,
A place where we can save
A heart that beats as both siphon and reservoir." -Jeff Buckley


Hey at least you're more mature about it than he is (sorry if it's she not he.)

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Monday, June 2, 2003 4:50 PM

MAGUINAN


Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
]HA, That's good. Quantum Chromodynamics for Dummies.

Or The Idiots Guide to Relativistic Field Theory.


How about "Teach Yourself Linear and Nonlinear Dirac Equations in 24 hours". That's a good read.

-maguinan


----------------
"That brings us to who we need,
A place where we can save
A heart that beats as both siphon and reservoir." -Jeff Buckley

P.S. This is like "name-dropping" physics nerd style.

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Monday, June 2, 2003 8:57 PM

JIMMYJAMES


I just want to say something about the gravity on the ship. Well if you've seen "trash" you will have noticed some floating islands that used anti-gravity, so if they have that, then it's quite logical to assume they use that to generate gravity in the ship.

just thought i'd point that out.

--------------------------------------------------
do you know what the chain of command is? it's the chain i go get and beat you with till you understand who's in rutten command here

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Tuesday, June 3, 2003 1:44 AM

ARCHER


One thing that strikes me is the incredible stability of the ship. I mean, they pound that thing through atmo, and everybody just stands around like nothing's going on.

So not only do we have some fierce artificial gravity, but we got some massive intertial compensation going on.

Not that I'm asking for any Star Trek TOS camera-tilting effects while everyone grabs something and pretends like they're being rocked or anything.

There ain't nothin' I can't overcome or come to know. So lay your heavy load down on me, strip everything I have away. I am not your prisoner, I am not afraid.

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Tuesday, June 3, 2003 8:37 AM

CHRISTHECYNIC


Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
Of course, we all knew you were a genius. Eventually, you had to become a genius in this discussion, didn't you.

Comparing yourself to Einstein is just too much. That takes the cake, man.


Actually you compared me to Einstein, I just elaborated based upon the most common estimate of his IQ and pointed that it wasn't that that made him great.

Interestingly you are correct, of the definitions of genius I meet one by 7 points, however this is just stupid as genius is used to refer to Extraordinary intellectual and creative power or extraordinary intellect and talent, note that neither of these is caused by a high IQ.

Your jump from IQ to genius is as archaic as defining idiot as “and inoffensive term referring to people of extreme mental retardation have a mental age below three. Most of the people classified as idiot are unable to learn connected speech.”

When did you go to school? Were they still using these terms then? By the way, when these terms were in wide use the Intelligence Quotient was defined as a person’s mental age, divided by their chronological age, multiplied by one hundred. Now there are ageless IQ tests, so although IQ testing isn’t my strong point I’m guessing that it’s changed, and for this reason the association between genius and IQ is no longer applicable.

By using the IQ-genius association, and the estimate you gave for my age (twelve) we can say that for me to be a genius I would need to have a mental age of 16.8 or greater. Well in that case I am a genius, but somehow I don’t think that that is what you meant, so I urge you again: find out what you’re talking about before you say it.


As to my meds, that is a low thing to attack, now isn't it? Good guess though, dysthymia and chronic fatigue. Sorry, no delusions here.

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Tuesday, June 3, 2003 8:54 AM

CHRISTHECYNIC


By the way, just got you book, Advanced Quantum Mechanics, J.J. Sakurai.

You're right, light reading. I love calculus, by the way, so it's nice that the first differential equation is on the second page of text. Equation (1.1) Of course it isn’t like that’s a big deal, but some books open with lengthy history of the science introductions, this one had just enough of that.

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Tuesday, June 3, 2003 9:31 AM

ZEKE023


*steps in between THEGN and CHRISTHECYNIC to prevent the enevitable fisticuffs*

If we can come up with some specific questions - I can direct them to my friend who's a graduate student in Physics. She's specializing in the study of black holes - I imagine that can relate to what we're talking about in terms of space-time and gravity and such.

(she's hot too - many why did I let that one slip through my fingers... *doh*)

In other news - I'm still going with the executive decision of more than one system. Although it is possible for this to take place in one system - I think it unlikely due to the plethora of terraformable planets. Can we just go with that for the purposes of this conversation?

-Zeke

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Tuesday, June 3, 2003 10:05 AM

CHRISTHECYNIC


It is time that this stop, but I was looking forward to what he was going to say about the book.

I was wondering if he was going to say that I psychically came up with the fact that the first equation is on the second page of text, and that equation is a differential, or if he thought that I simply made it up and was lucky to be correct. Or, and this is the big or, if he would admit that although he is too lazy to do a search on the Internet when I gave him all of the information that he needed to get it on the first hit, I was willing to go down to the library to familiarize myself with new information rather then hide from it and pretend that it wasn’t real like he did.

Oh well, guess I’ll never know. Should probably return it to the library now (it's not really worth the read from what I can tell.)

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Tuesday, June 3, 2003 10:20 AM

CHRISTHECYNIC


I think the one system idea is better if we want to avoid mucking about with the whole FTL travel. But if you prefer multiple, I’ll go with it till we find out for sure one way or the other.

Back to the subject this started with. We have seen that the worlds in the core seem to have water a plenty, but those father out have a western atmosphere (not actual air, just the feel). This could easily be explained if the teraforming creates worlds like this and it requires further teraforming to make it lush and sea like. We can assume that entire worlds are the western like stuff we’ve seen because as Trash shows on worlds where it’s not all that way people don’t live in those bits.


Also assuming that a material that creates gravity (in a way other than mass) were to be found (a graviton emitter perhaps if you follow the graviton theory) then artificial gravity and changing the gravity of moons would be no problem.

The problem is that if this were to be something that was simply laid down that causes of gravity (through mass, the normal way) of earth level (9.8m/s^2) then if it were say a meter below the deck of the ship, when you were up a meter you would be affected by only one fourth of earth gravity. Also a mass to do this would be 146,882,494,005 Kg. Not exactly what you want to tote around in your ship.

It would be likely that something that created gravity via a means other than mass would act like this 147 billion-kilo weight, and thus would weaken as such.

In fact this is a drastic simplification, but I think it shows the problems well.

Note that if it were to cause gravity in all directions it would be indistinguishable from a mass of equal size in terms of gravitational attraction (it would still be a lot easier to move.)

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Wednesday, June 4, 2003 4:18 AM

ZEKE023


Quote:
Originally posted by Theign
Really? Tell your friend to come to this board. Female physicists are extremely rare.


I know... I know... the ironic thing about that whole situation was the fact that we had sparks - but I was dating someone else at the time. So things got to a point where I avoided her out of respect for my then current girlfriend - who is the bitch who ended up cheating on me with three people! Irony.

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
Back to the subject this started with.
Note that if it were to cause gravity in all directions it would be indistinguishable from a mass of equal size in terms of gravitational attraction (it would still be a lot easier to move.)


My interest is in function, not method. Although I agree with you in that some degree of understanding of method is nessisary to deduce function.

That being said - there could be hundred of different ways to create gravity. Did you notice that a part of this ship is rotating? Like the B5 ships? Could that have anything to do with it?

I hate to drive this question into the ground - but beacons? Did I make this up? Can anyone speak to the validity of this?

-Zeke

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Wednesday, June 4, 2003 6:37 AM

CHRISTHECYNIC


Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
My interest is in function, not method. Although I agree with you in that some degree of understanding of method is nessisary to deduce function.

That being said - there could be hundred of different ways to create gravity. Did you notice that a part of this ship is rotating? Like the B5 ships? Could that have anything to do with it?
-Zeke


No, no it couldn't. For that to work the floors would have to be rotating. If you look at B5, the station, you will see that the ground on the station is the hull, which is rotating. This isn’t true for everything so I assume that they have a form of artificial gravity but it was simply more efficient to use rotation.

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Wednesday, June 4, 2003 6:37 AM

CHRISTHECYNIC


No idea why it posted twice on me.

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Wednesday, June 4, 2003 7:10 AM

ZEKE023


Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:

No, no it couldn't. For that to work the floors would have to be rotating. If you look at B5, the station, you will see that the ground on the station is the hull, which is rotating. This isn’t true for everything so I assume that they have a form of artificial gravity but it was simply more efficient to use rotation.


Not the B5 station. The cruisers. There was a single rotating segment that supplied gravity. Obviously not through any science we can understand today - but it is a common thread in sci-fi. no?

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Wednesday, June 4, 2003 7:36 AM

CHRISTHECYNIC


Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
Not the B5 station. The cruisers. There was a single rotating segment that supplied gravity. Obviously not through any science we can understand today - but it is a common thread in sci-fi. no?

I have no idea, I don't think the ever gave a reason why that did what it did what it did, so we can't tell if it would work in firefly. I don't think it was spinning when the power was off in Out of Gas, so that would mean it doesn’t give the gravity (but I am not sure o this point).

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Wednesday, June 4, 2003 9:45 AM

JIMMYJAMES


that spinning part of the cruisers in B5 was where all the ships crew was. the front half of the ships was where all the fighters were kept... this is of course my assumption. it would seem to make the most sence. if you've seen 2010 you will notice that ship has that same spinning thing. well that's were all the crew stayed on that ship most of the time and when they were in other parts of the ship there was no gravity, so i'm just assuming that the artists and designers of B5 copied that idea.

and there is no way that little spinning thing on FF creates gravity. i think it's related to the engine. probably even connected to it in some way hence the engine inside rotating. who knows :)

--------------------------------------------------
do you know what the chain of command is? it's the chain i go get and beat you with till you understand who's in rutten command here

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Wednesday, June 4, 2003 10:39 AM

CHRISTHECYNIC


Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
communication
Are there becons to boost signals over long distances?


In OoG they send out a beacon.

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Thursday, June 5, 2003 2:27 AM

ZEKE023


beacons
I was thinking more along the lines of beacons from planet to planet in order to boost signals or relay stations to receive signals and send them out again strong.

I'm thinking that FTL radio has to exist from planet to planet (system to system) in order for the cortex not to have a significant amount of lag. Every sci-fi ever has FTL radio (and none of them explain it - except for maybe Star Trek, and they use Tachions).

However, it doesn't seem like the ships have FTL radio - since they need to be really close to somewhere to get good audio and even closer to have visual. This would not be a problem if they could send info faster than light, no?

gravity
JimmyJames - Huh. I never really thought about that... but I think you're probably right. The crew must all be in the spinning part - cause as I recall, it was pretty big.
Nonetheless - the more advanced races in B5 (the vorlons and the membari) had artificial gravity that *just worked*.
I think that firefly gravity is like the later.

engines
so you think that engine is a fission reactor?
They make reference to the Reavers using an "uncontained" engine - and it being suicide. That, to me, screams "fission reactor".
Any thoughts?

-Zeke

PS: Thanks for helping me out with this. You guys rock!

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Thursday, June 5, 2003 4:02 AM

FARADAY


Beacons:

Keep in mind that a beacon can be either a physical device or a transmission signal.

So when Mal says "You get that beacon sent?" he could have been talking about a little cry-baby type device -or- he could have been asking whether Wash sent out the SOS signal using the radio. I tend to think he meant the latter, but you could speculate either way.

Also keep in mind that even if you have FTL signals, they're not necessarily limitless. You could still have a signal that degrades over great distances to the point where it's no longer decipherable.

One could speculate that planet-based transmitters such as the ones used for the Cortex are really huge, allowing them to transmit over greater distances than ship-based ones. Each planet (moon, asteroid, whatever) then acts as a repeater, picking up the signal and re-broadcasting it so it goes even further. There could also be strategically-placed deep space repeaters that do the same thing.

If you go with that interpretation, then it's possible to imagine a scenario like what happened in Out of Gas: a ship gets so far away from a planet or repeater satellite that it no longer has access to the Cortex. The only things it can communicate with are ships within the range of its smaller ship-based transmitter, and the chances of there being someone around (since you're out in the middle of nowhere) are very slim.

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Thursday, June 5, 2003 7:05 AM

CHRISTHECYNIC


The beacon would have to be a physical thing because it is constantly trasmiting, otherwise it wouldn't mess up the other ships for more than a momnet. So it couldn't just be a signal, because it is sending out a singnal.

Becuse of the limited range of their signals it only makes sense to have beacons around all over, if we assume that FTL signals degrade quickly everything we know about the radio makes sense.

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Thursday, June 5, 2003 7:46 AM

ZEKE023


I agree with all of what has been said.

communication
It seems to me that given the crew's off handed comments and given what we can deduce from the senarios of the episodes (especially OoG) - I think that the are booster stations like FARADAY mentioned above.

And Theign - you're right. All types of communication would degrade over distance.

engine
the engine turns to create electricity (just like a nuclear power plant turns a carbine). I would imagine that's why life support is linked to it - because it needs electricity to work. It needs containment - without whcih it would be "suicide" (not uncomfortable as with a wood stove - but "suicide"). It needs to be refueled (a fusion reactor would need to be refueled every five years or so depending on its size... maybe less frequntly - remember stars are big fusion reactors - and they last billions of years).

arguments for multiple star systems based on Out of Gas
FACT 1: Using information trasmitted by radio waves - a mesage could go one AU in 5 days. The distance between planets in any given system is SIGNIFICANTLY less than one AU. It would only take a matter of hours for radio waves to get to Mars (depending on its current distance from Earth)

FACT 2: A system could only support planets within its life zone. There are only so many planets that can fit in a life zone - and the more there are the less distance is between them.

FACT 3: We have never seen any reason to conclude that any story has taken place under multiple suns (i.e. in a bianary system). Meaning, there is always a nightfall - we never see two suns, etc.

For these facts, I can deduce that if Firefly took place in a single solar system, the plot line of OoG would be a moot point. The odds of them not being able to contact another ship within radio broadcast distance would be astronomical. And that's with the technology of today - not 500 years in the future.


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Thursday, June 5, 2003 8:01 AM

THORNKIN


"No, no it couldn't. For that to work the floors would have to be rotating. If you look at B5, the station, you will see that the ground on the station is the hull, which is rotating. This isn’t true for everything so I assume that they have a form of artificial gravity but it was simply more efficient to use rotation."

Babylon 5 was a complex Universe. Some races (like the Centauri) had artificial gravity. Others, like Earthforce, didn't. That is why the station rotates and why the larger ships had a rotating section--to create the effect of gravity. Many of the alien races had it and so their ships could be constructed differently.

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Thursday, June 5, 2003 9:17 AM

ZEKE023


THEIGN,
wait - let me think this out. If a radio signal can travel an AU in 8 minutes (give or take) - then it could travel the length of our whole solar system in less than an hour.

No - admitidly, I don't know much about the sizes of solar systems outside of our own - however, how can you explain being anywhere within a soloar system and not being able to contact a planet, or another ship between planets, within a few hours (that was the time right?)

My calculations say that it would take 5.2 hours for a radio transmission to go from the sun to Pluto (if Pluto is 5 billion km away).

Now my math might be a little off - but even if it is - the real question here is:

Can you feasibly design a solar system where you can have so many habitable and teraformable worlds as appear in the show where you could not send a radio signal to a single other habitable world within a few hours?
(keep in mind that ships will be traveling on the shortest courses between habitable worlds at any given time)

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Thursday, June 5, 2003 9:23 AM

ZEKE023


Hey...
can communication be coded on light and shot in a direct laser? Is this how information travels across fiber optics right now? Couldn't communications be aimed at a hub and shot there - and then shot from hub to hub and then finally to a final destination?

This makes more sense than filling up space with radio signals.

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Thursday, June 5, 2003 9:26 AM

CHRISTHECYNIC


Also remember that the life zone around a star does not need to remotely resemble that around our star, and the life zone can be extended through manipulation of things such as atmosphere. It would be possible with enough messing abbot to make a planet as distant from the sun as Pluto habitable, why someone would go through the trouble of messing about that much is beyond me, but it could be done.

Add to this the possibility of a much larger life zone around a hotter star and you have a one-system possibility. Is it one system, they never make that clear, it is clear that there is a center, and that other things rotate around the center (wheel never stops turning, wouldn’t matter to the people on the rim if they weren’t the outside edge of said wheel.) Also we know that the civil war was not intergalactic, but rather interplanetary. Sorry it said intergalactic civil war in there somewhere so I had to respond.

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Thursday, June 5, 2003 9:37 AM

ZEKE023


Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
Add to this the possibility of a much larger life zone around a hotter star and you have a one-system possibility.


but the point is that you would have a to have a life zone three times the size of our whole solar system in order for the plot of Out of Gas to make any sense. I don't think that's possible
And that's not even considering ships passing between planets!

Not only this, but the ship would have to be constantly traveling closer to its destination based on its inertia when the engine gave out. (Ships can't stop moving in space without thrusting in the opposite direction - except in Star Trek Nemisis).

How can you account for that kind of distance in a single system?

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Thursday, June 5, 2003 9:41 AM

CHRISTHECYNIC


Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
Can you feasibly design a solar system where you can have so many habitable and teraformable worlds as appear in the show where you could not send a radio signal to a single other habitable world within a few hours?
(keep in mind that ships will be traveling on the shortest courses between habitable worlds at any given time)



They were intentionally getting where they wouldn't be detected, thus they would have aimed for a spot where there were not easy signals. Interference might make radio a bad choice, and light expands thus weakening the signal, unless you were to use a laser (like you said) but that wouldn't work for an SOS because you don't know where to send it. It is conceivable that there would be a place (many places actually) out of the line of sight of laser communications.

All kinds of things cause radio interference, and it might be that in the space of the system high quantitys of EM radiation make radio non viable. There is more but I type so slowly that if I tried there would be a new topic going by then.

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Thursday, June 5, 2003 10:02 AM

CHRISTHECYNIC


Does anyone know how far a radio signal would travel before it faded into the background? The distance would of course be relative to the strength and the frequency of the signal, and of course the amount of background. We can assume that a ship would have a very small transmitter compared to planet based things, and of course space based background would have to be taken into account if we were to assume a “loud” area of space. I don’t think they use radio communications on Firefly, but I’m wondering about this.

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Thursday, June 5, 2003 10:02 AM

ZEKE023


I poseted this question on the fox site - hopefully a cast member can speak to this.

On a side note:
speed of travel between worlds, fuel consumption, communication speed...?

What else is necessary for RPG rules?
(aside from general game mechanics, obviously)

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