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Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
I can understand that Red and Georgia cannot have stabel orbits around White, being different masses, according to astrodynamics.
Let's go with the fictional concept of a stable orbit. What do you think is the best guess for velocity and duration for Red & Georgia? Do you think Kalidasa and Blue Sun orbital calculations should consider the mass of all three to be the central body mass, while ignoring the effects of nearer Georgia and Red, or just consider White to be the sole central mass for the calculation?
What figures do you think are best, for the sciency version of figures?

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Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:

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Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
Based upont the revised information above, we can now review the itineraries of the Verse.

Let's start with BDM Serenity.
Lilac to Beaumonde to Haven to Training House to Haven to Miranda to Mr. Universe's place.

Beaumonde in 15th orbital ring around Kalidasa, which is 121Au from White Sun. Beaumonde is about 13.4Au from Kalidasa Sun, so Beaumonde's farthest distance from White Sun is about 134.4Au.

Lilac, second moon on New Canaan in 2nd orbital ring around Blue Sun, which is 180Au from White Sun. New Canaan is about 2.39Au from Blue Sun, so the nearest distance to White Sun that New Canaan and Lilac get is about 177.6Au.
Therefore the shortest distance that Lilac and Beaumonde can get is about 43.2Au, or about 23-30 hours at max Serenity acceleration.

Haven, 1st moon on Deadwood in 7th orbital ring around Blue Sun. Deadwood is about 14.0Au from Blue Sun, so nearest disance to White Sun would be 166Au. Shortest distance from Beaumonde to Haven would be about 31.6Au, or about 20-26 hours at max Serenity accel/decel.

Miranda orbiting Burnham around Blue Sun isn't much distance from Haven. Miranda about 3.9Au from Burnham, and Burnham about 23.4Au from Blue Sun (8th orbital ring). So nearest that Miranda gets to Haven is about 5.5Au and farthest apart is about 41.3Au (about the saem as Lilac to Beaumonde closest range).

So, does this seem reasonable? Or is the Beaumonde distance out of wack? Does it seem reasonable that it took a day to get from Lilac to Beaumonde, and another day to get back to Haven (a short ways from Lilac)?
I didn't get that impression from film and scripts, how about you?
The travels to and from Training House are not a problem, nor are trips to and from Miranda.
Lemming has admitted that not all of the Map of the Verse is vetted within the series and BDM travel itinerary, so should we decide that this placement of Beaumonde in the Kalidasa System is one of these anomolies?
It would seem that if Beaumonde was in the Blue Sun system, or at least the same system as either Lilac or Haven, then the travel tiems would seem more in line with what the BDM showed.
Anybody else?

One wrinkle to consider is the upgrades to Serenity after TLB and before BDM. Apparently the proceeds from the fencing of the Lassiter paid for all the Serenity upgrades, like more blinking lights around the cockpit, and the new mule. Did they include speed/performance upgrades? Is their travel time quicker now? If so, it's also possible to consider one of the moons of Dragon's Egg as a
training House location.

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Still seems clear that Beaumonde location is out of tolerance, it should be in Blue Sun System, based upon all BDH references to it.
Also, wanted to point out a reference I keep forgetting.
In Serenity Vis Comp (written by some Joss guy), on pg 114 Jayne says "Not one day ago" Mal was ready to get rid of River. This is after Training House, referring to Maidenhead on Beaumonde. So then from Beaumonde to Haven (and hours spent there) to Training House takes less than a day, and certainly less than 2 days. This line does not end up in the screen version.
There is also River's line on Miranda, that it will take 4 hours to get to Mr Universe's place from Miranda - this line also does not end up on film.
From Beaumonde in Kalidasa System to Mr. Universe's Comm Station is about 240Au distance, and adding a flyby of Haven in Blue Sun System makes a minimum of 420Au distance. Even if Serenity were able to travel at the Speed of Light, and achieve that velocity very quicky, that's still about 55-60 hours of travel (or 2.5 days). Not even counting all the hours of screen activity. Take a "couple hours" each way from Haven to Training House, this makes 60-65 hours of travel, with Speed of Light Travel. If only half the Speed of Light, this is 115-125 hours. This does not mesh with the time period written by Joss in Jayne's line.
I do understand this is not the greatest reference, but it does show the intent of time displacment intended by Joss.
If Beaumonde is located in Blue Sun System, all these discrepancies disappear and dissolve.

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Originally posted by Bytemite:
The barren moon might be one of the moons of Santo in the Qin Shi Huang system, both are sparsely population, considering. Tethys in particular, only has 27,000 people. The Qin Shi Huang system is a protostar system in the White Sun system, but being that the crew has visited Santos before, apparently it's not close enough to the core to give them much alarm.

Or, it could have happened on some rock out in the Halo asteriod belt that someone tried to terraform, then abandoned.

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Originally posted by Bytemite:
Ah, didn't realize there was 72 hours. Been a while since I've seen the episodes, gave my DVDs away and haven't gotten them back, plus I want to keep the episodes fresh.

I agree with your reasoning in that case. It brings up a good question, for the sake of the science, should we use the original show order or the rearranged?

There should be a preference for canon, I assume, and the rearranged version is now canon. But, on the other hand, the rearranged version could mess up the science.

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Originally posted by Bytemite:
Ah, didn't realize there was 72 hours. Been a while since I've seen the episodes, gave my DVDs away and haven't gotten them back, plus I want to keep the episodes fresh.

I agree with your reasoning in that case. It brings up a good question, for the sake of the science, should we use the original show order or the rearranged?

There should be a preference for canon, I assume, and the rearranged version is now canon. But, on the other hand, the rearranged version could mess up the science.

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Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:

So now to look in those for low-populated rocks which are terraformed.

If the preceding episode was OiS (original episode sequence), then they went to New Melbourne about 3 days after booting Jubal. So Red Sun System was where they were, and Kalidasa is next nearest, and our top candidate for Empty Rock locale.
If the preceding episode was War Stories (rearranged episode sequence), then they were at Ezra at the center of Georgia System, and so next nearest would be Blue Sun System, and our top candidate for Empty Rock location.

It'll be a few days for me to look up those, so input for those would be cool. I'm assuming it's not large, as well as being sparsely populated, so the moons like you found in Core would be about right, just find the same thing in other systems. Would not be asteroids - they would not be terraformed with all those collisions in the asteroid belts.

Unless somebody can point out errors in my reasoning.

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Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:

Other fans can use the info in whatever way they choose, and we can inform them under which conditions each answer is correct. I understand some fanfic writers use this information, and it is for them to decide which is canon as applied to the fic they are working on.

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Originally posted by Bytemite:

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Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:

Other fans can use the info in whatever way they choose, and we can inform them under which conditions each answer is correct. I understand some fanfic writers use this information, and it is for them to decide which is canon as applied to the fic they are working on.

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I'm one of them, so thanks. :)

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Originally posted by Bytemite:

I agree with you on Osiris, that's Blue Sun's new headquarters after they moved from Sihnon, but I thought Paradiso was on Regina. In the RP manuals it's listed as a world that has a problem with Bowden's. There might be something on the Serenity Blue Ray, too.

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Originally posted by ElectricLion:
Not to change the subject, but Yellowjacket has been telling me about a discussion concerning Beaumonde, and its position in the Verse -- namely that many think it should be in Blue Sun instead of Kalidasa. He asked me what I thought about moving it to Blue Sun. Well, I can't. That's an authority level way above me. If it was a fan-created world, it would just be a matter of getting the creator's permission. But Beaumonde is an "official" world that was created by Joss & Co., placed by QMx, and approved by Joss & Co. It would take that level of approval to relocate it -- and that would throw a serious monkey in the wrench of the set that is the Map, the Atlas, and TVIN.

How about this? Think of Kalidasa on the opposite side of its orbit around White Sun, if not actually placing it there. Remember that it's going to be there in 665.5 years anyway. And this makes sense for a number of reasons:

1. It's the star's existing orbital path. It's still 121 AU from White Sun. This just puts it 59 AU from Blue Sun, instead of 301 AU from Blue Sun.

2. The actual geography of the Verse doesn't change. Remember that the whole Verse is in constant motion. While these large and very large orbits might as well be thought of as fixed for story/episode/RPG campaign purposes, the bodies in these orbits are moving through their orbits.

3. Relevant to #1 and #2, none of the planets' orbits will change. No changes will need to be made to TVIN, other than perhaps the picture on the cover. But then that could remain and we (Yellowjacket and I) could add a page or two in the first part (before White Sun) or at the end before the Afterword, describing Kalidasa's "new" position.

4. Right now, with the Map configuration, Blue Sun isn't just on the Rim. It's practically in interstellar space. It's so far from the rest of the systems that ships must have one hell of a fuel capacity if they want to travel from Blue Sun to any other Verse destination.

5. Since Beaumonde is an outer planet of Kalidasa, it's much closer to Blue Sun through half its orbit cycle (23 of 46.06 years). For "story" purposes, Beaumonde's position is essentially fixed. Would it help the travel estimates if we said it was at its closest approach to the Blue Sun system at the time of "the present?"

How does that sound?

J. Chris Bourdier
The Verse In Numbers

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Originally posted by ElectricLion:
Not to change the subject, but Yellowjacket has been telling me about a discussion concerning Beaumonde, and its position in the Verse -- namely that many think it should be in Blue Sun instead of Kalidasa. He asked me what I thought about moving it to Blue Sun. Well, I can't. That's an authority level way above me. If it was a fan-created world, it would just be a matter of getting the creator's permission. But Beaumonde is an "official" world that was created by Joss & Co., placed by QMx, and approved by Joss & Co. It would take that level of approval to relocate it -- and that would throw a serious monkey in the wrench of the set that is the Map, the Atlas, and TVIN.

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Originally posted by ElectricLion:
1. The actual distance is about 46.15au. That's measuring from Beaumonde's orbit to Blue Sun, assuming that we've moved Kalidasa through 180 degrees of its orbit around White Sun. Remember that the plane of the Blue Sun system is perpendicular to the plane of the Verse. While there will be some small variation due to parallax, all the Blue Sun planets can be thought of as being the same distance from the rest of the Verse.

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Travel times and distances from the worlds of Blue Sun to those of White Sun, Georgia, and Red Sun will all remain the same. Travel Times and distances between the worlds of Blue Sun and those of Kalidasa will become reasonable.

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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?

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Originally posted by second:

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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?

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http://pics.fireflyprops.net/TVIN-2.01.pdf
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

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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Originally posted by ElectricLion:
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.

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Originally posted by ElectricLion:
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.

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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.

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Originally posted by ElectricLion:
Your velocity isn't limited by your engine. It's limited by economics and fuel supply. IF you had an unlimited amount of time and an unlimited amount of fuel, you could accelerate up to within a small fraction of the speed of light. But you don't have either. Your engine is at its most efficient when your speed is 0. As your speed increases, the efficiency of your engine decreases. Remember Newton's law.

If your ship masses 1000 tons, and you want it to go 10 miles/second, you have to throw 1000 tons of propellant mass out the back at 10 miles/sec. Once you're at 10 miles/sec, however, your propellant mass has to be moving at greater than 10 miles/sec, or else, its more like just leaving mass in your wake.

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This suggests that the bigger ships can really move if they need to. It also suggests that the gunships are very short range, about like a shuttle.

The gunships would only be left behind if the Dortmunder was under acceleration. If she was cruising, the gunships would start with the bigger ship's current velocity. Their smaller engines would enable them to maneuver as usual, but they wouldn't have enough power to shed the velocity imparted on them by the Dort. But, yes, if the Dort was under acceleration when she deployed her gunships, they would fall behind and not be able to catch up.

The real problem with that scene is another one of Joss' throwaway numbers that he didn't think about. The signal is supposed to be coming from a personnel carrier 13 klicks (or kilometers) ahead. But 13km in space is a naked-eye-object. The commander should have raised his head slightly, looked out the front window, and said, "Where? I don't see it."

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
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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Originally posted by ElectricLion:
JSF, if you're going to quote my emails, please quote the relevant part. Throwing my entire email up there is just wasting space.

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The same rules apply whether your ship is in a gravity field, or at a speed of 0 in space. In fact, the explanations above are assuming a speed of 0 (starting) with no gravity field present. I'm just talking about the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation and Newton's laws, which are all very basic.

The "Atlas of the Verse, Vol I" is a commercially available product:

http://store.qmxonline.com/Atlas-of-The-Verse_p_86.html

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