Serenity.

[gridlore]

Simply fucking ROCKED. Well written, beautifully envisioned, and executed perfectly. But I have one little rant that isn't really a spoiler.

The series and film claims this all takes place in a single solar system with "dozens of planets and moons that were terraformed." (Or more accurately, Southern California-formed.)

This is freaking impossible with a single star. It's have to be a freaking bright supergiant to have a life zone large enough. So I, being an absolute geek, have come up with a solution.

Serenity Actually takes place in a trinary system. The central star is a fairly bright giant (call it a F5 III) with three gas giants in its life zone. These GG have multiple large moons. The second star is a G0 V orbiting at 80+ AU, with two worlds in its life zone, plus one right outside the edge (but still close enough to be somewhere above utterly frozen. The last star is a G8 V with a few piddling worlds and moons that were terraformed, but not overly well. This is the "outer system" mentioned in the canon, since a distant trianry could be well over 300 AU away.

Other than that, not a single complaint about the film.

Comments

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

You should take a look at the RPG. They've got a map that's similar to your idea... I even think it's a trinary.

[shadopanther.livejournal.com]

I have not seen the film, so I cannot comment on that. However, the feeling I got from the series was that several solar systems were involved, with the more developed Alliance planets at "the Core".

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

That would be how it's usually done, and that would make sense.
However, Joss seems wedded to the idea of a single star system and STL travel between the colonies.

[biomekanic.livejournal.com]

That wedding to the STL thing is the one part that irritates me about the Firefly/Serenity universe.

You have what amounts to FTL radio (not to mention the FTL internet), but FTL travel is "unrealistic?
C'mon Joss, gimme a break.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

(tiny little spoiler)
Also, the notion of one of those habitable (Earth-prime, in fact) planets being WAYYYY out from everything else...
Oy.
Astronomy and planetology are obviously not Whedon's strong suit.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

(rant continues/concludes)

And the reason it bothers me so is that everything else is so good. Whedon has created these great characters, great story, cultures, technology...
And then set it in a star system with all the plausibility of a bunch of flat plates being carried around on the backs of elephants standing on turtles. And he either doesn't realize this, or doesn't care.

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Why use a giant star? It'd put limits on how old the other stars could be and the previous evolution of the moons, and it'd be bright enough to mess up planet skies severely even at 80 AU. And the deeper the HZ you need, the brighter the giant and the more massive and younger it is. FG-giants are fairly unstable too, IIRC. Instability strip, that sort of thing.

I'd go for a quadruple instead with two pairs of say 20-40 AU separation FGK main sequence stars, in turn about 300-500 AU apart. If the system is really wide, you could add in a third pair of marginal stars at thousands of AU.

[chaotic-nipple.livejournal.com]

Plus, the bigger the star, the more UV it puts out.

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

For the wide habital zone.

Two F/G-class main sequence stars with gas giants in the habital zone orbited by a K/M binary at 1000AU would also work.

[chaotic-nipple.livejournal.com]

Well, it depends how advanced your terraforming technology is. In Wil McArthur's "To Crush The Moon", they make Luna habitable by squeezing it down to roughly half it's current diameter, and then smacking a few comets into it for water, with the air coming from processed crust. The kind of technology that could do that could also easily reorbit any planets that are too far out or too close.

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

Except that would be seriously out of whack with the other technologies seen in Firefly/Serenity.

[chaotic-nipple.livejournal.com]

True, but maybe the Core Worlds are holding back all the really cool stuff for themselves.

Something I've wondered: How come we've only ever seen _one_ AK-47 in the series? Considering how easy they are to make, and the rate of fire advantage they have over older style weapons, I'd expect them to be more common.

[10binary-cats.livejournal.com]

Even more important...where did wash's dinosaurs come from?

[chaotic-nipple.livejournal.com]

If they're real artifacts from Earth That Was, I expect that they're valuable family heirlooms. Probably worth more than the ship itself...

[(Anonymous)]

http://burtleburtle.net/bob/scifi/dyson.html

I think the system is a Dyson Swarm or Type I Dyson Sphere. A hundred worlds in one system is artificial. If they have the time and energy to terraform a hundred worlds, they have the power to move them into reasonable orbits in the habitable zone as well.

Thomas Jones-Low
tjoneslo@together.net

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

That is a fascinating page.