gridlore: Doug looking off camera with a grin (Default)
Douglas Berry ([personal profile] gridlore) wrote2005-10-01 05:05 am
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Serenity.

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.

[identity profile] pompe.livejournal.com 2005-10-01 06:21 pm (UTC)(link)
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.

[identity profile] chaotic-nipple.livejournal.com 2005-10-01 10:12 pm (UTC)(link)
Plus, the bigger the star, the more UV it puts out.

[identity profile] gridlore.livejournal.com 2005-10-01 11:49 pm (UTC)(link)
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.