Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

That has nothing to do with my objection to the idea. My objection to the idea is that you can't fit enough planets into the habitable zone of a system that one of them can disappear and not be noticed.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Do you mean Miranda, in the movie? The planet didn't disappear, nor unnoticed. As far as the official position went, it was a failed attempt at terraforming with the colony lost. People knew, but once it fell off the news <shrug>. As it was in the heart of Reaver space, there weren't a lot of people swinging by to check it out. Doesn't seem like that's too hard of a cover story to enforce, as such things go -- especially in fiction.

Also, disbelief in a plotline seems quite different to me from claiming the system itself is impossible. You might well dislike either or both, but one point doesn't support the other.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Purposeful design doesn't strike me as an obstacle.


Can the worlds in it be terraformed? Is the terraforming that occurs plausible given the tech level, resources, human economic and social structures, and so on?

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

So these people that farm literal cattle are the dark age descendants of people capable of creating, moving, and setting up rosettes of habitable earth like planets using magi-tech?

That's bordering on STNG's Q power.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Or just massive inequality. The descendants of the terraformers are likely the Core worlds, with the Rim people just dumped out on the more marginal worlds. The crew/passenger divides of Lord of Light or The Steerswoman were more extreme, in their ways.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Bah. The Rim fought a war with the Core and the relative odds weren't much worse than that between the North and the South in the American Civil War.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Not to get caught up in defending Firefly's worldbuilding too much, but there's lots of inequality within the Rim too, from lords with high-tech houses and weapons to 'mudders' who don't even have a horse.

Also, I don't think we know what the relative odds were, other than that the Independents had some advanced weaponry; and as independence fighters they were potentially in an asymmetric situation, like the Taliban or Viet Cong, though obviously not as successful.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

There's ZERO indications of them having moved stuff.

They collapsed a few brown dwarves; in theory, we could do that now (albeit at stupidly high expense) with thermonuclear weapons in unison to create a core shock.

What we do know - they have artificial gravity, high sublight (they cross 120 AU in a matter of a week - some 16 light hours), that the primary transit drives are not newtonian (the episode where they're drifting provides the evidence for this), that the shuttles don't have the transit drive (same episode), and that the worlds have artificial gravity and terraforming tech.

The TL is about Traveller TL 12 except for the terraforming tech and the JDrive being replaced with a roughly 10 PSL sublight drive.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

If you're willing to spot them rearrangement of the planets and other material in the system, terraforming doesn't seem like much of a stretch.

"Them" could of course be someone other than the humans we see in the show. If you throw in some sort of Progenitors to have built the system, they might also have alien-formed it, and that might not have been so far from what humans preferred. Not that any such thing is even hinted at, but I suppose it's not actually contradictory, either. You could also have somewhat regressed human societies now there.

As for Raymond's 60-worlds layout, it doesn't seem to make terraforming any more difficult than it would be in a single-world system. That, I think, was just an exercise in the orbital dynamics to see how many stable worlds he could pack into habitable zones.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Mal's pistol is probably a political design consideration. It may be the revolvers are legal on some worlds but automatics aren't legal anywhere. Or its just a common oddball he likes

Also it's probably either a rail pistol or maybe some kind of binary gun and doesn't use gunpowder.

That said most arms in the series and movies are cartridge guns, Vera aside which again is binary propellant one that needs oxygen to fire, dumb but otherwise the weapon is very good if Jane is to be believed.

As far as the tech, the force field window was probably electrostatic not kinetic . I can't see what good they'd be but i suppose it or a cold plasma is possible.

As for the system, its highly unlikely but its a big universe, Having one system like that is I suppose possible