Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

I'm amused at FTL being considered more acceptable than a multi-world system with unspecified terraforming.

Whedon's been explicit about "being on the losing side of the Civil War" being a key part of his inspiration. (Not that Whedon's family was; seems pure Yankee AFAICT, he's just intrigued.) Some people accuse him of whitewashing by losing the slavery issues; I think they're nuts. For that matter, there's still near-slavery on the Rim, and Whedon's also said he doesn't think of the Alliance as clearly bad guys. *Parts* of Alliance, now...

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Because FTL is also part of the setup - at least, there's no mention of cryogenic suspension or other forms of long-term hibernation being routine that I can recall. All those people, and all that equipment to set up the first colonies, must have gotten there somehow...

What I can believe is that there was a faster FTL method known, but that it was deliberately destroyed and the records erased to prevent people from even trying to go back to Earth-that-was. I can also believe that the first steps of the method were rediscovered, giving a short-range FTL capability, but that any further progress is deliberately and carefully suppressed by the Alliance, partly for political reasons and partly for the same reasons they got rid of it in the first place.

That would be a lot more believable to me than a system that just happens to have that many naturally-occurring Terra-grade worlds in that many orbits around a single star, or that they had the ability to move entire Earth-size planets but somehow lost that ability (while misplacing an entire world).

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Uh, as we've already said: they do have cryogenics, though we don't know the maximum duration, and Miranda wasn't "misplaced", it was considered a failed colony.

And if you take the Paul Birch route of mass stream flybys, they needn't have lost the ability to move planets (within a system, not between stars), it just wouldn't come up after you'd finished moving them, because it's expensive infrastructure, not some magic planet-moving drive.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

They don't have FTL - they have high STL. Nowhere does it claim they ever had FTL.

But we see high STL.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

That's axiomatic due to the lack of oxygen.

One can survive the average 6 mBar surface pressure, and the bitter cold, without a pressure suit, provided one has a pressurized oxygen mask. It's not comfortable, and will result in edema... but it's only the lack of oxygen that's deadly.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Gets a mite chilly, most places.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Officially the trip took about a century.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Which requires enough of a violation of physics to might as well use FTL.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Needing a mask and oxygen tanks counts as special gear.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Less hospitable than Antarctica isn't exactly a nice tourist trap.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

If it was more than a hundred light years it did require FTL.

I can't even say if a multi-star system like the 'Verse even without considering planets is within 100 ly.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Right. But who said anything about tourist traps?

:0

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

If they have a practical way to go somewhere habitable, it seems unlikely that they'd spend a lot of time on the dead rockballs.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Going faster than 1% the speed of light isn't realistic for anything other than tiny probes.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Bad wording on my part. I meant likely to sustain populations greater than tiny research stations.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Ah, right.

No, no, I tend to agree.

But on the other hand, if we are going to apply those standards of realism, why the heck did people leave Earth-that-Was?

If they had such amazing terraforming tech, why not terraform Earth back into a livable state?

There are some quirky things in the Firefly backstory. I'm not saying they can't be explained. I'm only pointing out that they do seem to require further explanation (or not, maybe it doesn't matter for the stories being told...).


Was the terraforming tech only developed past a rudimentary level AFTER humans arrived in the 'Verse?


Is it perhaps based on the environmental life support, gravitics, and ecoystems tech used in the generation ships?

Were those generation ships or sleeper ships?

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

"B Ark"

http://www.geoffwilkins.net/fragments/Adams.htm

It explains so much.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

So do Barrow and McMurdo. Don't need sealed pressure suits for those, either.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

If they have the terraforming tech to make any planet or moon in the "habitable zone" into a very earthlike world, then it seems unlikely they would leave Earth. They could have used the tech to fix the environmental problems on Earth.




What's this about ''dead rockballs"?

Maybe the reference to enviro-suits threw you a bit? I didn't write vacc-suit, although those would fall under that general heading. So would some haz-mat gear. So would a ''still-suit.''

I'm not talking about worlds that cannot be terra-formed. I'm saying that terraforming may not be able to make every world in the super-system's habitable zone into a comfortable, hospitable Earth copy. Some worlds may turn out very harsh and challenging for humans without the right gear/drugs/genemods. Possibly deadly. And the process may take centuries to complete, even on worlds with natural conditions much more like present Earth than like Mars, even if it is really advanced.

Does that all make sense?

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

I don't see what the need is. It fits better with the travel system changed to a traditional FTL. The basic idea of Firefly is simply Space Cossacks running around in the grey zone of the law, blowing raspberries at authority, and being obscure enough to get away with it. That would work just as good in most 'verses.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

But you do need more than just an oxygen mask.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

I assume the reason the writers went with STL only was to limit action to the single super system. Going anyplace else with habitable worlds would take at least a century of flight. And Earth-that-Was may be wrecked...

The Alliance presents a bigger threat if there's no place to escape it and start over.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

If they have the technology to send a generation or FTL ship anywhere, they have more than enough to fix earth.

I can't think of any vaguely realistic problem other than the clichéd grey goo scenario that would make earth truly uninhabitable.
It's best to keep it mysterious and unknown by the characters rather than try to explain or lampshade it.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

The cold, dryness, wind, thin air, and light/darkness circadian disruptions make the place sound like hell on earth.

My mild S.A.D. would make me homicidal in the summer, and comatose in the winter.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Why is the most obvious reason so hard for some people to accept? Poor science education? With how ignorant of space's vastness the general populace is, the writers may have though they were being realistic by not including FTL. They simply didn't think/care about the absurdity of so many garden of edens in one system.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

They don't have FTL.

And generation ships?

Not known.

Given that the show did have suspended animation tech, I'm guessing cold storage sleeper ships are more likely.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

A lot of edens via unspecified terraforming is unlikely. FTL is impossible or problematic (causality-violating) by known physics. FTL only seems less absurd due to decades of SF tradition ignoring actual science in favor of storytelling.

Ditto for psychic powers, which Firefly eventually tipped over into (after having been coy for a while about whether River was just really hyperaware and smart.)

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

FTL= poor science education

It's not possible, Flyn.

Why can you accept it, but not a miracle star system?

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

We don't absolutely know that FTL is impossible. The faint hope remains for a loophole. But the idea of hundreds of earth-sized worlds just sitting around in the habitable zone waiting to be terraformed with a snap of the fingers takes more than a loophole.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

A true FTL drive makes the cluster (be it open or closed) unneeded.

The lack of FTL (albeit having what looks to be STL Alcubierre-style warp drive) makes the setting constrained in a way different from a significant FTL drive setting would be.

Keep in mind: with even a 1PSL Sublight drive, Mars is a matter of around 800 minutes at closest, and 2600 at furthest. 14 to 44 hours. At 10 PSL (0.1C), Mars is 1.5 to to 4.5 hours.

10PSL looks to be about right for Firefly's main drive.

Theoretically, we can build a stable mission duration of about 1.5 years (that's about what a nuclear submarine is capable of without any replenishments on low-crewing, from public sources.). Let's assume that's a reasonable non-colonial ship model; we'll call this science range. (Colonial range seems to be about 6 months travel time edge-to-core.)

• At 0.01C, everything in system (to the boundary of Pluto) is well within science range. (Pluto is about 3.5 weeks). Everything inside mars is within within 2 days - even Mars near opposition.
• At 0.1C, Everything is under 2.5 days - everything in the inner system is within day trip range.
• At 1 C, everything in the system (still to the pluto boundary) is under 0.25 days, and the oort cloud is still out of reach, but many of the KBOs can be reached.
• At 6 C, we get round trip to/from the Centauri Systems. (TOS WF 1.8)
• At 10C The Alpha Centauri and Proxma Centauri systems, Barnard's Star systems are in our hypothetical science reach. The Luhman A&B are barely reachable in that 1.5 years, as is WISE J0855-0714, and the Centauri systems are within colonial range. (TOS WF 2.2)
• At 100C, the Centauri Systems are within 17 days, and Barnard's within a month. (TOS WF 4.6) Science range hits 75 LY. Several hundred systems are in colonial range.
• At 600C, the Centauri systems are in Vacation Range - 2.5 days there, a week down, and 2.5 days back. (TOS WF 8.4)
• At 1000C, science range his 750 LY across - colony range is 500 LY, the size of Traveller's Imperium. (TOS WF 10)

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

In my case it would be because I can't internalize the 'FTL = causality violation' bit. I'll take Einstein's word for it (since it has been vouched by so many other scientists). I've even had it explained to me and understood it (although I forgot (mentally rejected?) the explanation again fairly quickly). But I just can't accept, emontionally, that I can't move at any speed I like, spend some time wherever I went, fly back again, and some reasonable time has now elapsed. It just doesn't make sense. Emotional sense, that is.

So FTL travel may be impossible, but it ought not to be, while miracle systems are just silly.


Hans

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

One other issue to be thought of, disappearing in an STL-verse pretty much requires the person looking for you to quit looking at you.

Assuming Serenity has a non-magical drive and makes trips on the order of days or weeks instead of months or years (in a single biggish star system), it's going to be trivial to spot its drive plume from anywhere unless it is occluded by a planet or star. And given the Alliance controls the Core Worlds, it's unlikely to ever be in every interested party's blind spot. Burn the engines, and everyone knows where you are, what you are, where you're going, and when you'll get there.

So really, the question isn't a choice between impossible FTL and implausible star system. It's Magic A or Magic B (or sensor capability far worse than we have today).

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Maybe because FTL is simpler?

A single black box (or peculiar Steampunk spinning Thing) in the engine room is also smaller and less intrusive than very large black boxes that can re-make planets in negligible timespans.

It's a principle of world creation elegance that you don't make your story enabling miracles larger and more intrusive than they need to be.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Ftl is almost universally rationalized by the conventions of a hypothetical coexistent universe, subuniverse, pocket universe, whatever. We can make those conventions what is convenient for the story. A star that carries several dozen planets each terraformable exists in OUR universe.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

FTL isn't needed. An open cluster that takes a couple of years to cross wouldn't make the setting less like the frontier in the 19th century.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Interesting concept. How close can you pack stars to get an SLT accessible cluster? And by packing stars I mean worldbuilding while remaining sorta plausible.


Hans

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

A typical open cluster's core is about 3-4 light-years across with a density of about 1.5 stars per cubic light year. The corona is about 5 times that diameter with a decreasing density. Globular clusters, of course are bigger and denser, but are terrible environments for habitable planets.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

It has to start with a star that can be reached from Earth. Centauri is already four light years.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Which is what got me started on the musing that lead to this thread.

Besides grey goo, there might be someone/thing intelligent and hostile in the Solar system that the refugees wanted to get away from.

My favorite idea would be something like the Comprise from Michael Swanwick's Vacuum Flowers. A technological hivemind that incorporates anyone it can get by force. In VF it can't leave Earth because the more than a second of communications lag causes hivemind schisms, which are Bad Things.

For the psuedo-Firefly setting, assume it can handle a few days of lag, but not more.

We could make Firefly a VF sequel if we worked at it. The very end of the story has almost as fast as light inertialess travel invented and colonies setting off into interstellar space, because Earth just got an anti-schism mind technology.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

The Hyades cluster is 150 light years away with about 160 F, G, and K stars packed within ten light years and would be a pretty interesting setting for a space opera game.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

<shrug> That causality is never under any circumstances violated is a premise that scientists generally have a great emotional attachment to, but that doesn't mean it's true.


That's what makes it more plausible. It is virtually certain that on a fundamental level, physics as we know it, is somehow wrong. I'm pretty certain it won't be wrong in the kind of convenient way that will make speedy and cheap interstellar travel possible but I don't absolutely know that it's impossible, the way I know no system like the 'verse exists within a hundred light years of us because if it did, we would have seen it.

And of course one of the fundamental principles of Firefly is that there shall be no aliens, so that leaves us no alternative except the supernatural...which would explain the instant terraforming and how humanity got to a system that doesn't exist.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

You spend X days in your FTL starship going to some neighboring system. You spend Y days there. You spend X days going home. You arrive home 2X+Y days after you left. Where's the causality violation? There's no overt causality violation there. It's all buried in a slew of scientific mumbo-jumbo. Narratively there is no causality violation; indeed, there is no possibility of any causality violation.


Hans

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

But if relativity is correct (and everything we know suggests that, fundamentally, it is), any method that allows for faster than light travel (or communication) can be used to break causality. If it can't, it suggests the universe works radically different from the way [we think] ours does.

The thing is, FTL only works the way you are suggesting it does in a universe that has a universal time flow. Our universe does not. The simple math of motion is close enough for going to the library on a bicycle. It isn't even close when going to Alpha Centauri on a torchship.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Yeah, as an example quantum mechanics really doesn't make sense by any natural sort of human intuition but it appears to work anyway.

So demonstrate that any proposed FTL system would violate a few conservation laws (probably not difficult) and you're getting somewhere. Complain that it violates human ideas of logic and that doesn't amount to much.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

No aliens may not be a fundamental principle for the OP.

I've already suggested that the Verse may be understood as a miracle, the handiwork of God, or gods, making a new home possible for humanity.

As for not spotting it, that's easy. Alternate universe. No one on Earth-that Was could know the difference until extreme range telescopes had reached a certain point of development.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

I don't see what makes it necessary. IMO, Firefly would have worked just as well in an open cluster (the Hyades is a really good candidate; both close and dense) with a very fast STL drive (probably some gravitic pseudovelocity warp drive). Taking a couple of years to get from the core to the fringe doesn't, IMO, hurt anything.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

That's not a bad idea, not at all.

A gravitic pseudo velocity warp drive looks like another physics-busting miracle, but that may not be a problem. Firefly already does have gravitic tech, including, IIRC, a grav drive on ships. I pointed out the gravitic super science in a previous post. Not that the show counts as hard sci fi! It doesn't.

The miracle system seems like a classic mega-engineering sort of thing. It reminds me a wee bit of Niven's Ringworld.

YMMV

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

So far, it's not.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

It has math behind it anyway. Math and physics aren't the same thing but one can be mistaken for the other.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

There's no physics that says it can't work, though, either.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Thus ''looks like."




One thing to say in favor of your model/approach is this:

The setting already has gravitic tech. That's used instead of spin or acceleration simulated gravity vessels and space stations, or so it seems. And IIRC, the actual drive system of the Firefly-class vessel works through gravity manipulation. It also seems that the terraforming uses gravtics. And wasn't there an episode in which some sort of invisible gravity "clamp" grounded the Serenity?


If one's going to use gravitic miracle tech, I'd mine that vein for various applications, rather than toss in a lot of other stuff.

• Grav ripple comms
  
• Grav on vessels for in system travel/slower STL
  
• contragrav air cars
  
• grav assisted terraforming
  
• your fast grav STL

I suppose they cannot micronize this tech, as we don't see it used in things like hand weapons or personal protection.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Doesn't that mean the opposite?

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

No.

A pseudo velocity gravitic warp drive?

That's more plausible than the super system?

The super system orbital mechanics can be made to work with current understanding of physics, yes?

Of course it would be artificial/designed on purpose by an intelligence.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

It's more plausible than FTL.
Sure, but why?

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Oh, I agree that it's more plausible than FTL.

Is it more plausible than an intelligent design super system?

Not really, except for one thing. The setting already has gravitic tech. That's a very strong argument in favor of your preferred warp+ cluster approach, if gravitics are already part of the deal.

If I were, like the OP, designing a new setting with some ideas drawn from Firefly, I would not include gravitics. I'd use slow ships from Earth, terraforming that wasn't so perfect, and a miraculous super system.


That would end up looking rather different. Sort of a Terradyne thing, or I guess a bit like what Astro started with his Twelve Dancing Sisters.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

We can't detect Earth-like planets, let alone supertech-compressible moons, so I don't get this "if the verse existed within 100 light years we'd have found it already." Have we even looked that closely at all the systems within 100 light years?

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

We've looked closely enough to notice five main sequence stars including...somehow...a blue giant in a quintuple solar system.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

"Heart of Gold" has a hovercraft / speeder kind of vehicle. You could say that works on contragrav.

All this gravitic tech certainly would make it easier to rearrange a system (or several) into a super-system :)

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Yeah..

It doesn't seem that the tech in FF is quite up to rearranging all those planets and moons, though. Altering them, yes.
But as presented, the 'Verse was already arranged in such a fashion that many planets and moons existed within the so-called habitable zone. It was like that when the humans found it.


Now, for a new FF-inspired setting, the humans could have juggled and reset all those orbits, re-engineering the entire system. But consider what that says about the tech level and resources of the civilization....

I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying I would not do it.

YMMV

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

I believe we can rule out blue giants within 100 ly altogether. On ay sort of stellar timescale blue giants pop like popcorn (10 million years). They just aren't packed together like popcorn.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Where do you get these details? I'm pretty sure Whedon wouldn't have bothered counting the suns or worrying about where they were on a Hertzsprung-Russel diagram; it's not his thing. As far as I recall, the show itself is mostly silent about the structure of the system other than to mention a bunch of planets and moons of varying habitability and wealth. The movie has the one bit about it being one system in the school flashback.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

A couple years from core to edge DOES hurt the setting - badly.

In order to have a significant, protracted war (as the unification war was) you need at most a handful of months across.

Having the STL drive be capable of crossing the "system" in a few months (say, 3, edge to edge) won't be hurt (nor even seriously impacted) by another system 2 years away - that second system will essentially not exist for most purposes, except maybe deep range expeditions. It's just too far to make matters worth involvement. (It's why most people rightly reject the idea of any STL space empire - by the time you can react, it's too late.)

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

The US Civil War was mostly fought along the Mason Dixon line and the Altlantic Seaboard. It mostly wasn't fought on the frontier.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

I read a GRR Martin book that featured a red giant surrounded by a ring of yellow dwarfs. Made me wonder about the habitable zones. In addition to the red giant's biozone, would there be a second one between the red giant and the ring of yellow dwarfs? Would the yellow dwarfs have enough distance between them to have planets? I know it's impossible, but I'd love to have a planet weave between the yellow dwarfs and make its own orbit 'round the giant. Maybe an asteroid belt in that pattern? Silly, but fun.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

The edge of the Hyades Cluster is 7.7 light years from the what we could call the core. (which has a radius of 2.3 light years)

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Yes, but this hypothetical setting doesn't need to be in every single stellar system in the cluster.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

What if it is a single star system with multiple stars? Would that work?



Hans

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Arrrangements with more than 2 stars resolve themselves into pairs with a common center of mass. You can get a 3 star system with one pair and a singleton orbiting the pair like Alpha Centauri.

4 stars has to be 2 pairs with the pairs orbiting a common center. 5 then can then bring a singleton into orbit around the pairs. You can replace the outlying singleton with another pair for 5 but I've never heard of a bigger system than 6 with true orbits.

You might get by with only 10 AU between the 2 stars in a pair (First In allowed it) but you'll need much greater distances (like hundreds of AU) between pairs.

You can then play with double planets as natural occurrences but you still only have one real habitable zone per star.

Terraformable moons of gas giants remain hypothetical objects. Jupiter doesn't have any and only lack of knowledge about Titan's innards keeps it as a maybe. Go out to Neptune to find the next big moons and you're looking at places where nitrogen is a granite hard solid. Heat one of those to human-friendly temps and who knows if things would work out all right.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Except that in reality, gas giant moons would be within the radiation belts and inhospitable to earth like life. Not to mention have extremely long day/night cycles, again not very earth like.

Firefly is a nice western in space, don't get my criticism wrong.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

In reality, Jupiter is the only one of our gas giants to have a huge and deadly radiation belt, and Callisto isn't within it. Long rotation periods seem more likely, given locking to synchronicity and multi-day revolutions around the giant.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Terraformable anything remains a hypothetical object. Many gas giants are much closer to their stars than ours, though, if worrying about habitable zones. If using fusion-powered artificial suns in orbit, even that's not really a concern.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

My concerns were geological. The three outer Jovian moons are all a mix of rock and ice that wouldn't be viable if you melted it. They're also too small to retain liquid water gravitationaly.

The charged particle radiation wouldn't be a direct issue to anything with an Earth-like atmosphere. It might erode the atmosphere of any body without a magnetic field though.

For me at least "terraformable" can henceforth be taken as shorthand for "at least as terraformable as Mars". In the real solar system even Mars isn't that close to terraformable but it still leads by a wide margin.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Sure, but there's no reason to think our Jovian satellites are exhaustive of the possibilities. Planetary science is so far a long string of surprises.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

If a moon is big enough to retain a liquid core, it's likely to also have a magnetic field of its own, making the GG's less of an issue.

Also, moons either outside the outer edge of the GG's radiation belts are likely not tidelocked. Plus, they need a liquid core to generate a magnetic field themselves so that they are survivable from the solar radiation.

And ones closer in than the inner edge of a GG's radiation belt are protected by the radiation belt itself to a degree. Further, they're close enough in that tidelock ceases to be a major issue.

Amen!