Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by shawnhcorey

I thought it was a multiple-star system. From the Wikipedia page: "The system has five stars and seven brown dwarf/protostars."

That's not going to give you dozens of terraformable planets and hundreds of moons. It would be (at best!) 5 relatively close solar systems.

You could have 2 pairs of stars each about 10 AU from each other with the pairs orbiting around the combined center of mass of all 4. the 5th star has to orbit that same center and really might not be very close at all.

The brown dwarfs are useless complications.

You're also needing al 5 of the real stars to be the right sort 1.e probably mid-G stars with high metallicity, all of the same age and all c.4 billion years or more old.

You also need your pre-terraform planets in the right orbits and not the wrong sort i.e not too big, not too small, right length of day and not runaway greenhouse either.

Then you also have the question of omnipotent Ancients because hitting this many improbabilities is screaming "unnatural arrangement!".