Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Hans Rancke-Madsen

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

Hans

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.