Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by cptbutton

(And I am not even going to try to make sense of the “dozens of planets and hundreds of moons” suitable for terraforming part.)

That's not nearly as tough as everybody makes it out to be. Joss just missed the obvious: It isn't a single system.

It's an open cluster. FTL drives exist, but jumps to pretty much anything outside the cluster (e.g. back to Earth) are not possible without some major infrastructure (some kind of jump booster array) that is well beyond anything anyone can now manage.

[shawnhcorey]

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

[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!".

[shawnhcorey]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

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

Now if you limit your search to nearby stars. In our galaxy, this may have happen once or twice. :) But from what has been learnt of extrasolar systems, anything is possible.

[Agemegos]

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."

Yeah. It's a system of hundreds of stars, or in other words an open cluster. Nature just won't plausibly give you even one terraformable world per star. 30 per hundred stars is an optimistic estimate.

[The Colonel]

You can rationalise it fairly easily if you dump the "all one system" conceit - short range FTL between a few, closely spaced systems would do fine.

As already state, the trip from Earth could be one way simply because the distance is too great for FTL drives that can be built in the colonies and the ones that brought them here have been dismantled for use in colony building (or used up all their phelbotinum).

Again, the tech difference is due to most of the resources from the colony ship being used up to settle the core worlds. After that, well, each core colony is its own state ... whilst we may assume that any future colonies (on non core planets) would be independent or controlled by the federal government (the Alliance): no core world wants to spend resources it can use at home to fund a sub-colony that would benefit someone else, and the Alliance doesn't really have the mandate to do so - you could probably draw parallels from early US history. Speaking of early US history, why, if for all they know there's no-one else out there does the Alliance have such a big military programme? Well, unlike in the show, in this version the Alliance know that Homeworld is still there and live in fear of "the Crown Expeditionary Force" (than you Mr Meier) coming to bring them to heel...

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

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

I imagine "God made it this way on purpose" would provide a good, persuasive explanation for many people.

That might even help explain the terraforming projects. Terraforming may include a strong religious element in come cultures.

''The Creator clearly intended us to find the cluster/system and remake these worlds, else why would He have arranged everything just so? "

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by RyanW

That's not nearly as tough as everybody makes it out to be. Joss just missed the obvious: It isn't a single system.

The basic problem seems to be that, like many TV-SF writers, Josh wasn't too clear on astrodynamics and didn't realise that he could get advice on it. Like Terry Nation in the 1960s who didn't know the difference between a solar system and a galaxy, he just wrote more or less what other people had written.

The "all one solar system" stuff only comes in in the film, and stinks of desperate retcon. Treat it as RyanW says, a Traveller-style polity of several solar systems, and it pretty much works.

[shawnhcorey]

But planets in systems with more than one star are possible, but very rare.

[thrash]

Originally Posted by shawnhcorey

But planets in systems with more than one star are possible, but very rare.

That's not the issue, though. The issue is: how many terraformable worlds can you have in one system?

Even with multiple stars, each with its own suite of planets, resonance effects will limit the number of worlds per habitable zone to two or three at most -- call it a dozen or so, max. Swap all of the planets in a habitable zone for a super-Jovian gas giant, and you might eke out a couple more habitable moons. There's just no way to get 70+ habitable planets and moons around five stars.

Hey, I know: what if the 'Verse is a failed or abandoned Dyson Swarm?