Is Firefly better off cancelled?

[Mudd]

No, they filmed that in the BBC's basement.

Nice bit in that article about the Killer Angels connection and what he drew from it, and the Stagecoach stuff, which never occurred to me - I think I'll have to buy the book.

Damn, the article reminded me again how sorry I am this show is gone.

 

[Phoenix219]

Core Worlds? Rim? Galactic Alliance? The System? BUT NO FTL? And that many habitable planets? How is this remotely plausible? I am so glad I have never watched Firefly.

 

[Mudd]

Well, it's vastly more plausible than, say, Star Trek because...it has no FTL. Or teleporters. Or ray guns. Or actors playing aliens.

Okay, there may have been a raygun in there somewhere at some point.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

They don't have FTL, but they do have artificial gravity...

And I believe there was indeed a raygun in one episode but it was treated as a very rare item and not in common use. Still, the technology does exist.

 

[Kor]

Core Worlds? Rim? Galactic Alliance? The System? BUT NO FTL? And that many habitable planets? How is this remotely plausible? I am so glad I have never watched Firefly.

"The Alliance," not "Galactic Alliance." And many of the planets in the system were terraformed. The show makes that clear.

Kor

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Is it just one planetary system where all the action of the series takes place?

 

[Mudd]

They don't have FTL, but they do have artificial gravity.

As a practical matter, the show has to. It's a conventionalization rather than fictional tech that matters within the 'verse.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ Are you sure your name is Dennis and not Christopher?

 

[Kor]

Is it just one planetary system where all the action of the series takes place?

In the series, it wasn't quite clear. But the movie explicitly said that it was all in a single system.

Kor

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ Is there any information as to where this system is? And how far away it is from Earth?

 

[urbandefault]

^ Is there any information as to where this system is? And how far away it is from Earth?

It's "in the black." That's like, far away.

 

[The Wormhole]

^ Is there any information as to where this system is? And how far away it is from Earth?

Considering the fastest we can get something to the next solar system currently is twenty years, you're probably looking at a minimum of that.

 

[fireproof78]

Core Worlds? Rim? Galactic Alliance? The System? BUT NO FTL? And that many habitable planets? How is this remotely plausible? I am so glad I have never watched Firefly.

That's a deal breaker?

I get if people couldn't get in to it (my dad tried but couldn't, despite liking TOS) but not trying it at all? That confuses me?

As for the map of the Alliance, here you all go.

The Alliance's official name, as revealed in "Ariel" (one of the best episodes in my opinion) is the "Union of Allied Planets." Whedon describes it thusly in one interview:

''Mal's politics are very reactionary and 'Big government is bad' and 'Don't interfere with my life,''' Whedon explains. ''And sometimes he's wrong -- because sometimes the Alliance is America, this beautiful shining light of democracy. But sometimes the Alliance is America in Vietnam: we have a lot of petty politics, we are way out of our league and we have no right to control these people. And yet! Sometimes the Alliance is America in Nazi Germany. And Mal can't see that, because he was a Vietnamese.''

So, the moral ambiguity is presented deliberately, and I think we would have seen more of that had the show continued.

 

[RJDiogenes]

As for the map of the Alliance, here you all go.

Sweet. Is that official or fanon? I like it either way.

 

[Grendelsbayne]

"The Alliance," not "Galactic Alliance." And many of the planets in the system were terraformed. The show makes that clear.

Kor

Also, many of the locations in the show aren't technically planets - they're moons (and at least 1 asteroid, I think).

They don't have FTL, but they do have artificial gravity...

And I believe there was indeed a raygun in one episode but it was treated as a very rare item and not in common use. Still, the technology does exist.

The Lassiter wasn't really a raygun, that I recall. It was an advanced laser weapon which was never really shown to do anything particularly amazing. In fact, I don't think it was shown working even once, so there's no reason to assume it would be even remotely comparable to, say, a phaser. And the fact that even the alliance preferred traditional guns would tend to back that up.

 

[fireproof78]

Also, many of the locations in the show aren't technically planets - they're moons (and at least 1 asteroid, I think).




The Lassiter wasn't really a raygun, that I recall. It was an advanced laser weapon which was never really shown to do anything particularly amazing. In fact, I don't think it was shown working even once, so there's no reason to assume it would be even remotely comparable to, say, a phaser. And the fact that even the alliance preferred traditional guns would tend to back that up.

There was also a laser pistol in "Heart of Gold."

Sweet. Is that official or fanon? I like it either way.

It was an official production for the Firely Roleplaying game by QMX.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Considering the fastest we can get something to the next solar system currently is twenty years, you're probably looking at a minimum of that.

Twenty years -- that's more than 20% of the speed of light to Proxima Centauri. Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking have proposed laser-propelled miniprobes that can survive 500,000 m/s^2 acceleration for 2 minutes with a light sail that can handle the intensity of a 100 GW laser that requires the order of 100 nuclear power plants worth of power and communicate the 4.2 ly back to Earth from tiny transmitters. They have yet to build and launch one. The engineering problems are probably harder than they think so I hope they have deep pockets. The best we can do with chemical rockets and gravity assist is somewhere around 20,000 years.

 

[JD]

Which the vast majority of its citizens and those that fought for it had no idea was the case, and even our "heroes" didn't know that until the movie, long after they'd warred against them. Heck, as I recall, even the Operative didn't know that. So, again: one of my big gripes with the show is that it didn't establish from the start what the stakes were/had been. If Whedon wanted to do a frontier show, why not just have lots of factions with a history of petty squabbles, rather than an ill-defined big war? Whatever depth the war backstory gave the characters wasn't worth its narrative complications for me, and that's my two cents.

Well, since the whole thing is sci-fi version of the post Civil War west, you kind of need the Civil War.

 

[Gaith]

^ It's fiction. You don't "need" anything.

 

[Mudd]

Well, since the whole thing is sci-fi version of the post Civil War west, you kind of need the Civil War.

To the folks who have to scratch out their livings in the aftermath of a war, the supposed causes and issues that provoked the conflict are not all that material - only whether your side lost or not.