Loading the Canon: 34 Tauri

Firefly and the BDM never really gave us a good idea of the 'shape of space.' We knew there was a high tech Core where the UAP was based, that included, at least, Londinium, Sihnon, Ariel, and Persephone. Places like Greenleaf, Haven, Beaumonde, and Mirnada were "on the frontier." But we never really knew how those places related to one another. In fact, during the course of the series and the BDM (that's "Big Damn Movie" in case you were wondering), our heroes cover quite a bit of ground: from Ariel in the core to Miranda out at the ass end of the 'Verse.

Through the series and movie, we only get glimpses of anything like a star chart. And that's a good thing. They were concentrating on the story telling, not the technology or the astro-physics. It just needed to be established that most trips took from a few hours to a few days, and the actual distances didn't matter to the plot. I seem to remember an interview with Joss where is said the science hurt his brain. That's ok. He doesn't need to be a scientist. As gamers, we don't need to be scientist either. We just need to know enough to work with the campaign.

Before the release of the Official Map of the 'Verse (canon) , and the companion 'Verse in Numbers (semi-canon?), there were a number of Fan and Gamer attempts to map out the 'Verse. All of them had to contend with the "fact" that the 'Verse contained "Dozens of planets and hundreds of moons." From a deleted scene in "Our Mrs Reynolds," Mal says "More than 70 earths spinnin' about the galaxy, and the meek have inherited not a one." Taken together, any map of the 'verse will give us a single star system (or very tight cluster) with n > 70 habitable worlds.

Without a star chart, our GM (Joss, being the GM for the series and movie) just has to tell us how long the flight takes and we're good to go. Distances don't really matter. Only time. At least from the perspective of a story teller.

From our perspective, as player and GM's, travel times are all that really matters to us too. The problem is that it's hard to arbitrarily declare times when we don't know the distances involved. This is where the map comes in. It shows us the shape of space. We can tell where different worlds are in relation to one another well enough that we can estimate travel times, sensor ranges, whatever we need. Unfortunately, it also raises a few other issues.

To inappropriately misquote Montgomery Scott, "Ya canna' chage the laws o' physics." Basically, it boils down to the fact that ships in the 'Verse are not exceptionally fast (a post dedicated to that later, actually) and the distances between most worlds is vast. If you're just popping between worlds in orbit around one of the protostars, you really are looking at trips measured in a couple hours. But for the jaunt from, say, Beaumonde, in the Kalidasa system with our "fan created" Hale's Moon and MacLaren's Drift, to Ariel or Londinium, you're talking days. Even at full burn it's not a short trip. Londinium to Miranda? Think a week - in a fast boat.

A couple of things work against the idea of actually using the canon material included in the Map. First, there's the fact that most of us get from region to region in Secondlife by teleporting. You're on Shadow and want to be on Caliban? Click a landmark and POOF you're there. Never mind Shadow's primary is Georgia and Caliban (orbiting Miranda) is around Blue Sun. The mechanics of Secondlife ignore the distance between. Another thing working against us, as a group of players, is that we don't necessarily want to be bound by flight times and enforced delays. We play in real-time. When the call goes out that Blackburne is under attack by Reavers, we really don't want to respond "Damn, sorry, mate. But I'm at Washtown and it's a 35 hour flight." We ignore the flight time for the sake of RP.

So what are we left with? Jai's suggested (paraphrasing, here) assuming that the transit took however long it should have taken, but that's behind the scenes and only really tracked by the character(s) involved. That can actually work really well for individuals or small groups. In a live game, I'd do exactly that. "After twenty two hours in transit, you set down on Haven." The show did exactly that too. Flight times were flexible, based on how many scenes they needed to have in transit to tell the story. But that flexibility causes continuity problems in a multi-GM, multi-environment, campaign like we have on Secondlife.

So we're kind of stuck. The technical minded amongst us have to set aside technical accuracy, and the implications of the Map, in order to accommodate the large number of players and environments involved.

We will assume the Official Map of the 'Verse is a canon representation of our space, and use it to figure out where things are. We can even toss in distance or flight time references when they make sense in the story, but we largely ignore the technical details.

It's a game, after all, right?

I'll touch on the orbital mechanics and some of the 'factoids' tossed in by the Companion in another post. It's a great piece of work, but I need to dig into some of the numbers. It's also not entirely clear whether it's canon itself, or an addendum to the map that is canon.