Personally, I'll use it for reference in some situations but not as Canon. There's several reasons for this, probably the most important being that it makes some assumptions that don't appear to have any support outside this particular white paper. The second, which I'll cover later, is that some of the numbers appear to be wrong.
More on that later.
First, the Companion includes a basic timeline on the Exodus and colonization periods. It's fairly sparse, which is good, because it leaves us room to look back at Earth that Was wile it was still just Earth. There's a few points that don't make a lot of sense in there, but I'll leave those to the reader to find. The point is there's a working time line that's vague enough to leave us, as GMs and players, room to maneuver. Since a lot of the history of the Exodus is considered "lost," when there's something in the timeline that conflicts we can write it off as either "misinterpreted" or simply an inaccurate account.
Where this may not matter to our live games in SL, it does matter to some of the fiction I, and others, are writing or might wish to pursue.
The timeline given in the Verse in Numbers does give us starting and ending dates for the Unification War. 2508 to 2511 - a period of 5 years, set 7 years before "now" in 2518. In this context, I believe they're referring to the period of Serenity. This strikes me as much too short a period for the war. I would have thought at least 10 to 15 years, perhaps longer. This is one of those cases where we can apply some interpretation to the numbers. Where the "official" war was only 5 years long, we could have had fighting happening on more localized fronts for much longer. 'Nam, anyone?
This raises the question of when our own campaign is set. When I first joined the story back in December of 2007, I was told we were set "About six years after the events of Serenity." I based my character backstory and in-game age on that. Putting the date at 2524 worked well - I could have a character in her mid 30's who'd still fought in the last year or so of the war before she was 20. If we extend the "unofficial" period of the war back farther than five years, we can accommodate older veterans without having to change assumptions.
I've heard different assumptions from other players though, most notably 20 years after Serenity. The difference is large enough that it would cause continuity issues for the characters involved, since they'd have to retcon their backstories to fit the "new" timeline - either forward or back.
I'm not sure what the consensus is amongst the other players. Personally, I think setting it at the closer date makes more sense. The events of Serenity are much closer to home, and there's less difficulty with incorperating elements like surviving Reavers and villans like Niska.
I'd welcome comments on that. In fact, I'd welcome comments on any of my assumptions in any of these posts.
Now, back to the Verse in Numbers.
I mentioned that some of the information in the paper seemed wrong. There's a few assumptions they make that just don't work. First, there's the habitable zone issue. While there's some argument about whether the habitable zone concept is even valid, the disagreement is in how it would apply to the search for life. For our purposes, we're not just looking for life, we're looking for Earth-life-habitable planets. Just because a world could support a population of extremophiles, doesn't mean it'll be suitable for our needs. The planets need to be Earth-like or terraformable to Earth-like.
That means it needs to be close enough to its Primary to get enough radiation to support life, but not so close that it over-heats the surface. Every world we see in the series or movie appears to be temperate to dry, with one exception - a 'cold' world.
There's a number of ways to calculate the habitable zone around a particular star based on its luminosity. A quick search turned up a handy on-line calculator that was originally written to support Traveller 2300. You can plug in the star's luminosity, conveniently provided in the Map and ViN, and get the inner and outer ranges for an Earth-like habitable zone.
For example: White Sun, 34 Tauri A, is stellar class A0, with a mass 3.2 times that of Sol and a luminosity 80 times as great. Plugging the pertinent luminosity into the calculator, we come back with an inner limit of 7.3 AU, an ideal at 8.9 and a max of 10.7 AU from the primary. That puts Burnadette, Londinium, and Sihnon within the habitable zone. The next world out, Liann Jiun is at 10.8 AU and outside the habitable zone. The remaining worlds are too far away.
The calculator I referenced above is based on a fairly simple formula, that's referenced in this article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Science. The actual formulas are (from the article above):
This puts a lot of worlds outside the computed habitable zones of their primaries. The problem is probably even worse for the worlds they've placed around the 'ignited protostars', but that's a discussion for another post.
What we're seeing though, is that the numbers are wrong. We can live with that. It's a game after all. In our parent fiction it was never even mentioned, let alone an issue. This is a Western in Space, after all, not hard Science Fiction. We're not talking 2001: A space odyssey.
Since this is already getting too long, I'm going to move the Surface Gravity discussion to another post.
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