Loading the Canon: A leaf on the wind

"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."

"What does that even mean?"

Unlike a lot of Role Playing Gamers, my home genre, so to speak, was Science Fiction, not Fantasy. While I'd been exposed to classic Fantasy fare like AD&D, I cut my gaming teeth on SciFi. To me, one of the best things about Firefly from a story standpoint was that I was able to easily suspend disbelief and get into the story in spite of the SciFi aspects of it being peripheral to the story.

As I've noted in other posts in this series, the Science, when we see it, is actually fairly well done. Silence in space. EVA suits. Ships that feel like more than just a backdrop. Honestly, I would take Serenity over Enterprise any day of the week. The details, when they had any, were nicely done. For someone who actually liked messing around with the details, it said a lot that I fell in love with the series without them.

But then, it was about the characters and not about the ships.

Ships though, are the main topic of this post. Last time, we talked about Electronic Warfare and communications. This time, I'm going to touch on ships and how they maneuver. Or don't, as the case may be.

In the pilot episode, we see Serenity cross paths with a Reaver transport on a run between worlds. When you watch the scene, the crossing velocities appear to be pretty slow. Now, that's a requirement of dramatic television. If we showed the actual crossing velocities, you'd miss it if you blinked. That's how fast the ships must be going to cover any sort of distance in useful time frames.

This is actually somewhat contradictory because we know Serenity's main drive (The "Boom! drive" as I like to call it) gives a pretty impressive initial kick. Though, it appears that may be ALL it gives. At least from what we see. They spin up the core and dump it all at once in a massive pulse, giving the characteristic "Boom!" and then they coast for the rest of the flight. Why I say it's contradictory in the pilot image, is because the crossing speed should be a good deal higher than it appears.

Why do I say that? Simple. Visually, it looks like the boats are crossing at maybe fifty miles an hour. Tops. Possibly a lot slower. For an interplanetary trip, the ships have to be moving a LOT more than 50 miles an hour. They really need to be moving at thousands, if not tens, or hundreds, of thousands of miles an hour.

For the ships to have an apparent crossing speed of even a hundred miles an hour, they would have to be flying in pretty much the same direction! As an audience, of course, we ignore it. We're used to seeing it in SciFi TV shows and movies. We suspend disbelief and accept that the Reavers are cruising past at low speed and we don't care.

Could they have been traveling in the same direction, so the crossing speed was what it appeared to be? Of course they could have. But common convention has the nose of the ship pointing in the direction of travel. That's standard, and we see no reason to break it here. The Reaver looks like it's on a crossing course, not flying backwards on a very similar course, which is reinforced in later dialog.

Earlier in the pilot, when Serenity has just escaped from the Dortmunder, we get the impression that the Alliance gunboats lack the performance to real in the escaping Firefly and still catch up with the Cruiser that's about to mosey off to answer a distress call. There's actually a number implications in that scene that are significant from a technical/gamer standpoint, but were obviously done to advance the plot.

Other examples of "Drama > Reality" in the 'Verse are several of the scenes involving the Reaver fleet in the BDM. When Serenity first encounters the Swarm, they cruise through the midst of it at what looks like freeway speed at best. Never mind they should be decelerating into their approach for Miranda. In that scene they're going slow and in a nose first attitude, indicating they're in standard Coast Mode flight - having established the Boost and Coast flight model in the series itself.

There's a lot of implications that were ignored for Story sake. Serenity needed to do the low speed pass to establish how large the fleet was, give us a chance to see them tearing other people's boats apart, and generally add a bit to the overall Reaver creepiness factor. The scene worked from a plot standpoint, if not a technical one. We could probably over-analyze this, or make up all sorts of technical reasons it was still "right," but we're not going to. We're going to admit that Joss got the science wrong, because he didn't care and the plot was more important, and the scene was there strictly for Story and not because it was technically accurate.

One the way out from Miranda, we see a couple of things. One: the "Itty bitty cannon" is capable of blowing a Reaver ship to bits with a single hit at close range. We DO mean close range too. Mal is barrel sighting that shot. It really is as close as it looks. Which kind of makes you wonder why the Reaver pilot wasn't saying "Ai ya, hwai leh! They've got a Gorram cannon!" They were close enough he should have seen the bloody thing!

In any case, none of the Reaver boats return fire after that first shot. Wash just punches it and then, point two: The entire Reaver fleet takes off after them. Watch that scene again, and for amusement sake, notice the one Reaver boat that seems to be doing a wheelie when it punches it, and then notice how little time it takes for what whole fleet to drag up and tear off after Serenity. It's like the entire squadron was ready for them to play rabbit. While it's implied the Reavers like to run down their prey, it seems a bit much to expect that entire fleet to go off after them!

But that was part of the story. Mal said it: "They won't see this coming." Story here demands the entire Reaver fleet take off after them and they do. So it is written, so it shall be.

Finally, the third point here. When they arrive at Mister Universe's "private planet" the Reaver fleet is still in more or less the same relative position they were in when the punched out of Miranda's orbit. Or Lagrange point. Or wherever the hell they were floating around sending out raiding parties. The point being they never closed the gap with Serenity and, notable for a number of reasons, the entire formation seems to be pretty much intact. It's like they ALL had exactly the same acceleration impulse and kept the same relative position through the entire flight.

From a story standpoint, it made perfect sense and led to the closest thing to an epic space battle we ever see in the 'Verse. From a technical standpoint, it made absolutely no sense. There was absolutely no reason ever presented for the ships to have the same acceleration, same "cruise speed," and same overall performance. It's another example of "The story is more important than technical accuracy." And you know something? I don't mind. I love the movie anyway. But from a technical gaming standpoint? Ugh.

Where does this leave us for Canon as gamers?

If we were doing this as a pencil and paper or a moderated on-line game, we could easily incorporate ships moving at different speeds, having different performance levels, ranges, accelerations, etc. It's how I would run a game live. Some ships would be faster than others, and you might find yourself having to deal with getting some place ahead of or behind someone else. Chases might matter.

But then, they might not. We'd want to keep the focus on the characters and their interactions and not on the ships. So the solution becomes something like this. . .

In most cases, flight speed doesn't matter. Characters will arrive when they need to for Story sake.

If there is a chase, there's three options.
1: If story demands the "guys being chased" need to escape, they escape.
2: If story demands the "guys being chased" need to be caught, they get caught.
3: If story demands the "guys being chased" don't quite get away, both sides arrive at the final destination at roughly the same time, so as to increase dramatic tension.

Space battles have a very similar set of options.
1: If story demands the "good guys" win, then they win.
2: If story demands the "good guys" lose, then they lose.
3: If story demands the"good guys" fight to a draw, then it's a draw.

Noticing a theme here?

The second part of this goes as follows.
1: If the "loser" is a minor NPC (a Mook, or other character no one cares about) they die.
2: If the "loser" is a Player Character or Significant NPC, they limp away to crash land on a conveniently placed asteroid, planet, or moon, in order to lead into the next part of the story.
3: If the "loser" needs to be captured, rather than escaping as above, then they're captured and the story flows from there.

Ok, I admit. This was more GM/Plot focused than Canon focused here, but Canon doesn't really give us much to work with. If we go straight by what we see in the series and movie, we're left with a technically weak "everyone goes the same speed" situation that makes the technical players brain's hurt.

Secondlife itself adds some layers here, since it's almost as bad a flight simulator and space combat simulator as it is an FPS combat simulator. So my take an canon and RP? Just go with the flow. Treat everything in the context of the story and if players want to argue about who's ship is really fastest, let them. A GM can sort it out. Because, ultimately, this isn't about the ships, it's about the characters.

Loading the Canon: Stopping the signal

As has been, and will be, often mentioned, Firefly was a Western in Space. It wasn't a spaceship show. While spaceships sometimes played a very important part of the stories, the tech behind it pretty much didn't matter. "I need that in Captain Dummy talk, Kaylee." was more than an amusing quote. It was the approach to technology in the entire series. Firefly spared us the Treknobabble by simply treating tech they they had in Westerns of old. The Duke never bothered to explain how the Winchester worked. He just pulled the trigger and killed the bad guys.

Now, the lack of detail can be a mixed blessing for Gamers and Technical Geeks alike. On the one hand, you don't get bogged down in the particle of the week and can avoid stories that involve finding creative was to abuse established tech. On the other, you don't have anything to work from when you do need some technical detail and are forced to wing it.

There are a lot of different aspects to technology overall, some of which I've already touched on, and some I'll probably never worry about. But for this entry, I'm going to take a look at one of the vaguer parts of the 'Verse: The world of Electronic Warfare.

Ok, well, technically, it's not really all EW. It's just where it would generally fall on an MOS or Game System skill tree. I'm talking, of course, about sensors and communications.

The flight deck of Serenity, and I would assume any other Firefly of the same vintage, always struck me as looking like the flight deck of a 60's era Soviet bomber. Lots of switches and knobs. Not a lot in the way if fancy displays. In fact, I seem to remember reading somewhere that the flight seat on the Firefly set was actually taken from a Douglas DC6. The feel was very utilitarian.

This utilitarian feel was quite evident in some of the instances where they're sending or receiving a wave from the flight deck. The screens are small, and the images seem to be of fairly low quality. A good example is Mal talking to Patience in the pilot episode.

This might have been something unique to the Firefly class ship, or at least to 'flying delivery van' class transports in general. The displays on the Alliance ships seem to be better, though they actually seem less sophisticated than the displays found in the combat control center of a modern early 21st century warship.

But the relatively primitive displays flow right into what appears to be equally primitive sensors. There's a number of times in the series where it looks like you'll find better radar in a State Trooper's patrol car than you'll find in a typical spaceship. Serenity's sensors seem to be weak, at best. In "Our Mrs Reynolds" the sensor array was able to identify the "Net" not too long before it came into visual range. In the pilot episode, they detect the IAV Dortmunder not too long before she's almost on top of them. How far? We never really know, because this is a Western in Space and they don't usually talk about such things. But the implication was that they were awfully damn close.

In that same episode, we see that the sensor arrays on an Alliance cruiser are, essentially, gao se. They don't pick up Serenity until after Wash has had a chance to power down. To their credit, they do initially pick up the thermal signature, and are then able to quickly identify the class, but still. They're a ship of the line. You'd think they'd have better sensors!

Even worse for the Alliance, is they have absolutely terrible ECCM capabilities. That's Electronic Counter Counter-Measures. Serenity kicks off the Cry Baby and the Dortmunder's sensors are completely fooled. They do the same thing again in the BDM when escaping with Inara, indicating that it's not just the Dortmunder that's got crap for sensors. Either that, or the electronics in the Cry Baby is so far in advance of anything the Alliance has to counter it that the Fleet needs to rethink their whole EW budget.

Another example? The vultures operating the Net in Our Mrs Reynolds don't notice the approaching Serenity until she was almost on top of them. Though, given the apparent sophistication of that particular installation, it's no surprise their sensors also sucked. In the episode "War Stories" we get to see just how bad the sensors are on Niska's skyplex. The mook on duty in the control room there didn't get an alert on the approaching Serenity until she was growing rapidly on one of the external cameras. That was kind of like looking out the window to see someone about to drive a semi tractor through your front door.

So, what does this leave us for Canon? Well, it leaves us confused, actually. It appears from everything we see in series that ship's sensors aren't a lot better than they were on Earth that Was in, say, the 1950's. There's a few exceptions here and there, but that only adds to the confusion. It's also an opportunity. From the perspective of a Player/Character/GM, you can usually just assume that everyone's sensors are pretty much crap (including your own) and ignore it. Since nearly everything happening in an SL context is going to be at very short ranges, this works out fine. The only time it would come up is when people are RPing across large swaths of the Black, usually off camera.

There's no reason to assume good sensors and such don't exist. Only that they're not exceptionally common, even on large capital ships. This leaves room to play all sorts of Electronic Warfare games. At least for those so inclined.

Did I mention my personal boat In-Character is the ELINT version?

Now, in contrast to sensor technology, the communications technology is quite sophisticated. Where it's firmly established that there is no FTL travel in the 'Verse (ok, actually, it's firmly established in an interview with Joss Whedon, rather than explicitly in the show or BDM) there is FTL communication. We see several cases of interplanetary communication with no delay, explicitly implying FTL comms.

The Cortex, for its part, is their equivalent of our Internet. I'm sure Joss based the Cortex on the contemporary 21st century Internet when he wrote it. The addition of wireless FTL capability extends it deep into the Black. Though there are a few apparent limitations on where the signal can actually go.

In the series, it's just the cortex and FTL communications. But the BDM introduces us to Mister Universe and the simply massive communications station he calls home. It's evident from the dialog that his station can receive pretty much anything transmitted anywhere in the 'Verse. And why not? The dishes are huge! As a transmitter, the station apparently can reach a large swath of the 'Verse simply by punching the signal out so people can listen to it. This is actually kind of contrary to the Cortex as Internet idea, but is rather like having a direct patch into, say, DirecTV's birds. The report gets out and people can see it whether they want to or not.

The Official Map of the 'Verse also includes various comms relay stations around the 'Verse. My guess, since it's never explained, is that they serve very much the same purpose microwave repeaters do in overland communications networks. They receive a signal from somewhere, then rebroadcast it to wherever it's supposed to end up.

How does that fit in with the rig Mister Universe has? No idea. The BDM, and its antenna farm, predates the official map of the 'Verse. There's nothing contradictory about having both a massive communications system like his and the series of Cortex relays noted in the map. There are some story continuity issues, but most of them are items for another blog entry. In this context, we can ignore the story and just focus on the fact that there are some big honkin' communications facilities in the 'Verse (no reason to believe Mister Universe's is the only one) and they're capable of drawing in vast quantities of traffic from across the 'Verse.

There's also the minor question of personal communication. It seems likely that 'Sending a wave' is the equivalent of sending an email, or IM, or vmail, or VoIP call, or whatever, over the internet now. We see people do that all the time. We also see them using some walkie talkies that look like they came from Radio Shack or something. Not the modern FRS radios. More like those really old hand held CB's. They seem positively huge. But they may also be very long ranged. Just because we only ever see them used up close, it doesn't mean they aren't Firefly's answer to an Iridium phone.

What does all this mean for us as Canon from a Gamer's perspective? We can take away several things from this. FTL flight does not exist. FTL communications does. Communications are normally instantaneous, which fits in perfectly for gaming in Secondlife. They are also normally very reliable. Except when they're not, which is almost always when it's required to advance the story. So as players, if we need to kick off a wave to a friend who's half way across the 'Verse, we can. It may violate the known laws of physics. But it doesn't violate Canon.