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.