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.