In the original series, Reavers are presented to us as a kind of "Boogy Man." They were dangerous, primal, violent, madmen who attacked colonies out of the Black, raping and killing (not always in that order) anyone that got on their way. They showed up just often enough in Firefly to add some genuine tension without being overused, as so often happens with Zombie class baddies. And yes, Reavers fill the same role as Zombies. In any case, they were all batshit insane and were far more likely to try and eat you than anything else.
Serenity gave us the origin of the Reavers and, as a bonus, an explanation as to why River Tim was an emotional basket case.
As a violent enemy goes, Reavers are great for terrorizing a small ill-equipped colony. From what we see of them, they're violent and aggressive and scary to look at, and fight like berserkers. They favor melee over ranged combat so they can kill you up close and personal, but do use ranged weapons - usually of the makeshift variety. In fact, I don't think we ever see them using "normal" ranged weapons. Reavers seem to like thinks like sawblade and rebar launchers over guns, which actually makes sense given their resources.
Reavers, as an enemy though, have a number of logical problems.
First: Serenity established that the Reavers are the result of an adverse reaction to a chemical agent known as G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate, which was dumped into the atmosphere of the colony world Miranda as part of an effort to pacify the population. It's established that 1/10th of 1% of the population reacted badly and went batshit insane, while everyone else basically died.
Miranda's given a population of 30 million people, which would leave us with about 30 thousand Reavers. That's not actually a lot of people. For comparison, Flagstaff, Arizona, best known for a university and two astronomical observatories, Lowell and a US Naval Observatory, has a population of about 60 thousand. Being Arizona, they probably have more guns than the Reavers do too.
The Reaver population, incidentally, is about the same as two Divisions of soldiers.
Second: With the exception of one guy, in one episode, there doesn't seem to be a way to make new Reavers. From the episode Bushwhacked, Mal states:
"They made him watch. He probably tried to turn away, and they wouldn't let him. You call him a survivor? He's not. A man comes up against that kind of will, the only way to deal with it, I suspect, is to become it."
While this gives us a (mostly implausible) way to make new Reavers, it doesn't seem like they'd ever keep up with the inevitable attrition. And attrition would be inevitable. It's stated a number of times that Reaver boats "run without containment," which is tantamount to suicide. Add to it a very violent life, the fact that they self mutilate, which will lead to infection and all the complications that come with it, and your initial population of Reavers is going to be dieing off.
Third: Reavers are not soldiers. While a few boatloads swarming a small frontier town will make a royal mess of the town and leave a lot of dead bodies in its wake, assuming the town's not armed like Player Characters, Reavers are going to be no match for a unit of professional soldiers. They're Berserkers. They swarm and fight hand to hand. They don't have a lot of ranged firepower. And they want to take their targets alive so they can eat them.
The fear factor Reavers have comes from their reputation and appearance, not from them actually being unstoppable killing machines. Where a GM could say that exposure to the Pax was the equivalent of some kind of super soldier serum, there's nothing anywhere in the series or BDM to support that. They're just crazy people. Violent, self-mutilating, crazy people.
Fourth: I have to state this as a question, unfortunately. But why don't Reavers attack each other? The Pax made 99.9% of the people exposed to it get so mellow they pretty much just lay down and let themselves die. The rest went hyper-violent and started killing and eating people. We can logically assume that the Reaver's first targets were the other colonists on Miranda, who were just kinda lounging around waiting to die anyway.
But when they're gone, what next? The implication from the show is that somehow all the remaining Reavers on Miranda got together and moved into whatever boats were laying around, and turned into packs of raiding mobs who never appear to fight each other.
Huh?
Fifth: Also a question. How have they managed to maintain their ships when they're all batshit insane and don't really have a steady supply of parts? Maybe somehow the Reavers act like Care Bears with each other, but that still doesn't explain how they keep their boats in the air. Considering the few times we encounter them in the series they don't take their prize as salvage, where are they getting the bits? In Serenity it seems their boats are all cobbled together from spares they've salvaged from their kills, which makes sense. But why are they hanging out in orbit, in ships running without containment on their reactors, when there's a perfectly good planet right next door? Which, incidently is at the ass end of the 'verse with no shipping traffic?
Huh?
I could go on, but you get the point. From a logical perspective, the Reavers are a terrible long term enemy. In a game set somewhere between 6 and 20 years after the events of Serenity, there shouldn't be many left. We only have 30K to start with, and there was a space battle at the end of Serenity which the Alliance obviously won. That leaves what must be a large fraction of the Reaver fleet destroyed, with the remainder scattered across the 'Verse.
Part of the Miranda Incident, as I tend to call the broadcast in Serenity, was spreading knowledge about the Reavers across much of the 'Verse. That means the Alliance is probably no longer denying their existence, and something is almost certainly being done to remove the threat they represent.
Now, in the SecondLife stories we're participating in, Reavers have been an ongoing menace with a number of explanations as to why we're still seeing them. There's some plot threads that actually involve why there's more of them, none of which can actually be considered canon.
In spite of the Reavers being rather flawed, they're still a major baddie in our stories. So how to we reconcile it?
We can (and probably should?) leave much of the 'society' of the remaining Reavers unexplained. They never explained it in the movie or series, and we don't need to have it explained to work with it in-game. They don't kill each other, and they can somehow keep their boats in the air. Fair enough.
Where did the replacements come from? There's no canon explanation, but we could go with the ones presented in-story: that the new Reavers are somehow the results of further experiments with derivatives of the Pax. Why would someone experiment with the Pax and end up with more Reavers? Good question. But it is a functional explanation for something we have in the story.
Bottom line? Reavers are part of the Firefly/Serenity mythology and we accept them as such. They do make good enemies for a pickup firefight, and the players like 'em. So, logical or not, Reavers it is.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Loading the Canon: Surface Gravity
Warning: Lots of number crunching follows.
In the last post I talked about orbits and habitable zones as shown in the Map and the 'Verse in Numbers. Another issue that comes up consistently though ViN is the stated planetary masses and the assumed surface gravity. Every time we see Our Heroes on the ground though the series and BDM they're on a world with Earth Normal gravity. At least close enough to it that they're walking and moving as if everything's great.
That's OK. Trek and Star Wars did that too. It saves on the FX budget and doesn't hurt the story telling. What it does do, though, is raise the question of why you have Earth normal surface gravity on a Ceres-sized moon.
Calculating the surface gravity of a world is another straightforward formula. There's a lot of places to find it, but you can see the formula and a chart showing the surface gravity for worlds in the Sol system here.
From that site, we have the following formula:
We're going to use SI measurements (That's International System of Units, not Sports Illustrated) for our calculations. Running the numbers for Earth first for a baseline, we get:
(6.67*10^-11) * (5.98*10^24) / (6.378*10^6)^2 = 9.805234578
Where:
(6.67*10^-11) is the gravitational constant.
(5.974*10^24) is the Mass of Earth in Kilograms
(6.378*10^6)^2 is the square of Earth's radius in Meters.
and 9.8 is the surface acceleration in Meters per Second.
Now, hunting around I've found various numbers to plug into the calculation which gives a slight range of values. For our purposes, we'll go with these numbers because they're close enough for our needs.
The 'ViN gives us a diameter and mass for each of the worlds of the 'Verse. That gives us numbers to plug into each value. Since Seana is from Ariel, I'll use Ariel and one of its moons to crunch some numbers here.
According to ViN, Ariel has a diameter of 13,000 km and a mass of 6.323 * 10^21 metric tons, or 6.323 * 10^24 kg. Plugging this into the formula, we get:
(6.67*10^-11) * (6.323*10^24) / ((13.0/2)*10^6)^2 = 9.982108876
That's just a touch over Earth normal gravity, which is good. Ariel is about the same mass and diameter as Earth, so we'd expect to get roughly the same surface gravity.
So now let's try a moon. Poseidon is Ariel's third moon and is given a diameter of 1024 km and a mass of 3.563 * 10^22 kg. Plugging this in we get:
(6.67*10^-11) * (3.889*10^22) / ((1.024/2)*10^6)^2 = 9.895183563
A bit less than Earth normal, so again we're good. But are we?
Earth has an average density of 5.51 g/cm3 which is about double that of granite and over 5 times that of water. Much of that density is the result of Earth's molten iron core, which has a density of around 8 g/cm3. The ViN postulates that they increased the surface gravity of the smaller worlds by using gravity tech to somehow compress them. Same mass with a smaller diameter gives you a higher surface gravity. But it also increases the density of the target. How much? Let's see.
Density is Mass / Volume. The formula to calculate volume of a sphere is 4/3*π*radius3 which we'll want to work in cm, rather than Kilometers. So Earth's 6.378*10^3 km becomes 6.378*10^8 cm. Plugging that into our formula, we get 1.086781293e+27 cm3. Our mass of 5.974*10^24 kg becomes 5.974e+27 g. This gives us:
(5.9736e27) / (4/3 * 3.14159 * (6.378e8)^3) = 5.496967 g/cm3
This is comfortably close to the 5.51 g/cm3 stated above. The difference between using Earth's mean radius versus its equatorial radius.
Ariel itself being an Earth-like planet in mass and radius will have a very similar average density. But what about the "compressed" Poseidon? Let's crunch the numbers.
Mass: 3.889e22 kg (e25 for g)
Radius: 1024 km / 2 is 5.12e2 km (e7 for cm)
(3.889e25) / (4/3 * 3.14159 * (5.12e7)^3) = 6.91735107e1 g/cm3 or around 69 g/cm3
That's a LOT higher than Earth's density. Even solid Osmium, the highest density "normal" material, only has a density of 22.57 g/cm3. Now, 'compressing' a moon down to give it an Earth Normal surface gravity is probably more rational than installing artificial gravity generators to get the same effect. Not that either of these solutions is especially rational.
I could run more examples, but then, you can run them yourself and see what I mean.
Conclusions:
What does this mean to us as gamers in the 'Verse? Well, for starters, if you're just compressing the existing body then putting a mining colony on a small moon is a patently stupid idea. The denser the rock, the harder it is to mine. That's just a simple fact. Our little moons have a density three times higher than Osmium. Erm. . . . no.
While Canon gives us Earth Normal surface gravity on all the worlds of the 'Verse, they never explained it in the show or movie. ViN gives us 'compressed' moons that have a high enough density to provide the gravity we want. But, as we've seen, gives us an insanely high average density. The alternative is artificial gravity, which the campaign has but it was never implied that it could be used on a planetary scale.
Now, we could work with a compressed core with a thinner layer of normal density crust above it. That lets us mine our small moons to a depth of kilometers to tens of kilometers, and possibly even arrange it so the more valuable minerals 'float to the top' during the compression process, enriching the crust.
While this doesn't appear to be presented anywhere in the published materials, it is a solution we can work with and one I'm going to apply to Hale's Moon from a story perspective. Not that it'll ever actually come up.
So, to sum up, worlds smaller than Earth wind up with an Earth Normal gravity by compressing the entire body to increase its average density. The compression is somehow stratified, so the outer layers maintain a more or less normal density and only the inner layers are crunched down like Unobtanium.
Scientifically sound? No. I'd have to run numbers I don't remember, but gut instinct tells me materials with a density of 69 g/cm3 wouldn't actually be stable under normal conditions. But within the confines of an RP environment? Sure. Why not?
In the last post I talked about orbits and habitable zones as shown in the Map and the 'Verse in Numbers. Another issue that comes up consistently though ViN is the stated planetary masses and the assumed surface gravity. Every time we see Our Heroes on the ground though the series and BDM they're on a world with Earth Normal gravity. At least close enough to it that they're walking and moving as if everything's great.
That's OK. Trek and Star Wars did that too. It saves on the FX budget and doesn't hurt the story telling. What it does do, though, is raise the question of why you have Earth normal surface gravity on a Ceres-sized moon.
Calculating the surface gravity of a world is another straightforward formula. There's a lot of places to find it, but you can see the formula and a chart showing the surface gravity for worlds in the Sol system here.
From that site, we have the following formula:
The surface gravity (g) of a body depends on the mass (M) and the radius (r) of the given body. The formula which relates these quantities is:
g = G * M / r2
where G is called the Gravitational constant.
When calculating the surface gravity using this formula it is best to stick to the MKS system where the units for distance are meters, the units for mass are kilograms, and the units for time are seconds. In this system, the gravitational constant has the value:
G = 6.67 x 10-11 Newton-meter2/kilogram2.
We're going to use SI measurements (That's International System of Units, not Sports Illustrated) for our calculations. Running the numbers for Earth first for a baseline, we get:
(6.67*10^-11) * (5.98*10^24) / (6.378*10^6)^2 = 9.805234578
Where:
(6.67*10^-11) is the gravitational constant.
(5.974*10^24) is the Mass of Earth in Kilograms
(6.378*10^6)^2 is the square of Earth's radius in Meters.
and 9.8 is the surface acceleration in Meters per Second.
Now, hunting around I've found various numbers to plug into the calculation which gives a slight range of values. For our purposes, we'll go with these numbers because they're close enough for our needs.
The 'ViN gives us a diameter and mass for each of the worlds of the 'Verse. That gives us numbers to plug into each value. Since Seana is from Ariel, I'll use Ariel and one of its moons to crunch some numbers here.
According to ViN, Ariel has a diameter of 13,000 km and a mass of 6.323 * 10^21 metric tons, or 6.323 * 10^24 kg. Plugging this into the formula, we get:
(6.67*10^-11) * (6.323*10^24) / ((13.0/2)*10^6)^2 = 9.982108876
That's just a touch over Earth normal gravity, which is good. Ariel is about the same mass and diameter as Earth, so we'd expect to get roughly the same surface gravity.
So now let's try a moon. Poseidon is Ariel's third moon and is given a diameter of 1024 km and a mass of 3.563 * 10^22 kg. Plugging this in we get:
(6.67*10^-11) * (3.889*10^22) / ((1.024/2)*10^6)^2 = 9.895183563
A bit less than Earth normal, so again we're good. But are we?
Earth has an average density of 5.51 g/cm3 which is about double that of granite and over 5 times that of water. Much of that density is the result of Earth's molten iron core, which has a density of around 8 g/cm3. The ViN postulates that they increased the surface gravity of the smaller worlds by using gravity tech to somehow compress them. Same mass with a smaller diameter gives you a higher surface gravity. But it also increases the density of the target. How much? Let's see.
Density is Mass / Volume. The formula to calculate volume of a sphere is 4/3*π*radius3 which we'll want to work in cm, rather than Kilometers. So Earth's 6.378*10^3 km becomes 6.378*10^8 cm. Plugging that into our formula, we get 1.086781293e+27 cm3. Our mass of 5.974*10^24 kg becomes 5.974e+27 g. This gives us:
(5.9736e27) / (4/3 * 3.14159 * (6.378e8)^3) = 5.496967 g/cm3
This is comfortably close to the 5.51 g/cm3 stated above. The difference between using Earth's mean radius versus its equatorial radius.
Ariel itself being an Earth-like planet in mass and radius will have a very similar average density. But what about the "compressed" Poseidon? Let's crunch the numbers.
Mass: 3.889e22 kg (e25 for g)
Radius: 1024 km / 2 is 5.12e2 km (e7 for cm)
(3.889e25) / (4/3 * 3.14159 * (5.12e7)^3) = 6.91735107e1 g/cm3 or around 69 g/cm3
That's a LOT higher than Earth's density. Even solid Osmium, the highest density "normal" material, only has a density of 22.57 g/cm3. Now, 'compressing' a moon down to give it an Earth Normal surface gravity is probably more rational than installing artificial gravity generators to get the same effect. Not that either of these solutions is especially rational.
I could run more examples, but then, you can run them yourself and see what I mean.
Conclusions:
What does this mean to us as gamers in the 'Verse? Well, for starters, if you're just compressing the existing body then putting a mining colony on a small moon is a patently stupid idea. The denser the rock, the harder it is to mine. That's just a simple fact. Our little moons have a density three times higher than Osmium. Erm. . . . no.
While Canon gives us Earth Normal surface gravity on all the worlds of the 'Verse, they never explained it in the show or movie. ViN gives us 'compressed' moons that have a high enough density to provide the gravity we want. But, as we've seen, gives us an insanely high average density. The alternative is artificial gravity, which the campaign has but it was never implied that it could be used on a planetary scale.
Now, we could work with a compressed core with a thinner layer of normal density crust above it. That lets us mine our small moons to a depth of kilometers to tens of kilometers, and possibly even arrange it so the more valuable minerals 'float to the top' during the compression process, enriching the crust.
While this doesn't appear to be presented anywhere in the published materials, it is a solution we can work with and one I'm going to apply to Hale's Moon from a story perspective. Not that it'll ever actually come up.
So, to sum up, worlds smaller than Earth wind up with an Earth Normal gravity by compressing the entire body to increase its average density. The compression is somehow stratified, so the outer layers maintain a more or less normal density and only the inner layers are crunched down like Unobtanium.
Scientifically sound? No. I'd have to run numbers I don't remember, but gut instinct tells me materials with a density of 69 g/cm3 wouldn't actually be stable under normal conditions. But within the confines of an RP environment? Sure. Why not?
Loading the Canon: The verse in numbers
I've already mentioned the 'Verse in Numbers as a companion to the official Map of the Verse. The map is treated as Canon, and we're using it as such. But the Companion isn't technically canon. It's a white paper done by a dedicated fan with a lot of time on their hands. It's really a fantastic piece of work, but whether or not we choose to use it as Canon is a separate question.
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):
L = 4πr2σT4
where L is the star's luminosity, r is the distance from the center of the star, σ is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant (=5.67 × 10-8 W m-2 K-1), and T is the effective temperature (in kelvin). For the Sun, this yields a range for the HZ of 0.7 to 1.5 AU. The HZ range for other stars can then be calculated easily since, from the above formula:
L(star)/L(sun) = r(star)2/r(sun)2
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.
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.
Friday, January 8, 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Where to start?
I've been gaming for a long time now, and there's a lot of areas to talk about. Since this is a fork from my existing "Firefly in SecondLife" efforts, I'll try and concentrate on the 'Verse as an RP campaign and SecondLife as an environment for gaming rather than try and cover everything. I won't promise I'll be able to stay that tightly focused but I'll do my best.
The problem is, where to start. I could delve into SL itself, but it would be hard to come up with anything that was useful and didn't sound like a bitch session. We all know the frailties and limitations of SecondLife as far as an RP environment goes, so why rehash? So, discarding the first couple of drafts that looked at it, I'll shift to the 'Verse as a campaign environment.
Now, for the record, I'm not a generic Joss Whedon fan. While I absolutely loved Firefly and Serenity, and enjoyed what little of Dollhouse I saw, I didn't particularly like either Buffy or Angel. Though that is more because of the subject matter than anything else. In summary: Too much Buffy. Not enough Slaying. Even Joss Whedon can't make the undead into appealing characters in my eyes.
But the 'Verse felt alive. The main characters were wonderful, and Serenity herself was as much a character as the rest of them. I'd go so far as to say Serenity felt more 'real' than any other ship I've seen in SciFi. Anywhere. Yes, the Eagles from Space: 1999 and the Star Fury fighter from Babylon 5 are probably the most 'likely to actually work' ships shown. They just lack Serenity's feel. Unlike Enterprise (any of them), Red Dwarf, Agamemnon, or almost anything else, you could picture what it would be like to live aboard Serenity. She was real. The only ship I can think of that even comes close was, maybe, Millennium Falcon, and even that's a stretch.
While I admit my first reaction to the "A Western in Space" premise was "You're shitting me. That'll suck!" I found myself drawn into the characters and their setting. Firefly was great from the word go. It didn't matter than the ship had no guns or FTL drive. It didn't matter that there were no aliens. It didn't matter the setting was, other than artificial gravity and the interplanetary drive, decidedly low tech. I was hooked.
The characters and their setting made it very easy to suspend disbelief, which is crucial for any SciFi to succeed. The stories were such that the tech didn't matter. The fact that the 'Verse was barely outlined beyond planets having names and people living on them didn't matter. The characters mattered. It was only when you started to try and figure out where things where in relation to other things that the lack of detail made life difficult.
I've always had a tendency to look at SciFi TV shows and Movies from the perspective of 'Would that be a fun campaign?" I've been known to refer to shows as the " campaign." Some things lend themselves well to a gamers adaptation. Others, not so much. Firefly and the BDM had a lot going for them in that regard, but also had a few issues.
Until the release of the "Official Map of the Verse" there was really very little information on what was actually where. There were occasional references to how long it would take to get from one place to another, but from a gamer's perspective you needed a little more. Joss could say it took ten hours to get from Greenleaf to Haven, or something, but a GM really needed more.
There was a bit of Fan speculation about how the 'Verse was laid out before the release of the Serenity RPG, which had its own, unofficial, map. The Official map contradicted most, if not, of the fan work and the RPG source material. It's really a work of art, but added some problems of its own. The orbital mechanics and steller brightness are issues for future blogs, but suffice it to say that there's a lot that doesn't work.
The other thing that was never addressed in the series was exactly how all the planets could end up with the same gravity and atmosphere, regardless of size, relative distance from their respective star, or whatever. It was never touched on, because it didn't matter to the stories. But for a more hard core Sciency SciFi, it's something that leaves you scratching your head. Though, like the orbital mechanics, the Terraforming issues are something for a future post.
Finally, there's the government. The UAP in the Series was presented in a much different light than they were in the BDM. While Mal and Zoe fought for the Independents in the war, and were trying to stay clear of them whenever possible through the show, we never get a really good feel for why the Alliance was so bent on Unification. And what the results of that unification were once the war was over. In the BDM, we see a much darker side of the Alliance as presented by the Operative of the Parliament. But again, we don't know much.
They are not the Evil Empire. That much was actually clear from the series.
So, what do we have?
From a campaign perspective, we've got the Core Worlds that let us play in a cleaner, more high tech, environment. The Core is more or less safe and sterile and could actually generate a lot of interesting settings for characters to play in. At the other end, we've got the Rim worlds. For the most part, the Rim was presented as much like the Olde West. Things weren't so shiny and clean. There wasn't a lot of wealth, or tech. The law was often somewhat flexible, depending on who was enforcing it for whom.
All in all, that's the makings of a great campaign setting. There's a good mix of environments. A range of technology and social levels. But things are never so wildly different, or so far away, that the players can't get a grasp on things.
Is it going to work for everyone? No. Probably not. But after over two years RPing in SL, it's the one campaign environment I've come to call home. It's the one "commercial" campaign environment I'd run games in live. And that says a lot.
The problem is, where to start. I could delve into SL itself, but it would be hard to come up with anything that was useful and didn't sound like a bitch session. We all know the frailties and limitations of SecondLife as far as an RP environment goes, so why rehash? So, discarding the first couple of drafts that looked at it, I'll shift to the 'Verse as a campaign environment.
Now, for the record, I'm not a generic Joss Whedon fan. While I absolutely loved Firefly and Serenity, and enjoyed what little of Dollhouse I saw, I didn't particularly like either Buffy or Angel. Though that is more because of the subject matter than anything else. In summary: Too much Buffy. Not enough Slaying. Even Joss Whedon can't make the undead into appealing characters in my eyes.
But the 'Verse felt alive. The main characters were wonderful, and Serenity herself was as much a character as the rest of them. I'd go so far as to say Serenity felt more 'real' than any other ship I've seen in SciFi. Anywhere. Yes, the Eagles from Space: 1999 and the Star Fury fighter from Babylon 5 are probably the most 'likely to actually work' ships shown. They just lack Serenity's feel. Unlike Enterprise (any of them), Red Dwarf, Agamemnon, or almost anything else, you could picture what it would be like to live aboard Serenity. She was real. The only ship I can think of that even comes close was, maybe, Millennium Falcon, and even that's a stretch.
While I admit my first reaction to the "A Western in Space" premise was "You're shitting me. That'll suck!" I found myself drawn into the characters and their setting. Firefly was great from the word go. It didn't matter than the ship had no guns or FTL drive. It didn't matter that there were no aliens. It didn't matter the setting was, other than artificial gravity and the interplanetary drive, decidedly low tech. I was hooked.
The characters and their setting made it very easy to suspend disbelief, which is crucial for any SciFi to succeed. The stories were such that the tech didn't matter. The fact that the 'Verse was barely outlined beyond planets having names and people living on them didn't matter. The characters mattered. It was only when you started to try and figure out where things where in relation to other things that the lack of detail made life difficult.
I've always had a tendency to look at SciFi TV shows and Movies from the perspective of 'Would that be a fun campaign?" I've been known to refer to shows as the "
Until the release of the "Official Map of the Verse" there was really very little information on what was actually where. There were occasional references to how long it would take to get from one place to another, but from a gamer's perspective you needed a little more. Joss could say it took ten hours to get from Greenleaf to Haven, or something, but a GM really needed more.
There was a bit of Fan speculation about how the 'Verse was laid out before the release of the Serenity RPG, which had its own, unofficial, map. The Official map contradicted most, if not, of the fan work and the RPG source material. It's really a work of art, but added some problems of its own. The orbital mechanics and steller brightness are issues for future blogs, but suffice it to say that there's a lot that doesn't work.
The other thing that was never addressed in the series was exactly how all the planets could end up with the same gravity and atmosphere, regardless of size, relative distance from their respective star, or whatever. It was never touched on, because it didn't matter to the stories. But for a more hard core Sciency SciFi, it's something that leaves you scratching your head. Though, like the orbital mechanics, the Terraforming issues are something for a future post.
Finally, there's the government. The UAP in the Series was presented in a much different light than they were in the BDM. While Mal and Zoe fought for the Independents in the war, and were trying to stay clear of them whenever possible through the show, we never get a really good feel for why the Alliance was so bent on Unification. And what the results of that unification were once the war was over. In the BDM, we see a much darker side of the Alliance as presented by the Operative of the Parliament. But again, we don't know much.
They are not the Evil Empire. That much was actually clear from the series.
So, what do we have?
From a campaign perspective, we've got the Core Worlds that let us play in a cleaner, more high tech, environment. The Core is more or less safe and sterile and could actually generate a lot of interesting settings for characters to play in. At the other end, we've got the Rim worlds. For the most part, the Rim was presented as much like the Olde West. Things weren't so shiny and clean. There wasn't a lot of wealth, or tech. The law was often somewhat flexible, depending on who was enforcing it for whom.
All in all, that's the makings of a great campaign setting. There's a good mix of environments. A range of technology and social levels. But things are never so wildly different, or so far away, that the players can't get a grasp on things.
Is it going to work for everyone? No. Probably not. But after over two years RPing in SL, it's the one campaign environment I've come to call home. It's the one "commercial" campaign environment I'd run games in live. And that says a lot.
Monday, January 4, 2010
And so it begins
After a bit over a year's blogging, I've decided to add another aspect to what I put on-line. The Lonesome Ninja Mayor and Children of Earth are both "Character" blogs of a sort. Ninja is purely in-character for the live Firely campaign on Second Life, while CoE is an exercise in fiction - a Blog turning Novella. Novel, probably, by the time it's done.
While I can give in-character perspective for the 'Verse and the stories we're playing out there, there's a lot of things that just can't be addressed through the character's eyes. I can't critique the 'Verse, or deconstruct story telling, or talk about game mastering, or being a Sim admin through her eyes.
That's all my realm. The player's world.
In any case, this is just the launch entry. I've got a lot of things to talk about. Some of them might matter. Some not so much. Probably a few things people won't agree with, and with good reason. Other things, hopefully, other players and GM's will find useful.
In any case . . .
This is how it begins.
While I can give in-character perspective for the 'Verse and the stories we're playing out there, there's a lot of things that just can't be addressed through the character's eyes. I can't critique the 'Verse, or deconstruct story telling, or talk about game mastering, or being a Sim admin through her eyes.
That's all my realm. The player's world.
In any case, this is just the launch entry. I've got a lot of things to talk about. Some of them might matter. Some not so much. Probably a few things people won't agree with, and with good reason. Other things, hopefully, other players and GM's will find useful.
In any case . . .
This is how it begins.
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