Nelson Cunnington wrote: > Jonathan Lang wrote: > >IMHO, that's no more realistic than traveling between different star > >systems without a discernable FTL drive: either all of the planets are > >in roughly the same orbit (because of their similar climates) or you > >have to disregard the fact that planets at varying distances from the > >primary will tend to have wildly different climates unless some (very > >obvious) environmental factors exist to counter the different levels > >of sunlight being experienced. And for the most part, none of those > >environmental factors are in evidence. > > What you say is true, though it has been stated somewhere that the > system is a multiple star system (possibly with a brown dwarf or three > thrown in), and the various bodies we see have been all more or less > terraformed.
The "multiple-star system" might buy you a reprieve, letting you have as many as one habitable world per star without obvious environmental factors - assuming that the stars are separated enough to allow for stable orbits around each one individually. You _might_ manage two for a given star if you posit a brown dwarf orbiting in the habitable zone, thus allowing "trojan point" Earth-like planets; but the likelihood of that occurring naturally are pretty rare, and the technology needed to engineer such a thing is well beyond what's posited for the Firefly setting. So figure at most one habitable planet per star, and at most four stars in the system (and I'm being _very_ generous with this number). Figure that the system is young enough that planets orbiting any red dwarves in the system won't have had time to become tidally-locked (because getting a planet to spin again is only marginally easier than moving a brown dwarf), add in the miracle of atmospheric terraforming (because it's unlikely that _any_ planet in such a young system would have had time to develop an Earth-like atmosphere), and you might have as many as four habitable worlds with no obvious environmental factors. > This might well include many artificial climate moderators > such as solettas or sunshades that have not appeared in either the > series or the movie because they weren't relevant. Also marginally possible. But now you're chalking it up to "they thought of it, but the show's budget wasn't up to the task of portraying it". Which I find just as unlikely. > Also, the colonizers > of the system may have all come from California, and so only inhabit > those parts of the worlds which have California-like climates. *smirk* > Other > parts may be much hotter, much cooler or much wetter, but again they > don't appear because they're not relevant. Not an issue; the climate variations that I'd expect are of the sort that would render the entire planet uninhabitable, either due to scorching heat on even the coldest part of the planet, or due to freezing cold on even the warmest day. > On the other hand, what do you expect from a cheap sci-fi series; that > they're going to airlift a film-unit to far-flung corners of the Earth > just to add a bit of variety to the location shots? The lack of apparent climate variation on the habitable worlds isn't much of a problem in my book; the idea that you can have - what was it? nine? - habitable worlds within months of STL travel time of each other is what strikes me as ludicrous. -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
