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Firefly Traveller - Where does it take place?
Monday, February 2, 2004

Where does Firefly Traveller take place?

Okay, based on previous assumptions, I am going to locate the Firefly ‘verse in near earth space. This is the only collection of star systems close enough to Earth to possibly be colonized in the next 500 years given anything short of an “infinity drive” that will let you go as far as you want as fast as you want. I also want to use 3D space since we have so much data available now on where local stars are located (this site has about 11,000 stars within 150 light years of Earth: http://www.caco.demon.co.uk/2300ad/NearStar.html ).

So, if we can’t go as far as we want as fast as we want, how far and how fast can we go? Since this is never addressed in Firefly, there is some leeway here. I am going to use two technologies (because people always seem to come up with more than one way to do things, we only seem to remember the most successful ones).

The premise of going faster than the speed of light is that you can’t. So, the way you go faster than the speed of light is by avoiding the issue all together. The ship itself never goes faster than the speed of light, it slips in and out of Normal Space (where the speed of light is a hard limit). The two ways that you do this in Firefly Traveller are the Classic Traveller Jump Drive, and the Traveller: 2300/2300 AD Stutterwarp.

I’m not a gearhead (Traveller term for someone who likes to spend lots of time designing equipment and discussing the logic behind various future technologies), so I’m not going to even try to explain the ideas behind these technologies or how they work (I’d probably only mess it up anyways). I will explain what they do though, as that will shape the geography of Firefly Traveller.

Jump Drive: The Classic Traveller jump drive moves a ship a given distance in one week. The ship leaves Normal Space (NSpace) and is in Jump Space (JSpace) for the entire journey. Jump Drives are rated from 1 to 6, with higher numbers going farther, but no matter what the rating of the drive, it still takes one week to make the trip.

There are two issues with Jump Drives in the Firefly ‘verse. The first is that it clearly isn’t the kind of drive the Serenity uses. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t exist in the Firefly ‘verse, but that we need a second drive system to run Fireflies. The second is deciding how far you can go at Jump 1. In Classic Traveller Jump 1 was set at 1 parsec (approximately 3.26 light years). But as the designers admitted, that was a somewhat arbitrary distance to facilitate the game, so I don’t feel any guilt in adjusting that distance to facilitate a 3D mapping system (CT used a 2 dimensional map).

I’m going to set the distance of Jump 1 at 5 light years rather than 3.26. This gives the Jump drive a longer range than the original, but given that I’m going from a 2D map to a 3D map, the increase in range is actually on the small side. 5 light years means you can reach the Centauri systems (Alpha and Proxima) in one jump, but not Barnard’s Star (that’s important later). So, Jump Drives can get you up to 30 light years in a week at Jump 6.

One final note here; the limit on Jump Drive is not the size or the power of the drive, but the resolution of the navigation calculations. In Classic Traveller, you could build a Jump 6 ship by strapping a big enough jump drive to a small enough hull, but until you got to Tech Level (TL)15, you couldn’t go Jump 6 ranges until you had the computing ability of TL 15. The same holds true in Firefly Traveller.

Stutterwarp: This system was designed to support Traveller 2300/ 2300 AD, a game system that came about a decade after the original Traveller game. It was based on newer ideas about how you can cheat the speed of light limit. This system (as someone already pointed out) is much closer to the Firefly ‘verse. A ship skips through space in short, but very fast hops. In fact, Anonymous pretty well summed up the argument for Stutterwarp in Firefly already, so I’ll just say the only thing left to do is figure out how fast and how far you can go with Stutter warp. I’m going to stick with the 7.7 light year limit to a single Stutterwarp trip, and adjust the speed to the level of the drive.

I’m going to rate Stutterwarp at 1 to 6 as well, and say that a Jump 1 Stutterwarp drive takes up the same space and same fuel requirements as Jump Drive 1. (OK, at this point I am punting, as I want to keep the ability to design Stutterwarp ships using the CT rules). Once again, the speeds of Stutterwarp drives are somewhat arbitrary, but they are based on going 1 Parsec in a week (comparing CT jump 1 to Stutterwarp). Even though I’m now using 5 light years as the range for Jump Drives, I like the speed of Stutter warp that the old comparison gives. It takes longer to get to 7.7 light years with Stutterwarp, but you can go almost 50% farther than Jump 1 in one trip. That is the kind of technology trade off that makes two types of technology competitive (so I like it, and I’m going to keep it).

So, where does Firefly Traveller take place (I hear you asking after reading through all of this)? Well, it takes place in a cluster of stars between 10 and 30 light years of Earth. At 10 light years radius from Earth you have 20 stars, at 15 light years you have 70, and at 30 light years you have 334. Now, many of these stars are brown dwarfs, but those that aren’t could have more than one terraformable world in orbit, so it balances out. Given the range of jump drives, you can cross the first span in 1 week at jump 4, the second span at jump 6 and the third span in 2 to 3 weeks at Jump 4, 5 or 6 . Given that Firefly has just ‘over 70 Earths spinning around this galaxy’, and terraforming is common (though dangerous) that’s about the range of systems you’d need to produce Firefly’s ‘verse (depending on how many systems you want to have planets around them).

Next: How do we get from 2004 to 2517? The first step.

COMMENTS

Tuesday, February 3, 2004 12:18 PM

BROWNCOATCAT


The interstellar travel system is the only thing about "Firefly" that does not remind me of Traveller. The suggestion of using some sort of stutter warp really appeals to me.

I always imagined that the series took place in a single Classic Traveller sub-sector, much of the time they stay within a few weeks travel of Persephone. This sub-sector would have two bands of worlds and a big gap in the middle. I say this because in the series the longest journey seen is the three weeks from Persephone to Jiangjin, and it is during this period, Serenity transverses a big band of nothing. The worlds at the bottom of the map, like Jiangjin, Triumph and Higgons's Moon are the backwarters that Inara complains Mal does not want to leave, and she wonders why he doesn't gross the divide back to Persephone and more civilised worlds.


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