Just because we don’t understand the technology doesn’t make it impossible or magical. But you know the Arthur C Clark quotation that applies here, or at least you should.
The point of science fiction is that it goes beyond what we currently believe as possible. That doesn’t make it “fail”, that makes it fiction. If it were present day fiction limited to contemporary science you could apply bad science as a fail. I don’t know “The Core” to know how this would apply to that film.
Artificial Gravity - Graviton control without a corresponding mass is not beyond the realm of plausibility - unless you’ve decided that Gravitons are pure fiction and impossible and don’t buy into quantum or string theories. The energy requirement would be astronomical. But I don’t know the wattage of a Dilithium Crystal based Warp Core engine. That little engine in Serenity hardly looks capable of that level of power, but again, I can’t say without knowing more of how it “works” to be sure.
FTL: Warp Theory doesn’t hold water with what we know now, but who is to say we won’t find a way to cross the bends and loops in space-time? It’s not really about going faster than light, its about taking a left turn from space time and hopping back in at another location. No idea how that would work, if I did, someone would be paying me beaukoup buckaroos. But I can’t say authoritively that it will never be possible. For what it matters Avatar failed too. .75 times the speed of light is still breaking the laws of physics as we know them. (Earth to Alpha Centauri in 6 years)
Hive Consciousness: Avatar did this very well - clearly establishing the natural capability to neural network any two creatures. And discussing the interconnected root systems. I find nothing wrong with the idea -sure it’s plot convenient, but so is teaching the aliens english. Or all intelligent life is humanoid. A planet wide root system is certainly not inconcievable. Look up the largest organism on Earth sometime. Cylon hive consciousness was sloppy - sometimes makeing every cylon aware simultanesly and other times, when convenient to the drama, not being in effect.
The laser drill needed some work, drilling through liquified iron…
There is always bad astronomy - science will always take a back seat to neccesary drama. Like since when can you ever be on a planet close enough to watch another planet collapse into a black hole? Everyone knows that Delta Vega and Vulcan are not so close that Vulcan would be the size of the moon in the sky, right?
Reavers are, to all intents and purposes, the zombies of the Firefly universe - I think there could be several plausible methods of infection that would be entirely consistent with the canon - that is: Just driving their victims mad, or maybe some kind of psychic phenomenon (which exist in this universe), or even (at a stretch, perhaps) their weapons or ships - by accident or design - including parts contaminated with the Alliance-made chemical that caused the problem in the first place.
No it’s not. There’s no law of physics that says you can’t travel at .75c. There are significant technological hurdles, but that’s not the same thing at all.
And face it, Firefly’s “there are many inhabitable worlds in a single star system, all reachable within a few weeks at sublight velocity” is almost as bad as FTL.
More of them are moons than planets - the biggest problems, to my mind, are:
That the terraforming process was able to adjust the gravity of the moons/planets (granted, they have AG on the ships, but for a whole planet?)
That the terraforming process resulted in reasonably mature-looking (albeit arid) planets within a shortish space of time (or else the human cultures should have drifted a lot further than they did, surely?)
But both of those problems are the result of overthinking - which can ruin any good entertainment.
So the stars are close enough that you can travel between them at sublight speeds? And multiple planets and moons are in orbits around multiple massive objects that are stable enough that they never get outside the temperature range required for human life and ecosystems? That’s even worse. I realize you don’t have many options if you want to have multiple unique destinations reachable only by spaceship, but at least FTL only requires one handwave.
[spoiler] If the Reavers could smell the chemical (and there has to be some difference that makes a person become a Reaver rather than a Dying Drone) then they could be attracted to it and carry it around. Or they could have noticed the connection to their transformation and be deliberately using it.
In Bushwacked, they could have exposed the whole crew before boarding. That could be why everyone just stopped doing things and nobody fought back. [/spoiler]
I think Firefly was a decent show. I watched the whole thing through once . . . in one sitting at a party. A friend who was a huge fan had brought the DVDs and put them on in a room . . . she and I were the only two who stayed through to watch the whole thing; the sun was up the next morning when we were through, but it was worth it.
However, I felt like the worst thing about the show were the characters. In my opinion they felt pretty interchangable, and all had the same sense of humor/sarcasm. It made my experience more bland than it needed to be.
Still, definitely worth watching, and as someone said upthread, because it never fulfilled its potential, it has limitless potential.
Wash’s death served the very real purpose of making everyone else dying completely believable. I sat on the edge of my seat for the next ten minutes, wondering if anyone was even going to live when I usually don’t question that at all.
There’s no reason that you can’t have lots of habitable planets in a single star system. Our solar system has a habitable zone that could easily include three planets. A large hot star would have a habitable zone much bigger. Maybe twice the size. That’s maybe six to 8 possible rocky planets in a habitable zone. Give each one a moon or two, and you’re already into 16-24 worlds. Now consider large gas giants with many moons, and terraforming that can make the best candidates habitable. Suddenly you’ve got about as many worlds as you could possibly need.
Yeah, why not? I mean, we are talking days to weeks of travel between any two locations in the same general region.
Some of those ecosystems are pretty shitty, according to the series. But we only know that they are stable now. Possibly the stability requires active maintanence, like moving planetoids with gravitics. See, still only the one impossibility/handwave, but put to novel uses.
Bending/extrapolating the laws of physics is *worse *than outright breaking them, in your book? Not mine. Non-wormhole FTL will always be “magic” tech. Gravity control is allowed under some current models of physics, breaking c just isn’t.
Wash had the same humour as Simon, had the same humour as River, had the same humour as Book? Not seeing it. I can easily see Zoe, Mal, Jane and Wash having the same basic humour, the same way geeks develop the same sense of humour (and the two are very similar) - similar (criminal/military) backgrounds & close relationships (marriage/gang/army buddies will do that to you.
My point was that if they’re that close, the planetary orbits will be affected by all the stars, not just one, leading to more complex and dangerous orbits.
Ok, but who moves the shitty planets when it becomes necessary to stabilize their orbits again? Seems like the Alliance planets get all the perks - does this mean everyone living on a farm using cattle to plow their fields (which was an excellent touch BTW) suddenly freezes when their scheduled tuneup gets skipped?
Well, “worse” in the sense that it leads to this kind of endless nitpicking. If your SF flat out says “We have FTL drives, even though they’re theoretically impossible, so deal with it”, you can choose to accept it or not. If your SF says “Everything we’re doing is theoretically possible, we’re so rigorous in our fact checking”, then you get into arguments as to how many stable, habitable planets you could really fit into a single star system, or multiple really close star systems.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked Firefly. But I think saying “It didn’t have FTL, therefore it was superior to shows that did” is untrue.
I haven’t seen anyone saying that. I liked that it didn’t have FTL, but only because it made a nice change. I’m OK with shows that have FTL as their “one thing”.