I do find fault that the same technology that has Verna the BAR has black powder revolvers. And dammit, they won’t have BARs, 1911A .45’s or Colt Peacemakers in 500 years. They’ll at least have some slick looking Glocks with built in laser sights.
And if it is affordable to smuggle cattle, it is affordable to legally import cell phone towers, oil derricks, microwaves and DVDs. 
I don’t find the differences in technology at all implausible. We can see vast technological differences today between , say, Tokyo and the Amazon rainforests. Or if we are talking about war what about those Afghan soldiers riding on horseback in the recent fighting? Just because the technology exists doesn’t mean everyone can afford it.
Sam, while I dont find it implausible that we may still be using bullets projected via explosives in the future, I don’t think it is a 5-1 ratio.
We (or the Israelis?) are developing a weapon which can shoot a missile out of the sky with a laser. It has been tested successfully, but currently only functions at a short range.
If it is deployed in a tactical combat situation, it is only a matter of time before someone uses it in an anti-personnel role.
Fusion only completes the requirements. I would imagine that a powerful and compact power source would only make lasers more powerful. If not compact enough to use as side arms, it would at least enable much more accurate vehicle-mounted anti-personnel and anti-missile weapons.
Those examples don’t co exist in the same place. One of the bad guys buying the cattle had a black powder cap and ball pistol. Why the hell even make the damn thing? If you have that technology you can make cartridge pistols.
Why does the gun have to look all futuristic? Perhaps in 500 years the highest valued things will be perfect replicas of old guns, albeit with more modern internals and better reliability.
After all, who would have guesssed in 1957 that one of the hottest cars in 2003 would be a replica of a '57 T-bird? And how come people today still choose to wear Colt Peacemaker '45’s, which date to the civil war? Patton went through WWII wearing two pearl-handled revolvers, 25 years after the Colt automatic, a much superior weapon, was made the standard service arm.
And there are still people who hunt with bows and arrows, albeit technically advanced ones.
The thing is, guns are easy to work on in a frontier culture, and can pack a surprising amount of energy into a very small space. One person can carry hundreds or even thousands of bullets. They are very effective guns.
This is something I’ve actually been thinking about for quite a while. All of us here grew up during an age of extremely rapid technological advancement, and have come to see it as the norm. Thus, our notion of the future is that it must be some gleaming, high tech utopia like Star Trek.
But curves of advancement flatten out. Look at the automobile: The period from 1900 to 1930 saw such a huge revolution in transportation that ‘futurists’ of the time were predicting skyways and flying cars by 1970. Go look at the ‘world of the future’ from the 1929 world’s fair. It looks like something we would now think of as ‘the future’ in maybe 200 years from now. Our perspective has changed about the future of transportation because the curve flattened out. Cars are certainly better today than they were 50 years ago, but that difference is not NEARLY as significant as the difference between 1952 and 1902.
Or look at light airplanes. The engine in my Grumman AA1 was designed in 1935. The plane itself was designed in 1968, and it’s a MODERN design. There are plenty of private planes flying around that were designed in the 1930’s and 1940’s (The Beech Bonanza, for example).
The B-52 is now scheduled to remain flying until 2050. Do you think the engineers who designed it in the 1950’s would have guessed that it would still be in the U.S. inventory in 100 years?
I find it perfectly plausible that guns like the 1911 Colt could still be in production and being used 500 years from now, barring some unforseen technological revolution.
Like brass cartridges?
My understanding is that weapons-grade lasers currently require a horrendous amount of energy. If the energy requirements don’t lessen drastically in the future, it seems likely that poor people will stick with projectile weapons: they’ll be lethal and reasonably accurate at short- to medium- range, and they won’t cost a fortune. Note that the alliance has energy weapons, but we’ve only seen them work at very close range.
And oil derricks in space? It’s one thing to assume we’ll find enough planets out there with a breathable atmosphere; now we’re assuming they’ve got petroleum deposits? Given that we’ve not seen any alien life on the show so far, that seems doubtful.
And cell phone towers aren’t particularly useful unless you’ve got a whole bunch of them, as well as an infrastructure sufficient to service them and bill people for them. A frontier town is going to lack the necessary infrastructure to support a lot of technology.
I think the show’s future is plenty plausible – especially compared to any other SF series I’ve ever seen. It certainly beats the plausibility pants off of Star Wars and Star Trek.
But more importantly, the aesthetic is solid, and the acting is good, and the cliches that Vertigo mentions are constantly being tweaked. I can’t think of a SF show that compares favorably to Firefly in any of these matters. Absent support from the show’s network, I just can’t believe that its problems are intrinsic.
Daniel
Well, it LOOKED like one. But was it? Or was it a modern pistol made to look like one?
But I don’t necessarily find even black powder pistols to be implausible. Let’s say you set down on a terraformed planet, to colonize it with nothing but what you brought with you. What kind of firearms would you bring? A gun that uses brass cartridges, which requires high-tech smokeless powder, or a gun that can be charged by grinding up some saltpeter and charcoal?
Also, let’s not forget the influence of the Alliance on all this. These backwards planets were frontier societies that LOST a war. They probably had what little high-tech infrastructure they had bombed, and may in fact be prevented from having certain technologies - primarily high-tech guns.
If you watched the whole show, you’ll note that when they travel to the ‘core’ worlds where the mass of humanity lives, they are all very high tech. And even around the poor worlds you can still find space stations.
It’s great to find intelligent, polite discussion instead of the in-your-face/crossfire stuff. Thanks.
If you can afford to smuggle cows, then it should be affordable to carry other things. They give away cell phones, and if they have enough power to go faster than light, they ought to have cheap power sources.
Petroleum dsposits is a good point. They do terraform some of them, and that would indicate no cretaceous plants or what ever it is that turns into oil.
I do remember that Reynolds mentioned needing fuel, so perhaps it is prohibitively expensive to transport cargo from an industrial planet far away to the outer regions where they make their living. An analogy: Maybe you can transport cows from cuba to Virginia by ship, but carrying cell phone towers and reactors from England to Virginia is too expensive to be profitable.
The thing to look at in interplanetary commerce is not usefulness, but sustainability.
Cows need grass. Pretty much period.
Cell phone towers need engineers, and maintenance guys, and central switching stations, and more cell phones to replace the broken cell phones, and annoying commercials…
Whereas if you get a herd of cows, and leave them in good pastureland, they’ll eat, and make more cows.
Made perfect sense to me that they’d be a valuable commodity on a world just starting up its ecosystem.
Yep. It’s not just a matter of transporting in the goods. Complex societies require millions of people to run them. We had a debate about this once in great debates. The question was, “How many people would you need to maintain our current level of technology.” The concensus was that it would take a very large number. Millions. You need people to make the tools to dig up the coal to make the furnaces to smelt the steel to make the tools…
Animals make a lot of sense as a major resource for a small colony, high-tech or not. The high-tech ones would just have better animals, free of disease maybe, and plenty of frozen embryos and such to replenish stocks and ensure genetic diversity.
Then why can you make money smuggling them?
I wonder if the reason we don’t see Jewish bad guys is the same as not seeing Nazi heroes. WWII made Jews obvious victims and it would be unpopular to protray them as evil.
Ah, well - Each to their own. Most of my friends ( at least the Buffy-fans ) adore Firefly, but the factor you just cited makes it intolerable for me.
I don’t mind updated westerns in space - I have a copy of Outland on DVD.
I like ‘Space Opera’ in general and in that milieu I don’t mind the whole idea of mixed technology and technological regression in frontier areas of a decaying empire.
What I absolute cannot tolerate is the deliberate introduction of Old West ( cliched Old West ) anachronisms. It makes my ears bleed. It makes me want to gouge out my eyes. It makes me want to take a hammer and pound, pound, pound away at my skull until it fractures open and I can rip the gooey mess that is my brain out and stomp it into the ground. I hate it. It’s cornpone to an absolutely ridiculous degree and I curse Whedon for ever putting that abomination on the air. No matter how good the acting, no matter how nuanced the characters, no matter how exceptional the writing, Firefly’s very existence is an unholy affront to every fiber of my being.
Not that I have a strong opinion on the matter or anything ;).
And hey, YMMV :D.
That’s interesting. My step Daughter’s group of Buffy fans don’t like Firefly.
BTW, I dislike Buffy.
Daniel
And, I figured out after I posted, maybe…how can I phrase this?
Perhaps there was some confusion as to their true owners.
Obviously the wrong thread.
Sorry.
I’m glad to see this turn into a pleasant debate, rather than just a memorial.
Sam, as far as the guns looking like vintage replicas, I just can’t go with your argument that it all in vogue to have a 19th century style gun 500 years from now. It would make more sense that they would have vintage guns from 400 years in the future. I guess I feel that they should have taken the logical leap with some the of look of the weapons and such. It is interesting to posit that when things become more frontier-like, people would fall back on similar types of living, economies, technology and weapons. But for god’s sake, it would reflect the intervening 500 years!
They dropped the ball by literally using weapons that are out of style now. Buy not using their imaginations to take normal evolution into account, it left the show looking like a clumsy remake of a bad western.
Sorry, t’is true.
By the way, I have no problem with them using horses and cattle 500 year in the future. It’s just that they wouldn’t be Texans and sport colt 45’s at the same time. Vintage pistols be damned!
I guess we’ll just have to disagree. I see no reason why guns in the future won’t look substantially the same as they do now. It is within our capability to make guns of any shape today, and we have standardized on a few basic ones because they suit us. Why should that change? If you want to complain about stupid design, how about he phasers on Star Trek, which are almost impossible to aim?
And the same with western wear. It’s actually very good clothing for that environment. It was highly evolved, given the frontier construction methods.