Firefly officially cancelled

Cafe Society
41

featherlou and I were also pretty miffed when we heard the show had been killed. It took us a few episodes to get a feel for the story and characters, but I thought it found its legs much faster than most Sci-Fi shows.

I don’t blame Fox. They take more chances with original material than the big three networks combined. They have a reputation for shutting down the quality shows quickly if the ratings aren’t stratospheric, though. I blame the unwashed, stupid masses who prefer to watch drek like Survivor and Cops and Life With Bonnie and Fastlane.

42

Damn. The show had actually grown on me after a rough start, and had become my only regular Friday viewing. At least the last episodes of Farscape are coming back soon. I’ve lost a favorite, as well as the show I hoped would replace it.

I know I’m late to the guns debate, but I don’t really have a problem with it. If anything, there should be a greater variety of weapons; kind of on an equal footing with the development of each planet, its relationship to the Alliance, and its access to regular commerical trade.

Look at post-colonial Africa and South America. The weapons used by the various military and para-military forces vary based on the colonial influence and and whether a nation (or factions of that nation) was within the Soviet/communist sphere of influence during the Cold War. Kalashnikov variants and copies were and are all over the place since they were supplied by East Bloc nations, China, Cuba, etc. The FN FAL and copies were also popular in countires under Western influence. But you will see a wide variety of weapons within the forces of one given nation, depending on availability and the financial resources of each nation. The CZ 25 submachine gun was in production from 1949-1968, but can be found in far-flung corners of the world even today in the hands of armies, rebels, terrorists, criminals, and individuals alike. Many of these weapons were refurbished and modified to single fire only and sold again as the Sanna 77.

In Afghanistan, the rebels fighting the Soviets in the 80s were using Lee-Enfeld bolt action rifles and even muzzleloaders until they could be supplied with or capture more modern assault rifles. But even now you will see non-military individuals using the older weapons. Personal preference, sentimental attachment, or just pragmatic holding on to the best weapon you can acquire and use continually?

How this relates to Firefly, IMO, is that people on the outer worlds would use the best (most durable, reliable, easy to maintain, and probably mechanically simple) weapons available to them for the environment they need. Whether this would involve buying or smuggling them from off-world; or manufacturing them if the resources are available. I can see wooden stocked, stamped metal weapons (or even blackpowder and ball and cap weapons) being prevalent in underdeveloped areas with lots of useable wood and limited metalworking facilities. Whereas, more developed worlds might have weapons with synthetic parts and a higher quality of manufacturing and finish.

For example,The Russians created the PPS-43 submachine gun because it could be made using existing facilities and materials during the siege at Leningrad when nothing could be brought in. It was later given to Soviet friendly nations, especially in Asia, after the Soviets quit using it. It has partly been copied by
the Chinese with the Type 64 silenced submachine gun. So a firearm made for a specific situation lives on half a world away in a different form.

So I don’t see why an old design wouldn’t live on hundreds of years later if it was the best weapon available. I can see the characters still using pump shotguns and AKs because they are reliable. Maybe they would look slightly different because of muzzle brakes; flash suppressors; barrel length; magazine design, size, or shape; etc - but they would probably still be recognizable as mechanical desendants.

43

I’m afraid you’re dead wrong about that. Unless you count homing in on missiles armed with tracking devices to be a successful test… :rolleyes:

44

Another note on the topic of Cap and Ball revolvers in a frontier situation:

I feel that the reason a cap and ball revolver is plausible in a frontier situation (even one in space) is that they are easy to get/make ammunition for. Let’s look at why:

With cased ammunition, the reloading process is much more difficult than a cap and ball process. First, you have to manufacture brass shells that will be of the proper size for your weapon, and able to bear the heat and force of the powder’s explosion. When you finish shooting, unless you want to remanufacture the brass or pay for new shells, you have to carefully police your brass, making sure you pick up each shell and that none of the shells have failed. To reload it, you take the brass, measure it to make sure it hasn’t worn out too much since the last firing, clean it of residue (chemically), polish it in a tumbler, measure it again to make sure that the polishing hasn’t destroyed your brass, remove the primer cap, replace it, then repack the cartridge with smokeless powder. Next, you place the lead in the cartridge, which you previously melted in to a form that was made to fit the casings, and finally, you have a bullet capable of being fired.

With cap and ball, you need powder, a ball mold, primer caps, and some cloth wadding for a patch. Powder can be premeasured into easily disposable paper containers, primer caps can be carried easily, and balls can be made almost on the spot (lead being soft enough that it can be formed into less precise ball shapes without heat, unlike the precision shape needed for cased ammo). That’s it. The pistol is ready to fire.

Cased ammunition is prevelant these days because modern manufacturing and shipping make it convenient to use it. On a real frontier world, it would NOT be cost efficient to have brass shells imported, or to build a factory to make them, let alone to have premade bullets shipped. Ever picked up a brick of ammunition? It’s HEAVY! And it takes up valuable space…whereas all the materials needed for a cap and ball revolver, save, perhaps, for the primer caps, is or should be available on a terraformed planet, without needing import.

As for the look of the pistols, why change them to make them look “modern”? The cap and ball pistols, as designed, were perfectly functionable and self contained. There is no need to “update” the design of a weapon that has proven itself perfectly efficient as is, just to make it look “sci-fi”.

45

Why would cap and ball be manufactured at all if the cartridge technology were there? There was one cap and ball and several dozen cartridge pistols.

46

I don’t know if this makes sense, but it’s also possible that at some point, colonists on new planets realized that their circumstances were somewhat similar to the US nineteenth-century frontier; they may have studied the technology available back then and copied it, and even copied the style of weaponry, clothes, etc. deliberately. For all we know, the culture in Firefly romanticizes the American West even more than we do.

Daniel

47

It may have been made before cased ammunition was readily available on that planet during it’s industrial development. They may have had the resources to make cap and ball weapons, but didn’t have access to equipment required for the exacting standards and tolerances needed for modern firearms manufacture at that stage.

Why would someone still use such a weapon when more advanced weapons became available? Personal preference or maybe sentimental attachment like I said earlier.

48

It wouldn’t be a Navy Colt, dang it, it would be some cold forged piece of junk made on a forge in the blacksmith’s shop.
We should also see zip guns if that were the case, like that awfull Trek movie with Spock’s brother.
The guy in a firefight with a Navy Colt againt a 1911A is gonna lose.

49

I think it comes down to economy…

Let’s say you are starting a colony on a far off world. Supply runs are extremely limited, lets say, once every ten years. Aside from those runs, you are on your own. You have a colony of 10,000 adult humans going with you. As part of your initial run, after all other supplies are counted for, there is enough cargo space for personal weapons. I, the weapons supplier, give you the following option:

I can send you 5,000 cap and ball revolvers, all in fine working order, each with one ball mold and, say, a thousand percussion caps each.

Or, I could send you 1,000 automatic weapons, with 100 rounds each, 50 reloading kits, and enough smokeless powder to reload an additional 100 rounds per weapon.

The choice is going to depend entirely on how well armed you want your pioneers to be, and how much you think they’re going to need it.

Of course, some people are gonna pay for cartridge weapons because they see them as convenient. If you’ve got the money, you can afford the convenience. Some folks can’t, and thus why a cap and ball would be used along with several cartridge weapons.

Finally, I would argue strongly that your logic of a Navy Colt vs a 1911A is faulty at best. I know people who, with a Navy Colt, are dead accurate with a single shot at up to 50 ft (or more, but that is all I have ever personally witnessed); simultaneously, I know people who can empty the clip on a 1911A at 15 ft and STILL manage to miss the can they were shooting at.

T’aint the gun that does the killin’, 'tis the man* behind it…and it only takes one well-aimed shot to do the job.

All that said, I agree that there should be more “homegrown” weapons, as I feel this would probably be common.

*sniggering as I say that, since the best pistol shot I know is my wife, a former Olympic class pistol shooter.

50

Interesting that this comes up now; I was just thinking about it last night. I picked up a copy of d20 Modern (finally) and have been converting some of the rules to play a Star Trek game (a la Last Unicorn, which sucks ass) and I just couldn’t help but feel cheated on the weapons front.

Would I rather face a rampaging band of Klingons with a high-tech SMG or an overpowered TV remote? Yeah.

Hell, even in my Star Wars game my players use silenced pistols, machine guns and shotguns.

Oh, OP wise, I’ve never seen Firefly. Friday is not a good TV night.

51

If you’re going to make new firearms that use obsolete firing systems (because it’s the best you can do with the resources available), wouldn’t you maybe try to base them on designs that have been proven in the past?

There are gunsmiths in remote parts of Pakistan who hand make copies of more modern mass produced weapons. They are rough compared to the originals, but you can see the origins of the firearm they copied it from, and they do work.

I’m willing to give the show a little leeway in using older models of guns, without creating new props that are “rustic-looking” enough to satisfy us all, since many will only be seen for a few seconds on screen.

Will the guy carrying an outmoded gun be at a greater disadvantage in a firefight? Probably. But he can’t really call a time out until he can better arm himself. Then again on a show like Firefly, that might have worked.

52

I would think the reload time would screw the guy up.
Whatever.
Don’t send 5,000 cap and ball, send blueprints for the 1911A and blueprints for reloading equipment with several thousand brass cases and primers.

53

Ah, but blueprints are worthless without manufacturing equipment to create them, and you don’t have the space for that equipment. Remember, this is “real” life, not a silly sci-fi where you can replicate anything you want out of thin air. Even if you had the room for the equipment, you’d need people to maintain and operate it, and people to mine for the raw materials, and equipment to smelt it, and process it, and turn it into usable steel, and people to run that equipment too.

Frankly, in a frontier society, that ain’t gonna happen, not for a long time. It takes a hell of a long time to develop a frontier past the point of where you are literally working so that you could eat later on that day…and no one is going to work extra hard so that someone else can make things based off blueprints for them, not when it is easier and cheaper to just take a step down and bring with you a slightly more primitive counterpart to the very thing you wanted to create.

54

Also, as far as reload time goes, I know several people who fire black powder cap and ball competitively, where time is a factor. They all use speed loads…basically, a fully loaded and ready cylinder or two, that allows them to slid the old cylinder off and the new one on in less time than it takes someone to empty and reload a standard cartridge revolver.

55

I’ll have to concede that point.
:slight_smile:

I am reminded of the Chinese copies of the 1911A made with hand tools though. I think you could manufacture a more modern firearm as easily as black powder.

56

I know nothing about this, but how difficult is brass to smelt, compared to steel or iron? Can you make a pistol out of iron (as opposed to steel)? Could this be an issue?

What about smokeless powder? I get the impression that cartridges use a different form of gunpowder than cap & ball guns; does this form have more ingredients, and/or is it harder to manufacture or store?

Daniel

57

Moving off the guns aspect for a moment, there’s a different part of the “frontier society” that bothers me. The gramattically incorrect language.

I have no problems with words like ain’t, but I just don’t buy it when these characters try to pull it off. You can almost hear them want to say “isn’t” but they’re forced to say ain’t because that’s what the script calls for.
I think this is mostly the actors’ fault for not being able to effectively portray a slightly uneducated person. It just grates on me the same way a horrendously fake southern accent would.

58

I haven’t noticed that. If you can mention a particular scene, I’d like to watch the tape again and see it.

59

Ender, that’s been my biggest problem with the show. Especially when Mal and Kaylee go into “rootin’ tootin’” mode, it rings very false. Jayne can pull it off much better, and I haven’t noticed Zoe, Wash, the doctor, the companion, Book, or River doing it nearly as much.

And in the last few episodes, ther’s been a lot less of it, I think. But it almost killed the show for me, early on. “Jaynestown” made me and Burundi cringe so much, we almost turned it off.

Daniel

60

carnivorousplant: It’s not a matter of ease of manufacture. I agree, a modern firearm is just as easily manufactured as a more archaic one (if not more so); but lacking manufacturing facilities (as a frontier planet would), it becomes a moot point. It comes down to a matter of usage as opposed to manufacturing, and in a truly frontier world, a cap and ball is going to be more efficient to care for, use, and carry ammunition for. It has a lot less “breakable” parts than a 1911A, and requires less “work” to aquire new ammunition.

Thank you, BTW, for being civil and openminded! I appreciate the good, flame-free debate! :slight_smile:

Daniel: Brass is not more difficult to smelt than basic steel, but it requires a different process to refine it. Steel, being a more “usable” metal, would be far more likely to be refined on a frontier world, where as brass would most likely be considered an extravagence, and not so prevalent.

Ender: It’s hard to write slang. It’s worse trying to act it out. IT grates on me too, but I think I understand why they are trying; they want to make clear the seperation of “plain folk”(frontier) and “city folk”(alliance). Still sucks. And being a Georgian, let me say “AMEN!” to the grating of horrendously fake southern accents.