Remember, this was created by a guy who (in the *Serenity * DVD commentary) says he gave up on science and logic when he was 15, and, when pressed for answers, will only say, “Science questions make my head hurt.”
Yeah, well, Tim Minear, one of the main forces behind Firefly, is an ardent hard science fiction fan.
I don’t know why some persist in claiming that the science in Firefly is bad. In my opinion, it’s better than almost any science fiction show that’s been on TV, and that includes the various permutations of Star Trek. We don’t need to make excuses for the science in Firefly, because it’s pretty darn good by modern visual medium science fiction. Of course, it’s not up to the standards of Robert Forward, Heinlein, or other ‘hard’ SF writers, but what space-based science fiction movies are?
The most unscientific things in Firefly haven’t been mentioned - artificial gravity, and the rate at which ships pass each other in space. Both of these are obvious compromises for storytelling. Other than that, and their unspecified propulsion systems, I think it’s all pretty plausible.
Don’t get me wrong, Sam. I’m a recent convert to the *Firefly * cult and I love the show. I especially like that they stuck to their guns about no sound in space.
But lots of fiddle! Yay for the soundtrack!
(And, um, can anyone decipher FTL for me?)
Faster than Light.
I think Firefly is a great example of “truth is stranger than fiction”. They’ve created a scientifically plausible place that most folks have to suspend disbelief to accept. In fact, they get people asking questions and in some cases actually learning.
This also explains why most other works of fiction fudge the science; it’s much easier than going into a “boring” explanation of why the less conventionally plausible is actually more correct.
Or minutes or hours. The speed of light is slow. 300,000 Km/s. You can detect the delay on a satellite phone call. It makes online games much more difficult.
BTW the Serenityverse has ships travelling at appreciable portions of C. In one episode an agent states that he travelled 90 million miles that morning. That’s conveniently almost 1 AU. Light would take 8 minutes. Call it 4 hours, or 240 minutes. So they travelled at an average of one thirtieth of C - including accelleration and decelleration.
Sure. They have constant acceleration drives and gravity control. At 100 g’s, you’ll be going 15 million miles per hour after 2 hours.
But expecting the show to go to the trouble to do the math behind throw-off lines like this is probably a bit much.
One example of this point being used in hard SF is Arthur C. Clarke’s story “A Meeting With Medusa” in which
the protagonist was injured in an accident caused by a flying drone camera being switched from a local circuit to a geosynch satellite circuit without the operator’s knowledge.
If we’re supposing that part of the reason so many worlds can exist in one star’s habitable zone is that it’s a hot blue sun, then the lag would be in the range of many minutes to a few hours – the habitable zone for a hot blue sun would start at a few dozen light-minutes out.
Like artificial gravity, I think you have to accept pretty much instant communications in any SF movie or TV show. It’s just too hard to make the plot move along otherwise, and if you want to be really accurate, it gets very confusing for the viewers, because every single communication has widely varing time delays.
Why? Heinlein did that in his juveniles! Remember Have Spacesuit, Will Travel?
As was mentioned earlier there are two opening monologues. The other one implies multiple star systems. The idea may not have been thought through at the time.
Of course. One of the things I loved about Heinlein. It’s also a pretty rare thing for an author to go to that level of detail. Especially for a television show that has to have a new script every week.
For a TV show, I’m happy that it just get the broad strokes right. Make the universe plausible, and stick to the rules you’ve set up. One of the things I hated about Star Trek, especially the later episodes, is that they’d just make stuff up constantly in order to move the plot and/or get the crew out of a jam. It didn’t bear any relationship to real science, and sometimes the words didn’t even make sense put together.
“I reversed the polarity of the warp field, causing a tachyon flow that opened up a cross-dimensional continuum, thus making my coffee taste smoother!”
Firefly the series was inconsistant about it. Serenity appeared to clear things up with the opening dialogue and solar chart. But then later in the movie there was another chart that looked like there were 2 or 3 star systems. But it’s possible these weren’t star systems but planetary systems.
What idiots.
You can’t make coffee taste smooth.
A planetary system being planets in the orbit of a sun, plural being suns with planets around them?
I meant maybe it was supposed to be a poorly drawn picture of a few different planets with orbiting moons rather than what it appeared to be, a few suns with orbiting planets.
My mistake. 
Mr. Scott: But I can put a weenie in the photon phase transducer, if you happen to have a wee spot o’ mustard up on the bridge.
Kirk: Spock, your analysis?
Spock: It sounds like Mr. Scott is having lunch.