Tech Levels: "Firefly" vs. "Battlestar Galactica"?

By the end of this century, we will have mapped every earth-size planet probably within 50-100 light-years of Earth, measured their atmospheres very accurately, and perhaps even imaged them well enough to spot oceans and continent-sized features. All with telescopes.

There’s no FTL in the Firefly 'verse. Thank God. FTL sucks when building a future universe, because it leads to just too many logical inconsistencies, and because it takes us too far out of the universe we understand. I much prefer the Firefly 'verse, which by virtue of its limits makes for a much more believable fictional universe we can get our heads around. With a limited number of planets and moons and cultures, it’s a lot easier to map out a consistent and believable universe than if anything can happen, any time.

Another thing about the Firefly 'verse is that it’s a plausible extraction of where we might be in 400 years. The Star Trek universe never made sense that way - originally set only a couple of hundred years in the future, yet with established human colonies throughout the galaxy and huge fleets of starships. But you can imagine if our fancy new telescopes imagined a solar system like the one in Firefly, with perhaps several Earth-sized planets that looked like they had oceans and breathable air, and dozens of other terraformable planets. The urge to go there would be pretty huge, and you can imagine another hundred years after that a large effort being spent to build a colony ship and send a few thousand people with millions of frozen human embryos or something rocketing off for that star system. After sending robotic probes to terraform the others and report back precise information. Sure, it would take decades, but so what? We ship out space probes today that take years to get to their destinations and we don’t think much of it.

Back to the OP - The Firefly 'Verse, I think. Those big alliance cruisers are every bit as large as Galactica, and they have hundreds of fighters strapped under them. They have energy weapons. Their medical technology is obviously much more advanced. The Vipers seem much more limited in fuel than the ships in Firefly.

So, they may not have FTL, but they were haulin’ ass. A generation is what, about 20 years or so? Those guys were moving a lot of humans at relativistic speeds. Pretty impressive.

That sounds interesting to read. Where is it from?

It says “an entire generation never even saw the outside of a spaceship” which, to me, implies a generation was born and died while on the ship, meaning it was in transit for seventy to a hundred years.

Yeah, I thought about that after I posted. Still, you figure they got a large chunk of humanity, along with lots of materiel, to a “nearby” system within 100 years… they were still haulin’ ass. I figure they must have been moving at way past 10% C. Probably more than 50% C. Plus whatever power source they were using - that’s not a civilization I want to piss off unless I’ve got unrealistic Trek-ian technologies.

Galactica doesn’t appear to have anything like it, except for FTL & artificial gravity.

When the Cylons want to take out a bunch of people what do they do? Infiltrate and then nuke the place.

What could the government/military of the Firefly 'Verse do? One person wearing blue gloves walks in, takes out a small, innocuous looking pencil-like device, and everyone bleeds out.

Again, that’s impressive technology.

That quote is from Serenity: The Official Visual Companion. It has an intro by Joss, featuring the quoted essay, pre-production stuff, lots of photos, and the complete shooting script. Interviews, sketches, etc. A nice job.

Not to mention her Armsmen, the Protector’s Own, and Eighth Fleet, all of which could seriously ruin a Fed/Browncoat/Reaver/Colonial/Cylon’s day :smiley:

I would have to say that for space traveling technology, Galactica has the advantage in FTL in that pretty much anyone can do it with the exception of small fighters (in fact, this seems to be purely a problem with the Colonial Viper, as the Cylon Raiders all seem to be FTL capable) and crippled ships. I’m not sure about non-FTL space transport technology, as we’ve never seen the Fed cruisers or their gunships in long-term pitched battles.

For medical technology, the Core Worlds of Firefly blow Galactica away, although out on the rim (or on small privateering vessels) medical technology is only a couple steps ahead of what an Army medic would find himself doing in the 20th century.

In the much-vaunted field of firearms technology, they’re roughly equal. Slight edge to the Firefly universe, which has sonic stun weapons and coherent energy weapons of varying degrees of usefulness. A beam laser looks really impressive, but doesn’t seem to be significantly superior to an automatic slug-thrower, at least not in relation to the added cost.

And in the most important category, the make your own worst enemy category, I would say the Colonials of the Galactica universe have an outright advantage over the Feds of the Firefly 'Verse. The Cylons were able to rebel against the humans, improving their own technology until they were able to eventually send infiltrators to the Colonies, compromising their defenses so that crippling nuke attacks could be carried out, not to mention being able to hack into and disable the flight control computers on Colonial warships. The best the Reavers can do is Rape, Pilliage, and Burn. Sometimes even in the correct order. :smiley:

And the skin eating. Don’t forget the skin eating.

They don’t eat the skin, they just sew it into their clothing.

I don’t know if it’s exactly canon, but this page suggests that the Firefly 'verse might be set in a multiple star-system; if you had several reasonably Sun-like stars at the right distance from each other, you might could arrange it so each could have a nice big system of planets, and still be close enough to one another so that non-FTL ships could travel from the planets of one star to the next (although that might be a lengthy, “round the Horn” type of journey compared to travelling between the planets of one of the stars, let alone between the moons of a particular gas giant). As the page sort of suggests, multiple stars might also account for what a “quadrant” refers to. “Quadrant” (unlike “sector”) strictly speaking implies four of them; while you could divide up the Solar System into four quadrants–just draw four imaginary lines from extending out from the Sun–it seems like it would be of somewhat limited use since a particular planet would wander from quadrant to quadrant. If you had four Sun-like stars in a somewhat loose multi-star system, the planets of each one could constitute a “quadrant” of the entire huge “system”.

As for AI, what about Mr. Universe’s “wife” in Serenity?

Brian

No AI. Just a real doll with a voice recorder/modulator and some disney style animatronics. She didn’t do anything we couldn’t do now, although it’d be tricky putting it all together in one package.

Exactly. However, I think this is one of the few times they used a buzzword without considering the implications.

The map at the beginning of the movie appears to be a solar system

I do, in fact, have a map of the solar system, plus or minus. Serenity: The Role Playing Game. Alas, my friends have… borrowed it gleefully and the female of the pair makes gleeful squeeing noises when the subject comes up.

If and when I get it back, I’ll try to give you what I have on technical data from it.

A more sensical use of quadrant to refer to one solar system would be to break the system into concentric rings: the first quadrant are the planets orbiting closest to the sun, and so on out to the last quadrant, which would be the fringiest of the fringe worlds. Since the political structure of the Firefly-verse seems based on proximity to the sun (Core-worlds v. border worlds), this would make sense as a way to divide the inhabited planets up. And, since it’s based on the planet’s orbits, there’s no issue with them moving from quadrant to quadrant depending on the time of year.

With regard to Battlestar Galactica, I’d note that it’s only the ‘junk’ that survived - everything newer got switched off and then zapped by the Cylons.

And for Firefly, see this thread.

I read somewhere that the creators of BSG purposely keep the tech level low. The phones have cords !

The reason that all of the ships in Galactica seem to have FTL is that all of the non-FTL ships got left behind at the start of the series. There was a scene where the Cylons show up and the FTL-capable ships jump away while the non-FTL ships beg to not be left behind (as the nuclear missiles start impacting on them).

Of what’s left, the Galactica’s Raptors (the small usually two-man reconnisance and transport ships) have FTL. It’s pretty much just the Vipers that are non-FTL capable.

E-Sabbath wrote:

I’ve got it. There isn’t much information there. The map has eight objects that could be suns, but you can’t tell if they’re really suns or just planets painted as really bright. They don’t label any of the objects. It’s really kind of a red herring.

Well, Adama wanted to keep his ship low tech because of the first Cylon war. By the time the series started, his ship was 40-50 years old, which is one of the reasons they were decommissioning it when the cylons attacked.

Anyone see the map at the start of the movie? I expected a solar system since I’d been told, but I didn’t get a good look at it.