2011/10/12

That's Gonna Leave a Mark

Or, well, not.

I was thinking. The scene in Serenity when Whedon acts like an emotionally abusive yandere, by killing the second of the two beloved characters he kills in that picture, is silly. I said it before, it should've destroyed both ships, and also, why do they have a window?

But I decided to prove it. So I have done the math.
  1. Any object moving at 3000 m/s will impact with the force of its own weight in TNT. Reentry velocity is Mach 25, or 8705.25 m/s.

    8705.25/3000=2.83575

  2. Kinetic energy varies with the square of the velocity.

    2.835752=8.04148

  3. I don't know what the Serenity and the Reaver ship's masses are, but it's quite likely they're ludicrously high, just like Star Wars ships' masses. 8 times those ludicrous masses is probably well into the kiloton range.

    If that wasn't clear, I'll break it down. Hitting another ship at re-entry velocities is likely to have the same effect as a direct hit from a medium-yield nuclear bomb.
But tell us again how realistic it is, just because the ships don't make noise.

Late addendum: After a perusal of the Firefly wiki, it turns out the Firefly-class is only 158.76 Mg empty weight, which is quite reasonable for a spaceship. However, 8 times that is still 1270 Mg, so it is a low yield nuke (1.27 kT). And besides, we don't know how massive the (much bigger) Reaver ship is.

Also, kudos to whoever noticed spaceships are supposed to be light—the Firefly-class's dimensions are about what you'd expect for an aircraft of its mass, if not even lighter (26th-century materials?). Well done, gentlemen. Now if only the writers weren't hell-bent on wasting your hard work.

1 comment:

penny farthing said...

Good point. Spaceships don't just bounce off each other, even if their exhaust just kind of wafts out the back....

I always think it's sad when writers/directors waste the hard work of the tech side of film making (DP on the Bourne movies, I'm looking at you). I'd rather have something be totally bad (which can be differently good) than have a few frustratingly good bits wasted on a bad project.

Then again, sometimes it's funny, and keeps you sane, when you know someone on the project was smarter than expected - consider the Grapes of wrath references in Crossroads, the Brittney Spears movies.... Or the ancient Sumerian in Buffy.