Yes, Now We Are a Family Again

Spell it, 'space'. S. P. ...Ace. SPACE. Space.

• I think I might've mentioned this before, but go watch the Serenity's exhaust. I've seen cigarette smoke move faster. A rocket's fuel efficiency is directly proportional to its exhaust velocity (and inverse-exponentially proportional to its mass ratio); the Firefly class must make an M1 Abrams look like a Prius. And given it has no propellant tanks, you'd probably have better delta-v with a truck's cigarette lighter and a punctured package of Jiffy Pop.
  
  Also, apparently not only did the 3D model used in the movie have individual rivets added, and the cargo bay redesigned with rounded sides because they're better for containing pressure, but each room's color scheme is supposed to reflect the personality of the person most associated with it. Uh, mightn't all that time have been better spent cracking open a few books 'bout rockets? I'm sure there are board books or something that even Whedon could understand.


• The first Alien was on, and, does it ever really explain how they knew that distress signal was a distress signal? I doubt very much that ship was outfitted for SETI, so how did it even recognize it as communication?
  
  Also, you'd totally send in some kind of remote (I'm guessing a mining ship would have bundles of 'em), rather than going in person. And if you see a big ol' nest full of alien eggs, you deserve anything, no matter how biologically impossible, that happens to you. Aside from how what comes out of the eggs might be dangerous—lots of animals hatch hungry, and they might find food by some method that can't tell an alien's nutritionally useless—being in an animal's nest is just as suicidal as getting between a momma grizzly and her cub.


• Here's a question: what's with all the SF settings where spaceships have more-or-less completely replaced air vehicles, with the possible exception of flying cars? Don't people understand that a vehicle suited to orbit insertion isn't really suited to most air tasks (it's not really suited to interplanetary flight, either, that's why you'd also use a different ship for orbit-to-orbit)? Why do they think we didn't replace 747s with Space Shuttle orbiters in the late 70s?
  
  In my book, there's lots of air units, though a lot of them are Twin Tilt Turborotor (come to think of it, I probably got the idea from Halo's Hornets), rather than jets or helicopters. Then again the spaceships use landers, too; the closest thing I have to one of those multi-role spaceships is that the habitat section of one of the starships can be detached to act as a lander. Also, most of the orbit-insertion is either two-stage or non-rocket, though the really rich guy (again, he has reactor licenses) has a single-stage-to-orbit lander.


• Which, hey, reminds me, if the Serenity's so damn junky, how come it can do VTOL SSTO and orbit-to-orbit? I don't remember Mal toking joints wrapped in the Magna Carta and lit with matter-antimatter annihilation—in places where pot's illegal but they don't dare bust him for it—do you? Because that's how rich you'd need to be to own a ship that can do that.
  
  As he often did before his work turned into Alfred Kinsey fanfiction, Heinlein explained it quite well in Space Jockey:

  The traveling-public gripes at the lack of direct Earth-to-Moon service, but it takes three types of rocket ships and two space-station changes to make a fiddling quarter-million-mile jump for a good reason: Money.
  
  The Commerce Commission has set the charges for the present three-stage lift from here to the Moon at thirty dollars a pound. Would direct service be cheaper? A ship designed to blast off from Earth, make an airless landing on the Moon, return and make an atmosphere landing, would be so cluttered up with heavy special equipment used only once in the trip that it could not show a profit at a thousand dollars a pound! Imagine combining a ferry boat, a subway train, and an express elevator. So Trans-Lunar uses rockets braced for catapulting, and winged for landing on return to Earth to make the terrific lift from Earth to our satellite station Supra-New York. The long middle lap, from there to where Space Terminal circles the Moon, calls for comfort-but no landing gear. The Flying Dutchman and the Philip Nolan never land; they were even assembled in space, and they resemble winged rockets like the Skysprite and the Firefly as little as a Pullman train resembles a parachute.

  Quite ironic, the Heinlein passage I quote here even has a ship named Firefly.


• If you have characters traveling in the Solar System in an SF story, you really ought to know where the planets are. They don't sit in a neat little line, you know. And hey, it's not like it's all that hard to figure out where they ought to go, we have computers now.
  
  There used to be neat little Java programs on the interwebs that'd calculate the planets' locations for you, but I can no longer find any of them. But not to worry; you can still use Celestia (the freeware star-viewer program), set it to your desired date, and then center the view at Sol, with an angle of 90° latitude and a fairly wide distance. Yeah, not ideal, but serviceable (don't come crying to me, I had to use Celestia to figure out which alien constellation Earth is in).


• Speaking of, there still are alien constellation generator programs. One that I used revealed that, for my felinoids (given the axial tilt I'd chosen for them, with η Boötis as their pole star), Orion is zodiacal—and yeah, it's almost completely unchanged from their home system, all its major stars are way far away.
  
  Because I'm not in the market to suffer horribly, I don't really want to make a whole sky full of alien constellations. So I just combined the zodiac (in their case, since their year's made up of about 10 periods of one of their two moons, a 10-sign one) with the Chinese system, where the whole sky is divided into segments. That'll at least let me give stars their names in their language (like the Chinese, they just name them after the segment they're in, plus a number).