I know you hung up my line--Star 69

[cyrano]

This is a request for advice from my science-smart friends. Please take a moment, help me get a reality check on the setting for my FireFly OryCon one-shot.


The planet is covered in water--about 15 meters deep, in general. I think this means an old planet. If so, what are the general qualifications of a planet of that age? I'm thinking high salinity in the water, and good sized waves that travel the surface of the planet. The installment on the planet is a mining colony, sunk into the ocean floor and surrounded by large metal breakwaters to protect it from the waves.

The social economy is standard Victorian Empire--there are the lower classes who work in the mines, on the docks, in the desalinization plants, eat the fish poisoned by the byproducts of the mining and live nasty, short brutish lives. The upper classes exploit the lower, live high above in the towers and eat kittens because they're so evil.

Comments

Re: heh.

[space-parasite.livejournal.com]

Well, my point with desalinization is that it would be easy enough to do that they could reasonably have or easily rig up redundancy. Although as another commenter implied, that may be too much thinking for the TV SF genre. (Or, it could be a plot point, if any of the players seems likely to think of that sort of thing.)

My reading of the NASA article is that the solar wind rips away the atmosphere entirely, which makes perfect sense. The UV-splitting-water-so-the-hydrogen-escapes thing is a way to have the planet depleted specifically in water, while still having an Earth-like atmosphere. So we aren't disagreeing!