The Verse - Joss Whedon's Firefly Simulation

[BrunFrakk]

Hello fellow sandboxers and browncoats! i have lately been working day and night on this massive solar system as seen in Joss Whedons series Firefly and movie Serenity. in fear of being cheesy, I've decided NOT to quote the intro of the movie... the system does however contain 5 stars, 7 artificial stars, 6 gas giants, roughly 63 planets and a Sextillion moons. it is indeed crowded.

the source i have been using can be found here http://firefly.wikia.com/wiki/The_Verse_in_Numbers

there are some data i had to change rather radically so the system would not collapse on itself.

first off: the mass. i have not been very exact at calculating the mass of each planet and moons. luckily  it doesn't matter because everyone enjoys artificial gravity 500 years in the future! 

secondly the brown dwarfs/proton star mass and diameter: which were set to be roughly 0.3 suns each. I decided to change this to what seemed to be the minimum for a star (93 jupiters). yet! the orbiting planets are still too close and i decided not that add moons to the planets orbiting withing C: 5-6-7 Million kilometers.

the texture of the planets are mostly from Earth, Mars and Mercury. decided after what is fact in the series or what seemed correct compared to the population and distance from the star. (habitable zones should be ignored).

one more thing which i am very sorry for is that the orbits are not 100% stable. i would advice you to keep the timer on realistic... it is more of a model then a simulation.

Serenity (as a 190 Ton teapot) can be found on it's way to Greenleaf.

The camera will spawn at Hera were the first scene of Firefly unfolds.

I really hope you folks will enjoy it, my english is not too as rusty as my throat when writing this, and i managed to upload it 

[Bla]

Looks exciting. If you're making a model, you can just set gravity to 0.

[Dan Dixon]

Wow... This is incredible.

It's obvious lots of work went into this.

Here's a different Firefly universe map?
http://www.fireflyshipworks.com/map-of-the-verse/map-of-the-verse/

Did you use any custom textures?

---

Coincidently I just created a map from Battlestar Galactica yesterday:
http://universesandbox.com/blog/2011/01/twelve-colonies/
... and it revealed a number of problems and ideas for how to improve the tools.

Having spent lots of time create a massive simulation, could you comment on what was missing, what you wanted to do, but couldn't or how the tools could be improved.

Adding more variety of planet textures is on the list.

[Naru523]

Looks nice.

[BrunFrakk]

I was aware of the official map, but found the PDF file more useful in my situation.
I have not had the opportunity using custom textures, as i do not know how...

coincidently! i am a fan of Battlestar Galactica as well and had already checked out your newly uploaded twelve colonies system. funny because i just finished watching trough the prequel series Caprica a few days ago and was planning to make the system myself. from a different schematics though.

as to what i wanted to do, but could not... (i am not sure if it is already possible). the bodies information for example. i could not seem to find a way to change anything but the name. if i wanted a moon to have the texture of Europa for instance, it would still say "Moon of Jupiter".
a second thing i did not find a way to toggle was a single objects Lagrange points. instead of one planet or stars Lagrange point it seemed as i could only select all. which ment another 1000 dots with text screaming for CPU usage. 
a problem occurred with the save files after i passed roughly.... 50 saves with the same name (The Verse 50). i could no longer name any of my saves in whatever system. i am however certain a reinstall should fix this problem. thought it might be worth mentioning...

other then that i don't know what i was missing. more variety textures sounds great though.     

[atomic7732]

other then that i don't know what i was missing. more variety textures sounds great though.     

Maybe Dan should let us scrounge around for some planet textures, and even use some of ours, and put it in a tab of planets called "User Textures" or something. Though you'd have to have some mass/diameter, it could just be an Earth. This would allow the user to change it.

[Naru523]

Maybe another feature is for the info could be based on the parent object. Like... Europa orbiting Earth. It would say "Moon of Earth", Mercury orbiting the Sun "Planet of the Sun" or something like that.

[atomic7732]

agreed. I like that. It could use the "Relation Lines" to notice how many levels it is (planet, moon, moonlet)

[spaceranger]

Far out! I just began working on a simulation of the Verse in Universe Sandbox as well, using the same sources (The Verse In Numbers PDF and the official map from QMX). My intent is to create all of the star systems for the Orbiter simulation.

I'm using US to determine what a stable configuration would be, and then I'll use the resulting parameters to define all of the systems in Orbiter (free space flight simulator, seamless ground/atmo/space flight). For anyone who's a fan of Firefly/the Verse, and doesn't already know, there's a Firefly vessel for Orbiter with working shuttles, cargo bay and hover mule. All it needs is an Orbiter Verse to fly in, but this is a big project. I've started generating planet, gas giant and moon textures, but there's so many, this will probably be what takes the most time.

The one drawback in Orbiter right now is that the software does not support more than one star light source in a system, with regard to simulating a star's light. Inter-stellar travel can be simulated by using a plugin called MSSS that essentially just loads a new scenario for each star, once a vessel reaches a certain distance or coordinate field (defined in a config). I expect that multiple star light sources will be supported sometime in the future, once the developer or someone in the community codes it up, but can't say when.

Anyway, thanks for posting this up! I'll definitely check out what you've done and will most likely use it as the basis for what I'm doing. Since the 'artificial' stars in the system are 'compressed' brown dwarfs, I agree that they should be as low mass as possible, things appear too tight as they are for the orbits to be sustainable. I'm going to attempt to get something as close as possible to the official source (haha) and as complete as possible. It will be some months before I post anything about the Orbiter release, but I will certainly post anything that I do in US up here.

Cheers!

[MassiveEffect]

Oh nice.  One of my favorite sci-fi shows/movies!
This is a great addition to Ubox!

[spaceranger]

Update on the US Verse explorations: the Verse is impossible, lol 

I can confirm that the data in the Verse supplement, and the official map, is for an impossible system. It falls apart in <100 years, quite spectacularily after that. It was fun watching two stars fly out at 1/3 the speed of light. There's just too many stars.

Also, there's too many planets outside the habitable zones, but ... bah, who cares.

I'm going to see if there's anything viable at all that I can design which resembles the source material as closesly as possible.

Possibilities:

• Put all the stars further away from each other.
• Adjust the star masses a bit (might not help all that much).
• Make all of the gas giants less massive (awwww, I wanted them _all_ to be massive Jupiters, heh)
• Tweak orbital velocities (a given)

We'll see what happens ... this could take a while ....

[Dan Dixon]

Moved Orbiter Mod discussion to this thread:
http://universesandbox.com/forum/index.php/topic,3860.0.html

[spaceranger]

Update: still no luck getting a stable system that resembles the official map and source. Alas. Too many stars.

I'm attempting a radical departure from published source to get ANYTHING to work that resembles the verse at all.

When at first you don't succeed ... kick it.

[spaceranger]

OK, this is a tough one. I cranked up the mass of the center star, it's now a really massive blue. That helped to anchor things a bit. I took out all of the planets but one (Londinium), so that I could just work on getting the stars working. If the stars are working, the planets should be able to squeeze in there. I've got Londinium in there to make sure that my innermost dwarf star won't pull planets out of the habitable zone.

I've attached the best I could do so far. I think I've got all of the inner stars working alright, I can't get the outermost star (and dwarf star satelite) to work; they're really, really far out and I haven't found a way to bring them in.

If anyone wants a challenge, heh, see if you can arrange these stars in a more stable arrangement somehow. I'd really appreciate any tips here. You can really crank up the time frame on this one. I start it out at 40 days and sometimes go up to 80, if I'm impatient. I'm open to tweaking the star masses, as long as they could host habitable planets around them, I'm good.

Cheers

[Dan Dixon]

Bringing this back to the front page.

[Darvince]

Since it's so unstable, shouldn't you just set gravity to 0, like other people have said, to make it a model so it won't collapse?

[vh]

maybe, but watching it move and spin around is more exciting than a model imo.

[spaceranger]

Since it's so unstable, shouldn't you just set gravity to 0, like other people have said, to make it a model so it won't collapse?

That won't work, unfortunately. I'd like to create a working 'Verse for the Orbiter simulator, so I need something that will funciton in its Newtonian physics simulator.