Firefly solar system

[TomPN]

I know that somebody has made a mod that turns the Kerbin solar system into the Earth solar system. Could somebody make a mod that turns it into the Firefly solar system? The data on all of the planets - sizes, orbital periods and radii etc. - can be found in "The Verse in Numbers 2.1", available online as a pdf. I think this would be very cool as there are tons more planets and moons to explore in the Firefly system. It's all one system, so FTL travel is probably not needed.

[AG5BPilot]

I must say that "The Verse in Numbers 2.1" made for an interesting read.  Thank you for that.

I'm not a modder, but I foresee two huge problems in making a mod such as you're asking for.

The first is sheer size.  The KSP stock solar system consists of one central body (the sun), 7 planets, and 9 moons.  The Firefly Verse consists of one central star, which is orbited by 4 other stars, 7 artificial or proto-stars, and about 260 planets and moons.  I doubt KSP could handle that.  It would also take an immense amount of work to make it happen.  I could see this sort of endeavor taking months or years to do, and that's assuming a whole group of people were working on creating all the worlds and moons.  

The second problem is licensing.  Firefly itself is certainly copyrighted and trademarked, and the fan work that went into making up the "Verse" is also protected by copyrights.  In particular, the document you referenced starts off with this:  " Any replication of this content, in part or in whole, without express written permission of the copyright holders is forbidden."  I'm no lawyer, but it's a good bet that this includes using the names and orbital arrangements.  To even think about doing this, one would first have to get permission to use this information.  If you were going to make the mod for your own personal use you could decide you're not going to worry about the licensing, but if you're going to distribute it the mod must be properly licensed (to protect Squad, if for no other reason).  You would probably need permission from both the publisher of 'The Verse by numbers", the studio that holds the rights to Firefly, and possibly some other entities whose intellectual property went into making that document.  That might not be impossible to do, since I suspect many if not all of the rights holders would be thrilled to see their work used in this way, but it's some legal hoops that one needs to go through before even starting such a project.

[TomPN]

Fair enough. Getting all of the legal permissions would probably be the easiest part of it. You probably wouldn't need many textures for the planet surfaces - from what I saw on the show, they're mainly cities and deserts. Throw in a moon-like texture for bodies that haven't been terraformed yet, and a Jool-like texture for gas giants. (Alright, it's probably more complicated than that).

[elpollodiablo]

I tried it about a year ago when Kopernicus was approaching Beta status. I failed because my Computer back then was unable to run Space Engine and i got burned out making heightmaps in Photoshop. Well, actually mostly because im lazy and different things came up

Anyhow, even with the "verse in numbers" providing most values it's a huge amount of work: The first system alone has 18 planets, including the 2 brown dwarfs and not counting moons. I play(ed) with 3 planet mods (2 add a new solar system) and lots of mods without problems in 64bit, but thats still probably 1/5 or less of all the bodies in the verse. Then there is the problem that it is very boring, for KSP players i mean: Most planets are obviously terraformed, have an atmosphere and around 1g. So the whole thing has to be modelled before human colonization, which means outside of orbits and a few "landmarks" like diameter or hillsize every planet is basically a "fantasy planet" as there is no information on how they looked before the terraforming. That also means all the artificial stars are still gas giants etc. The orbits have no inclination (again, boring for KSP) and to top it off, lots of conversions has to be done (the whole thing is in human scale) but that's the easiest part. Also, even tough in comparison still small, the verse is huge: The last star, blue sun, has an orbital period of well over 2000 years (going the opposite or polar direction of all the others afaik), which means FTL probably still is a must (you'd really want to visit it if you play that universe for obvious reasons).

I dont want to discourage anyone, actually i'd love to help if some decide to go for it: Would make for a good community project or smth similar, for the sheer amount of bodies there are to implement. Just a fair warning if someone else decides to invest a lot of time in this (and maybe ends up like me, with basically nothing to show for but some knowledge (the verse, imaging programs and planet modding))

 

[TomPN]

I looked through the Verse in Numbers and it turns out there are about 250 planetary and lunar bodies in the Verse. However, approximately 50 of these have no terraforming (including the planet Shadow, whose terraforming was destroyed at the start of the Unification War), and 7 are gas giants. In addition, the vast majority (all except two or three) of planets have a lunar system, and many of these have 3 or more moons. Of these, the largest is that of the gas giant Fury, which has nine moons - quite a challenge to explore, even for veteran Jool explorers. There is no data on the inclination of the moons orbits, so the orbits of the moons could be placed at various inclinations making them more of a challenge. So, even though about 80% of the Verse is composed of similar worlds (gravitywise, not sizewise - the sizes vary between a minimum of 970km diameter and a maximum of 1.4 x Earth diameter, according to the Verse in Numbers), there's still quite a bit to explore. However, I do agree that the system is of titanic size and would take a long time to put together. The Blue Sun system would be quite a challenge to reach - it does orbit in the opposite direction to the others, and on the Complete and Official Map of the Verse, it appears to me that the orbits of the Blue Sun's planets are highly inclined compared to the rest of the solar system, although this may just be the way the map is drawn. So, difficult and tedious to put together? Yes. Boring? Not at all.

Edited April 4, 2016 by TomPN
missed something out

[Seeker89]

this would be interesting... as kerbin is 1/10 of earth, you could cut out planets and moons that would be peanut size. That could help. the project would be very large.

[TomPN]

If you scaled everything down to 1/10th size, then dropped everything smaller than Gilly (26km scaled diameter, 260km original diameter), you would drop three moons from the White Sun system and 1 moon from the Georgia system. There would still be a very large number of bodies remaining.

[kunok]

Well one can use multiple times the same texture.

And there is an option to make a procedural surface? You won't even need textures if are done procedurally (the original map of kerbin is made by a procedural map library so it should be doable), just define the parameters of the planets and a seed, so everyone has the same planets.

[TomPN]

I don't see why not. You'd need a cityscape-type or earth-type surface, a desert-type surface, an unterraformed (moon-like?) surface, a gas giant surface and a star surface (for all of the protostars and stuff). 

[pearldrumbum]

This is an awesome idea. If a community of people get behind this, I'd be willing to help. I actually have that poster up in my office. This would definitely take a community of people to put together though. Way too much work for one person.

[AG5BPilot]

Let's not forget the licensing thing.  While you might not care about it, it's a good bet Squad will -- or at least they should if they've got any brains.  If you put untold man-years into building this mod and then show it to nobody, you're okay.  But if you distribute it publicly -- and you're already advertising what you want to do right here -- someone  may very well get sued for copyright infringement.  That someone is always going to include the one with the deep pockets, namely Squad.  This is why every commercial game you'll likely ever play that permits user created content expressly forbids players from creating content containing names or other Intellectual Property from copyrighted sources.

You're legally not permitted to just go and use the Firefly universe without permission.  Squad would be incredibly foolish to permit that.  And, in fact, they don't  They require a valid license for all mods.  You can't just stick a Creative Commons license on IP that belongs to someone else.  When you knowingly do that, I believe the term for this is "fraud".  The best outcome is that all the effort that goes into this is wasted.  The worst (but really unlikely) outcome is you find yourself hiring a lawyer to defend yourself.  Since the source material for this idea explicitly forbids any unauthorized use of the material, you can't even claim "I didn't know."

If you want to do this, you need to first get permission.  Why put in the effort unless you know you can actually do it?  Get the copyrights holders' permissions, and then go for it.  But skipping the first step will probably just waste everyone's time.

(I'm sorry to be the killjoy here, because I too really, really like this idea, but it's almost certain to end badly if you don't the due diligence and take care of the copyright issues first and foremost.)

[TomPN]

Agreed. To anybody reading this: get permission before making this mod. Repeat: GET PERMISSION BEFORE MAKING THIS MOD!!! There's a list at the start of The Verse in Numbers of all the fans who contributed to it, so get permission from the author and all of the fans to use their info. DEFINITELY get permission from Joss Whedon and the guys who produced Firefly. If you can think of any more people who you'd need permission from, post them.

[pearldrumbum]

Party poopers....

Haha, I totally get it and agree, though.

20 hours ago, TomPN said:

... so get permission from the author and all of the fans...

One way this entire project could be made more feasible, both in the permissions and scope of mod work, is to not necessarily use every body that's ever been submitted to TVIN. A lot of them are very similar and redundant, and therefore wouldn't really add to game-play anyway.

Getting all these permissions is going to be a lot of work too. I'd volunteer to start on sending emails and trying to find out who all actually needs to be contacted if there was enough interest from people wanting to contribute. These people could then decide how to pare down the long list of celestial bodies. Start with all 5 of the major stars, and include all of the protostars and gas giants with their satellites. Of course, anything else that is actually mentioned in the series or in Serenity would make it into the mod. Then they could pick other important bodies based on some of the more well known fan fiction to make sure there's a proportionate amount of planets and moons. Finally, we could eliminate any fan submissions that either can't be contacted or won't grant permission.

My wild guess would be that that drops the total body number by at least half, if not more.

[TomPN]

Wikipedia's "List of Firefly planets and moons" might be a good place to start. Of course, if you include a moon you also have to include the planet that it orbits. Since the moon Whitefall is mentioned in the pilot episode as being "the fourth moon of Athens", Athens and all four of it's moons would be included.