Ok, that was pretty funny. But "Whedon, you bastard!" is the least of the curses I have aimed at him.

I went to see Serenity last night, and while I didn't feel it was up to the standards of the TV series (how could it be, with only a couple of hours to do all the character development and plot structure) it wasn't as bad as I had feared it might be.

However, I think there was a departure from reality in one place...

There were quite a lot of Reiver ships surrounding the planet Miranda. (Run and hide, Tony -- we're about to venture into (are you ready for this?) math!)

Lets assume that the Reiver ships were in low orbit around Miranda -- say, 200 miles above the surface of a planet about the size of Earth. Let's further assume that the Reiver ships were spaced 500 feet apart (about a tenth of a mile). They certainly seemed to be literally brushing rockets to tailfins! And finally, lets assume that Mal and his intrepid crew had to pass through a mile of wall to wall Reiver ships to get through the blockade.

Well... a sphere 8,400 miles in diameter (Earth diameter plus 200 miles above the surface on each side) would encompass a volume of about 310,338,826,560 cubic miles.

A sphere 8402 miles in diameter (Earth diameter plus 200 miles above the surface on each side, plus one mile through the blockade on each side of the sphere) would encompass a volume of 310,560,549,932 cubic miles. Subracting the volume of the smaller sphere from the larger leaves 221,723,372 cubic miles taken up by the Reivers.

If the Reivers are spaced 500 feet apart, there would be 1,178 Reiver ships in every cubic mile of space in the blockade zone surrounding the planet. That means there would be 261,190,132,216 Reiver ships. If each ship had a crew of 10 Reivers, that means there would be about two and a half trillion Reivers.

It does not seem plausible that 2.5 trillion Reivers could support themselves by the expedient of occasional raiding parties on small (<1000 inhabitants?) colonial outposts.

It does not seem plausible that even under the most optimal conditions, that an initial planetary population of 30 million people, of which 99.8% died due to the effects of the drug administered through the air handlers, leaving only 60,000 Reivers to begin with, could be fruitful and multiply and increase their population by a factor of more than 40,000,000 in, ummm, what timeframe are we dealing with here? It's only been six years since the end of the secession wars, and the "experiment" would have happened after that. So, say 5 years. Even with cloning and forced maturation, I don't see it happening. Each original Reiver would have to produce about four and a half million clones, or put another way, about eight clones every minute, 24 hours a day, for five years.

So, I guess the question is this: Was Serenity a true documentary, or was it a work of fiction and imagination? My research would tend to support the latter.

tanstaafl.

It's a standard sci-fi trope to assume that you can't just fly around a blockade, even when that blockade is just a small rectangle of ships, as opposed to a sphere.

The closest analogy I can think of is the Star Trek: Next Generation episode where there is a net of federation ships scanning for Romulans sneaking out of the neutral zone. The first question any intelligent person would ask is "the net is a relatively small two-dimensional grid, they could just fly around it."

I would hope that some script writers would actually have a reason for this standard cliche, if not actually shown in the movie, then perhaps in their heads when they're writing it.

If I were writing it, I'd probably make the weak argument that the orbital mechanics of the particular solar system prevent approaches along any other path. Or that such other approaches are logistically much more difficult because of the amount of energy that you would need to expend. This argument is especially weak in any 'verse where FTL travel allows you to pop back into realspace at any chosen point. As opposed to 'verses where FTL travel requires the entry point to be someplace specific.

I thought it was 13 years since the Reavers were created. Anyone else remember this? I also only noticed the Reavers around one side of the planet. But I'm sure if they noticed a ship coming from the other direction they would have moved.

Firefly Wiki - Reaver info. Contains TV and Movie spoilers.
http://www.fireflywiki.org/Firefly/Reavers

Now Now, Don' be letting the facts, get in the way of fiction. That ain't right.

I suppose that was inevitable.