Firefly (TV series)/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

* There's probably some neat [[Techno Babble]] explanation for this, but it really strains my suspension of disbelief when people are running all over spaceships and space stations firing off guns. And not just guns, ''fully automatic machine guns''. In a show with no [[FTL Travel]] and no [[Sound in Space]], I really would expect that this would have the result it would in [[Real Life]]: hull gets breached, ship depressurizes, everyone dies.

** The ships and space stations are engineered to handle bullets hitting the hull. This is stated by Jayne in "Objects In Space" when Mal worries about Jayne's [[Hand Cannon]] potentially breaching the hull. "Bullets is soft lead, Mal. Vera's the best I got, she can barely breach the hull." Implication there is that Jayne's own personal BFG, with enormous rounds (which we can see on the gun itself are about the size of .50 caliber) barely poses any threat to their cheap, lightweight, barely-holding-together civilian ship. Besides, depressurization from bullets is an overblown hazard; if a section of the ship is compromised by bullets, it can be easily sealed off and the hull can be quickly patched. Not to mention that it would take time for a section of the ship to lose air from a hull breach from bullets; at least enough time for the crew in the compromised section to get to another compartment and seal it off.<br />Besides, if you've got ships that are moving so fast they're going to be crossing interplanetary distances in hours/days, you've pretty much got to engineer them so they can withstand micrometeorite/space debris impacts at that speed. A ship capable of routinely withstanding that kind of impact isn't going to blink at slower, less energetic impacts like those caused by bullets fired by small arms. You'd probably need something very powerful and likely tipped with armor-piercing and explosive rounds (i.e. the AA artillery gun from Haven that they bolted onto the ship) to get through the hull of any decently-designed spacecraft in this setting.<br />In short, the ships were built and engineered by people who expected that somewhere along the line, someone was going to be firing a gun inside the ship and didn't want everyone to get killed by a stray bullet. The vessels and space stations are built with this in mind. You don't need any kind of [[Techno Babble]] explanation for that - just good hull engineering.