Reflections on Firefly, Part 1: Guns 'n Hosses

No, that’s not a typo, that’s me getting into the spirit of things, dong ma?

I, like many “Browncoats”, was first exposed to Firefly in DVD form. I was lured into watching it by the promise, given by some much more rabid fans, of a sci-fi series where there was no sound in space. That taint of reality intrigued me, so I sat down to watch the pilot episode.

And then I watched Jaynestown.

And then… well, they got me off their couch eventually.

I was hooked. Not just by the witty dialogue, cute girls, and interesting villains, but by the realism of it. Not just that there was no sound in space. Not just that the future had slums in addition to its flying cars and gleaming buildings. No, I was hooked by the horses riding to the spaceship, and the cartridge firearms.

FOX’s execs, along with many other people, apparently were turned off by these very things. Why weren’t our sci-fi heroes using laser pistols and riding Star Wars-like speeder bikes? This is science fiction!

Well, it is science fiction. I’ll turn to Robert Heinlein’s “Starman Jones”, in which a character explains why a starship is taking horses to a colony world instead of tractors: “Horses make more horses, which is one trick that tractors have never learned.”

The bottom line is that it all depends on how we go into space.

It appears that the Alliance has a number of highly developed worlds (the Core), and a number of developing worlds. The latter appear in many cases to be at or below subsistence level, with large undeveloped areas. In such places, horses make more sense than tractors; it is a basic function of logistics.

A community with no outside support must be able to make or trade for everything it uses. Trade requires the community have a surplus of something. In the case of a colony, this has historically been raw materials traded for finished goods. If transport between the colony and the developed community making the finished goods is cheap, this can work fairly well. If not, the colony may be more or less on its own. If a tractor breaks, it could take several tries and many months to ship in spare parts. If that happens during planting or harvesting, the colony is in trouble. A horse can die, or get sick, too, of course. But it takes many more horses to work the same land. The loss of any one is a smaller impact. And while progressive failures will slowly reduce the tractors to scrap, there is no real limit to how long a large herd of horses, carefully managed, can keep working the land. Horses make more horses. All they need are food, water, and (for best results) a little human guidance to breed the desired traits. A tractor is the end result of a mass of machine tools, a complex fuel source, multiple complex materials, and a great deal of skilled labor.

We might postulate that just as an 18th century colony town had a blacksmith, so a 28th century colony town might have a machine shop. Sure. Until the milling machine breaks. Until someone loses the dial calipers. Until all your cutting heads are worn down. An 18th century master smith could, given unprocessed raw materials, MAKE a workshop and its tools. Not as good as ones from the mother country, to be sure, but good enough to get the job done. A modern master machinist, given nothing but raw materials and even a power source, would probably be unable to make a 3-axis milling machine. He could start the project, but it would be his grandchildren who would need to finish it.

Some of the same arguments apply to weapons. A cartridge firearm will last for a long time with only a tiny trickle of spare parts and maintenance. Ammunition kept in crates for fifty years can still be fired with high reliability – I’ve fire ammo twice as old as I am, with no higher failure rate than from modern manufacture. If a firearm is designed for reliability, as the Glock family of pistols, they will fire, reliably, after being immersed in sand or mud. The AK-47 is notorious, but also famous for the fact that illiterate peasants who never clean their weapons, living in a jungle or a rainforest, can still fire them after years of abuse. Can a laser pistol be designed to take the same abuse? Maybe, maybe not; electronics are more fragile than steel. But what would that make it cost? We do see handheld laser weapons in Firefly, along with stun guns, in the hands of developed group’s military and police forces, as well as rich men’s toys. But a stun gun can’t blow open a door, not even with Jayne using it, while an “old fashioned” bullet from a brass cartridge can.

But if they can maintain a spaceship, surely they can maintain a laser pistol! Now we’re getting somewhere, but the economic pinch bites us. Mal CAN’T afford to get spare parts for his ship, or the episode “Out of Gas” would have lasted about eight minutes. If he was a little better off, he’d buy parts for his ship. If he was a little better off than that, probably some real food; fresh fruit, perhaps? I won’t speculate on where replacing a perfectly workable and reliable weapon would fall on Mal’s priority list, but I don’t think it would be anywhere near the top.

That’s part of the key; weapons may be a necessity (to fight off criminals if not predators), but high-tech weapons are a luxury if low-tech ones will do the job. High-tech weapons will thus be bought from the same funds other luxuries, and a colony will only have so many luxuries. There’s also the legality issue; the Alliance may be unable or unwilling to ban weapons altogether, but that doesn’t stop it (much like ours) from restricting advanced or military-grade weapons. A rich man like Rance can buy his way around the problem, but what if Mal, one of the many times he meets face to face with the Alliance, had an illegal laser pistol?

So take me out, to the black – if I ain’t commin’ back, I’m brinin’ ma hoss and ma gun.