Inspiration for Firefly?

I was watching an episode of Battlestar Galactica, "The Lost Warrior", that made me wander if that episode is what Firefly would have looked like if it had been made in 1978. For those familiar with BSG, it's the episode where Apollo is forced to land on a world that is a direct rip-off, I mean homage, to the old west. It looks like a western with steel and aluminum, and the bad guy is a Cylon gunslinger called Red-Eye.

Oh, and whoever was charge of the science, specifically the space science, was an idiot. Even in 1978 I had a better understanding of astronomical terms.