• 0 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

help-circle
  • A bunch already here that I like for different reasons but I think my favorite is what they did in the game The Sword of the Stars. Sadly a case of a game with great ideas but only so-so-execution.

    My memory on the mechanics might be wrong as I haven’t played it for years but basically as a strategy game the fun twist is that every species has a fundamentally different approach to FTL.

    You have a Lizard species with basically Star Trek warp drive with fixed speed above light speed from any point to point of their choosing.

    Then you have humans that stumbled across naturally occurring interconnect lines between many stars and can travel faster along those routes by comparison to warp drive but have to travel below light speed off of those lines.

    Then an aquatic species that doesn’t do FTL in the normal sense. They developed teleportation but is it only for short distance. However they are able to get the power requirements down very low and rapidly repeat the process and so they flicker across space and the distance of each step gets longer the farther they are from a gravity well so they travel faster around the outside of something like a galactic cluster than in the middle of it. Reversing the normal pattern of where things get colonized.

    And last was an insect species that developed ship size star gates but travels sub light to anywhere new but as long as they bring a gate ship travel is basically instant after that.

    And the bonus layer is that since the game has direct ship to ship combat also in the mechanics the difference drive types have trade offs as well like the insects having extremely good combat drives since they don’t have ANY FTL systems on their combat ships so it all goes to direction propulsion.

    So far it is the only Sci-fi setting I can think of that has so many different ones overlapping not just something like a newer system replacing an older one.


  • Wouldn’t be a problem. G includes the West Indies places like Trinidad which has plenty of food that originated in India. So not the full list of all Indian food but it is perfectly real and not some crappy fusion restaurant knock off.

    Results of the British colonial era bringing a lot of people from India after ending the official slave trade and still wanting people to work plantations. So they switched from literally slavery to the not quite but still awful indentured service. The British would get the lowest social groups in India that functionally couldn’t own property in India to sign contracts for many years of work in exchange for a 1 room shack and a micro plot of land of their own.




  • Absolutely disagree on this. There is no fundamental reason software must have bugs. However old systems can be their own technical debt because of things like the hardware no longer being produced and therefore unable to be directly repaired if it breaks from age.

    This leaves either reprogramming for a modern device or things like emulation which can create/surface bugs that weren’t present before.

    The most extreme example I have heard of (sadly couldn’t quickly find a link for it) was a disorientation simulator for pilot training that had zero software issues in several decades of use and when the hardware failed they replaced it with an FPGA in a modern system that ran all the old code 1 for 1. PDP stuff originally I think.

    Additional edit - I’ll add that “bug free” software is insanely rare in reality and nearly but not quite impossible to create in practice. I can’t say the software didn’t technically have bugs but if multiple decades of use didn’t have them show up in practice it is functionally bug free.







  • I hear people say all the time that it is perfect. It definitely has imperfections.

    However while I will insist on it being imperfect it has still been my number one favorite game for at least two decades.

    It is easily the closest to perfect I think you could possibly ask for with the hardware limitations and the fact that teams don’t have magical infinite time or budgets. Anyone with even a slight interest in RPGs should play it.

    Plus it gave us the musical career of Yasunori Mitsuda


  • I had a 1980 year Oldsmobile 98 that didn’t have as many crazy issues as yours but did have one amazing one.

    Driving home one evening from college classes the headlights didn’t work so I took it into the shop.

    Couldn’t find anything normal as a cause but I had one of those old time small town mechanics that couldn’t stand to lose to the car. So he said he wouldn’t charge us for the extra work hours if he could keep it as a project until he was done. Took over three weeks of him going through the wiring and finally found a harness/wire that had worn through and was grounding to the car frame.

    So far nothing too weird for an old car. The bizarre part is that he had good current equipment and it is supposed to test if a wire is grounded out like that to the frame or even if it is broken by kicking signals along it like you can to find damage to Ethernet cables.

    So with that tester in hand and knowing without question what the problem was he hooked it back up and it still reported nothing wrong. He called the manufacturer and they said as far as they know that violates the laws of electricity… Worked fine with the new wires so again definitely correct and his tool worked on everything else he ever tried it on.


  • Make sure it is a high speed rated one and past that good luck. It depends on what kind of wiring setup is hidden in your walls.

    Wi-Fi might actually have higher peak speeds but even a repurposed/double duty wire setup like this is just so much more consistent assuming it works in the first place.

    I have had good luck with a set I have that are gigabit rated (get about 280mbps in practice) across 4 different places I have lived however I temporarily pulled them so we could test at some friends apartments and one of them just didn’t work at all so be aware that could happen and just have to return them.


  • Bring back Sodium batteries and how to make them as well as solar panel production. Probably to Nikola Tesla.

    To be a bit more precise whatever the easiest to produce versions of each are not the best ones so they could actually be produced at the tech level at the time.

    I’m sure they would still end up creating equivalents of oil Barons etc. but at least it would be based on a cleaner tech and more able to improve from there.




  • Would it work legally? Sure if it got passed as an amendment to the constitution. As currently structured there basically is zero legal argument with that other than another constitutional amendment.

    The chance of that happening with the actual political situation in the USA is essentially zero. To be clear it isn’t actually zero but I. The same way that your chance of walking out the door and dying by direct meteor strike isn’t zero but it isn’t worth planning for over a large number of far more likely things to happen.

    If that amendment both directly allowed shared ownership of property for things like high rise apartments/condos and for companies to function as management but not owners I do really think it could work. I’m sure companies could abuse that management position of course but still a huge improvement over our current situation.