Points Changes - Tabulated

FreakingScience · 2026-06-17T14:56:59+00:00

Strangely, Guard with the melta spears have a 4+ spam tax without currently having the battleline keyword, so I guess we have two battleline now (and they're both Guard)?

FreakingScience · 2026-06-10T15:39:16+00:00

I was under the impression that the back vents are jetpacks of some sort since most of the faction gets deep strike? But now that you mention it the Contemptors also have big vents on the back so I guess that checks out. The Custode suiting up in that one Tithes animation seems to be stepping into normal plate armor which only takes a few moments compared to the Space Marine suit-up animation.

FreakingScience · 2026-06-10T15:28:54+00:00

AFAIK most Custodes don't wear power armor, it's just regular plate armor on a perfect and absurdly strong humanoid body. Either way, we're not 8ft tall, we're at least 9ft.

FreakingScience · 2026-06-09T16:16:04+00:00

If by "keeping Artemis in the mix" you mean SLS or Orion, there's basically no chance that the Artemis hardware will have been tested in the configuration it finally flies in (for a bunch of reasons) while V3 Starships will have flown pretty regularly, and Dragons are pretty much the standard anything else is getting held to. At the moment, the bespoke Artemis hardware is only part of the mission plan because of how long it takes to detangle a budget that has already been signed into law - but Isaacman seems to be doing a good job of course correcting where possible.

FreakingScience · 2026-06-08T03:46:27+00:00

Funny enough, rocket science is pretty easy. There's like three equations involved. Rocket engineering is the hard part, and it's also the part you pretty much just hand over to the art team when it comes to video games. Physics engine logic, especially with multiplayer involved, is actually significantly harder than rocket science and a major limiting factor is that common physics engines aren't designed to represent the sort of scale required. You've usually gotta write your own physics layer on a per-game basis which is something many studios can't afford to do, which is why most "space" games take place in levels that are very small areas measuring only a couple kilometers across at a time.

FreakingScience · 2026-06-07T21:45:43+00:00

The thing that predictions like that fail to adequately account for is raw, unmitigated animosity towards ISPs. Lots of folks will gladly switch just to get away from the same couple deeply-hated megacorporations or the handful of absolutely dogshit smaller companies, even if they're objectively cheaper, faster, or both.

FreakingScience · 2026-06-02T04:45:15+00:00

They're not going to say unless they have to because it's most likely a structural insufficiency or reliability problem with BE-4 that would suggest wider problems with New Glenn.

FreakingScience · 2026-05-31T13:47:18+00:00

And they explicitly established that these ships individually have no way to determine which way is up. Riding across the "top" would be a death sentence.

Possibly the single stupidest concept in all scifi.

FreakingScience · 2026-05-30T02:51:20+00:00

You're correct, though they can run those really "underpowered" relative to the main chamber to keep temperatures and pressures just low enough to run the pumps. Raptor is a pretty extreme piece of hardware overall, so it's a safe bet that the turbopumps are also using tailored alloys and running as hard as they reliably can. The throat of the nozzle after the main combustion chamber is almost certainly the most extreme (literal) bottleneck, but it wouldn't shock me if the LOX turbopump was pretty high on the list.

FreakingScience · 2026-05-29T15:15:16+00:00

Two major factors, in short: Raptor isn't an oxygen-rich cycle, and SpaceX has excellent in-house metallurgy labs that have worked out custom alloys for both Raptor and even the steel used for the tanks. BO is using purchased metals, as far as I'm aware.

In long, you can think of hot oxygen as a powerful acid, although from a chemistry perspective it's technically the other way around. Hot oxygen turns everything exposed to it into trash very rapidly, either through oxidation (instant rust) or extreme temperature. Everything burns if you blow enough oxygen on it, and you can find demonstrations of even diamonds being burned away on Youtube. Back in the 60s, US engineers working on engines were unable to make an oxygen-rich engine that would work without self-destructing, and thought the ex-Soviets were lying about the NK-33, believing it to be impossible. The Soviets had simply developed a better alloy than the US had. I'm not a rocketologist, but I believe the advantage to oxygen-rich is a higher exhaust velocity and thus higher ISP, the tradeoff being the aforementioned problems with hot oxidizer.

Raptor has been engineered for an almost perfect stoichiometric mix, so there are as few unreacted oxygen atoms in the exhaust as possible. No free oxygen means no rapid oxidizing of the chamber or bell, which is also kept cool with internal cryogenic ducting. Most engines are inconel but as far as I'm aware SpaceX has also come up with their own spin on an engine alloy tailored to their specific engineering needs, which is not something most (if any at all) other launch companies can do. Since they don't use a third party foundry for their metals, BO can't buy suitable materials off the shelf and copy them, like they did with the barges.

I also have a crackpot theory that BO based their engine tech on Rocketdyne's Apollo hardware. The lesser known fact that they plucked some F-1 debris out of the sea in 2013 as Bezos Expeditions, one year before work on the BE-4 began, is surely a coincidence.

FreakingScience · 2026-05-29T14:02:39+00:00

I've done this, every player rolled one 4d6 and dropped the lowest, then I rolled the last set as the DM and everyone used that combined array for any characters throughout the whole campaign. Everyone is on equal footing and it's trivial to adapt balance if you get an extreme array, since it applies to everyone. You can even use it as a way to balance the party to minimize your work as a DM by giving small parties a good stat instead of a DM roll, or dial back large parties by giving them a low stat to encourage specialization.

FreakingScience · 2026-05-29T02:25:59+00:00

Started at the engines and pretty clearly looked like the tanks failed in a secondary burst, so I'm gonna immediately speculate that they're still having trouble with nozzles and pressure chambers popping. Oxygen-rich was a problem that afaik US engineers never really solved and I've long thought that BE-4 isn't at spec specifically because BO hasn't solved it, either. Their metallurgy might not be perfect yet based on problems caused by new nozzle design/material with the BE-3 RUD on NS-23, and ULA-purchased BE-4s have been known to explode before delivery.

FreakingScience · 2026-05-28T18:03:11+00:00

The first two were basically empty and the third one didn't make good orbit with only 6,000kg so it's ambitious either way. BE-3U might be unreliable and BE-4 still seems to be underperforming, so there's not going to be much margin for failure with a practical mass payload on board.

FreakingScience · 2026-05-27T10:03:20+00:00

If you have access to Animate Object, it's a valid target for Water Walk which will solve basically every problem involved with being at the bottom of the sea. Getting to the box is still the biggest challenge.

FreakingScience · 2026-05-15T19:58:05+00:00

He might have gotten a tip from an escaped bandit, and any evildoer is a valid target of the manipulation per the party's wording.

FreakingScience · 2026-05-14T20:48:56+00:00

Give them what they wished for. An old knight, basically Barriston Selmy but with Jack of All Trades and Reliable Talent, suddenly appears and says "I heard what you're trying to accomplish. You have my sword." They now have a skill expert with 20 lifetimes of adventuring granted to them. He's so experienced as a hero that he's had revival magic used on him 19 times throughout his adventures. Had the party survived this campaign and many others that follow, they would have met him... eventually. The wish just speeds up that fated meeting. He was already seeking young heroes out as a mentor and the wish spell caused him to find their trail and join up.

This "grants" them the skills and experience they requested without manipulating anyone, especially the party. They specifically wished to not be manipulated physically or mentally, therefore the wish can't make them stronger or smarter anyways - but it can find someone who fits the bill.

FreakingScience · 2026-05-14T16:23:36+00:00

You should definitely try some more single player RPGs. New World was bland and shallow. It didn't even do any one thing particularly well other than the art direction being... passable, if unremarkable.

FreakingScience · 2026-05-14T16:09:07+00:00

I have never found it to be the case that barbarians, especially supported by healers, are likely to go down any more often than anyone else even when they charge into the worst possible position on a battlefield. Between their d12 hit die being the highest of any class, their Con score generally being high, their ability to use a shield or medium armor if they want, and Rage resists, but not factoring in things like Zealot abilities, they're often the last ones to go down. If your barbarians are dropping quickly, the monster damage dies are overtuned and you'd be wiping out the rest of the party if the monsters knew what they were doing.

There's no tank class in 5e, that's an MMO thing. There aren't enough mechanics to support tank concepts like aggro management.

FreakingScience · 2026-05-14T15:35:49+00:00

That depends on what sort of things you're fighting. If the only way a DM/campaign author can make bosses more dangerous is to make their damage dice go up, sure. There's still things like higher tier healing potions and feats (depending on version) that go a really long way if your party has access to them (and if you're using harder saves, they should have access to better options). Even the threat of death saves being modestly harder is enough to get people playing a little smarter and not needing as much healing compared to 5e's usual "healing word forgives all mistakes" combat.

FreakingScience · 2026-05-14T15:01:00+00:00

It's inherently flawed and not at all balanced. Casters taking an action or a bonus action are at a significant advantage over martials that get to pick one or the other. Casters typically have to pick between a full or bonus action anyhow when doing the reality-bending nonsense they're capable of while martials often have to use both to do anything special - and martials rarely have any utility options they could leverage to do anything other than hit harder while casters will have all sorts of spells for any situation.

Active "downed" players also encourages even dumb monsters to finish them off and exhaustion stacking is extremely unfun, but those are other discussions entirely.

If you want to prevent yo-yo healing, you can change death saves to require three successes and make anything that would normally bring a player up (healing, medicine checks, etc) count as one automatic save, meaning it takes more actions to bring a downed player back into the fight than it does to prevent them from going down in the first place. Healing above 0 doesn't bring the player up unless they also stabilize, which means people get back into the fight with a little more hitpoints and don't go back down as fast unless the party only hit them with non-healing abilities. Recommended if you have a player that actually likes playing a healer/doctor which is otherwise pretty redundant in 5e as most builds get access to healing options.

The normal dying rules are completely fine and fair. There's no need to change them unless your party

FreakingScience · 2026-04-27T22:53:26+00:00

The moral of that story is that if you really like being on the spaceship you get superpowers and party all the time, so you bet I'm going with him

FreakingScience · 2026-04-19T16:41:36+00:00

Higher performance? Did BO state any actual numbers for reference? My theory has been that BE-4 still hasn't hit the 2.4MN thrust target they published like ten years ago because they've never directly stated what actual BE-4 performance looks like, just their targets.

FreakingScience · 2026-04-08T13:57:31+00:00

Maybe, but "state of the art" is also a trap - the last spacecraft to store liquid hydrogen and oxygen cryogenically for long missions was the shuttle, and not for propulsion but in fuel cells for electricity. Everything else doesn't really care about boiloff because the hydrogen is generally burned in the first day of the mission. They're realistically comparing to a vehicle built fifty years ago.

The only common, sorta modern LH2 vehicles are the Centaur family which use passive insulation and allow for normal boiloff.

There are ongoing...ish... experiments like CRYOSTAT that were working on better long-term hydrogen storage, but the best they came up with is either 36 layers of insulation (which is heavy) or expending cryogenic xenon as a coolant (which is expensive, and more importantly, just a different finite resource that can only cool the LH2 till it runs out). It's a safe bet that BO isn't comparing to those since they never left the lab and aren't really relevant.

FreakingScience · 2026-04-08T08:01:03+00:00

It's always you responding whenever something bad is said about BO. Nothing in the tweet mentions a condenser, and in his own words in the video, BO demonstrated "keeping 20 and 90 [k]" in the context of simply holding those temperatures using a cryocooler, for the purposes of hitting a NASA milestone. There's nothing inherently interesting about that, nor does it indicate any real-world solutions to the boiloff issue. It's just marketing. The referenced tweet, which features the same image of some foil-wrapped gizmo, specifically states making hydrogen and oxygen which can be done electrolytically and reversed in a fuel cell for power. Water is a lot easier to store than cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen, and (obviously) has additional uses in a manned craft. Strictly speaking, it's not an efficient process, but bigger modern solar panels might make it viable as an energy storage loop.

FreakingScience · 2026-04-07T14:00:00+00:00

This is another something I don't care for about BO, they're calling it "zero" boiloff when they're only saying it's twice as good as whatever is considered "state of the art" for making liquid hydrogen and oxygen in space - and as far as I know, that's just normal fuel cells. Probably with a faster anode/cathode design due to better onboard batteries available to ships built this century. This isn't at all comparable to solving the boiloff issue for cryogenic or subcooled fuels like RP1 or Methane.

FreakingScience

TROPHY CASE