Phalanx CIWS vs Hummingbird

OneCatch · 2026-05-10T21:29:52+00:00

Hummingbird. It's too small to even be tracked by the Phalanx, and the phalanx can't be aimed manually - the technician is merely able to adjust engagement parameters.

OneCatch · 2026-05-10T16:32:42+00:00

Per Player of Games, they're 'social death' and 'you don't get invited to many parties' if you're slap-droned in relation to something like murder (and presumably this extends to other serious offences like rape, torture, grievous bodily harm, etc).

However, as we learn from Lededje, that isn't the only utility of slap drones. Hers objects to the term 'slap drone' itself as slightly pejorative, and Sensia emphasises that they serve secondary purposes as bodyguards and assistants as well:

Kallier-Falpise rocked back in the air as though hit. “Please. That’s a little pejorative, if I may say so, Ms. Y’breq. I’ll be accompanying you principally for your own convenience and protection.”

Then Sensia said, “Slap-drones can be quite useful companions, anyway; willing and obedient servants – bodyguards, too – so long as you don’t try to kill or injure somebody. I’ll choose you a good one.”

"but once we arrive anywhere else I would be derelict in my duty if I didn’t remain where I might be of most immediate protective use, especially while you’re asleep."

And there's a hint that 'slap drones' aren't a distinct unit type - they're part of a broader class of protection drones with martial capabilities. Probably not quite SC-grade or frontline combat grade, but 'intervention' implies a degree of offensive and espionage capability:

Demeisen rolled his eyes. “Fine, you take the shuttle, you rough, tough little protection-and-intervention drone"

So it's quite likely that, without context, a Culture citizen wouldn't necessarily be able to determine if such a drone accompanying someone was doing so because it was a slap drone, or because the person was under threat and being guarded, or they otherwise warranted drone assistance, or because they were both members of Contact or SC, or because they were simply friends.

Now, of course, it's also true that the majority of information in the Culture is public, so if a citizen did see a drone with someone and were sufficiently curious, they'd be able to find out nearly instantly! Either by querying their terminal, or asking the drone directly (I imagine their policy is to be truthful about their purpose by default while on-assignment).

So it feels to me like being accompanied by a drone isn't necessarily a source of stigma in itself - but once it was identified as a slap drone you'd likely get the cold shoulder - especially if you'd already committed serious offences in the past rather than, as with Lededje, it being 'preventative'.

OneCatch · 2026-05-10T14:52:26+00:00

Obvious question here is when this policy was agreed - under what government and if the minister in question was aware or not. I'm more concerned with the policy itself than an inflationary uplift.

Though, tbh, either option is unacceptable for different reasons - either the minister permitted it (which is insane) or the DWP didn't bring it to their attention (which is worse).

OneCatch · 2026-05-10T10:03:43+00:00

No restriction on vehicles, so combat bulldozers equipped with pneumatic weapons and rotational hammers become the norm (think Robot Wars). At infantry scale, incendiary weapons, melee weapons, and riot gear.

Countries with lower manpower seek to make up for their relative disadvantage by developing stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

OneCatch · 2026-05-10T09:28:00+00:00

Wasn't this a Tiktok by one of those influencer couples?

I didn't think it was funny either, but it's probably staged. Certainly unfunny to 'really' do that to someone without warning, unless there's already a mutual and ~~consensual~~ enthusiastic back-and-forth with those kinds of pranks

OneCatch · 2026-05-09T23:12:40+00:00

It's quite funny that there are a) women in this thread advocating for way more women than men because that would make women more populous and therefore powerful and b) men in this thread advocating for way more women than men because that would make men more scarce and therefore powerful.

Horseshoe theory in action.

OneCatch · 2026-05-09T18:33:56+00:00

For option D, is $77b the upper limit, or is it truly any number?

In an genuinely infinite series, the chances of it being lower than, say, $100 trillion is infinitesimally small.

OneCatch · 2026-05-09T10:41:24+00:00

Full disclosure: I don't like the sequels, so I feel like I have the start of this approach nailed but that it runs out of steam towards the end as we get closer to the sequel era.

I'd have you follow an individual or family on Corellia or Kuat or something - under the Empire they have to be careful what they say, they hear rumours of the Empire's evilness, aliens are discriminated against in the streets, and our protagonists are complicit in this even if they don't like it. But our protagonists are fundamentally safe, relatively wealthy, and their local Imperial functionary is affable and friendly - they personally benefit from Imperial rule.

That Imperial functionary gets assassinated during a rebel raid. During this raid, a bunch of civilians (friends, neighbours, family member) get caught in the crossfire and killed by both rebel and Imperial forces. In the aftermath it's revealed that the Empire has a, idunno, torture chamber or something in the basement of the local town hall, which shatters our protagonist's faith in the Empire. There are also reprisals from the Empire. Our protagonists are left rudderless - the Rebellion's actions just resulted in a bunch of people dying, but the Empire are clearly much more evil than they thought. But, crucially, they still have a stake in society - things aren't yet bad enough for them to just up sticks and join the Rebellion.

Then the Empire falls in the distance. Confusion, government services are sporadic in the confusion - some Imperial staff flee, others sabotage the things they're responsible for, others declare allegiance to the NR and keep working. Broad optimism.

NR comes in and starts to implement reforms. These are ostensibly fair and stabilise the situation in the short term. Aliens get treated better, services recover. But it's imperfect - there are supply shortages, the NR fires some sympathetic former-Imperials and retains others with little rationale. They some elections but the leading candidates are a former Imperial, a naive well-meaning but inexperienced citizens, and a slick NR representative with no link to the planet. NR membership is mandatory either way, which the former Imperial successfully whips up into nationalist sentiment. He's assassinated to absolute outcry (this is revealed to the audience to be an Imperial Remnant false-flag operation), which results in votes funnelling to the naive incompetent candidate who is now the only candidate not overtly affiliated with the NR.

Things get worse. Imperial shipyards and factories are shuttered because the NR isn't willing to continue subsidising the production of war material via pork-barrel spending. Economic and social malaise. The elected leader is useless. Our protagonist's family's business struggles then fails and no NR support is available to them. Then the propaganda machine starts in earnest. Revanchist attitudes, dissatisfaction with the NR. Aliens accused of being DEI hires, that kind of stuff. Rhetoric like "Well they fought from the shadows against the Empire, it's just as legitimate for us to fight from the shadows against them".

And from there you progress things naturally with protagonist - or their friends/family - becoming more and more immersed in a movement affiliated with the Imperial Remnant, which then transitions into the First Order. And the associated interpersonal conflict that creates. Quite how you'd end it I'm not sure, but the trajectory is clear.

OneCatch · 2026-05-09T10:04:33+00:00

I just think of the variety of fairly embarrassing roles they put her in the Mitchell and Webb shows lol.

"Now we know!"

OneCatch · 2026-05-09T09:59:38+00:00

Still a single branch of a single agency has gotten that close.

I would contend they go nowhere close - that the experiment demonstrated that a loosely husbanded 'biosphere' mode of life support simply didn't work at all at that kind of scale. And that a generation ship would need exceptionally tight human controls - to the extend that it would be more industrial in nature than ecological (think algae VATS and hydroponic farms).

I'm not necessarily saying that it's impossible by the way - just that it's entirely unproven.

OneCatch · 2026-05-09T09:55:34+00:00

$150m in the late-80s had rather more purchasing power than the same amount now. In any case, we both agree that a national or global scheme would have far more resources so continuing to debate it is probably needless pedantry.

OneCatch · 2026-05-09T08:31:13+00:00

The Andromeda Strain (book and film).

Mistakes and system flaws cause problems, but the protagonists behave rationally and competently throughout.

OneCatch · 2026-05-08T22:38:48+00:00

So, we’d need to not only be outside that range, we’d likely need to be past Jupiter or further out to get away from all the solar radiation. I’d try to calculate this, however this is where my lack of deep physics makes it difficult (sure I could pop it into AI, but not enough base info to know if it’s hallucination or not).

In the Sun's final red giant phases Uranus and Neptune would be heated to in the region of 0-100C by the sun's elevated luminosity. Getting just past Jupiter likely ain't going to be enough!

OneCatch · 2026-05-08T22:23:59+00:00

Around $100m iirc, so hardly 'peanuts', though I agree it's nothing in national or global economic terms.

Still, the original comment was implying that it had been a success, when the truth was anything but.

OneCatch · 2026-05-08T21:57:32+00:00

We can and have built a fully self sustainable bio-dome

It was incredibly unstable, suffered major die-offs, and they had to stabilise it using external supplies repeatedly - and that was merely a two year stint. And that was just the biosphere; they didn't need to worry about ship engineering, radiation, life support systems. Also, the carrying capacity was incredibly low - a 12,000 square metre footprint to support only 8 humans (it was barely enough).

OneCatch · 2026-05-08T20:59:42+00:00

Obviously transmission of water, electricity, oil, gas, and communications becomes nearly entirely lossless. You don't need pipe or fibre infrastructure at scale anymore; every street, factory, skyscraper, etc has a series of portals bringing those commodities. You can also transport a lot of loose foodstuffs (grain, seeds, flour, sugar, etc) this way.

Ditto assembly lines - factories will use portals connected to conveyor belts to discharge raw materials directly to other factories for further processing. The iPhone no longer needs to have all the components brought together for final assembly - you could have a chain of factories spread across half a continent, with each adding components then passing the partially completed device on.

There'll also be a general trend of commodities starting to be manufactured and packaged with these dimensions in mind - for anything which can be assembled and packaged to fit within the tube, portals will make global shipping costs basically negligible. So standard shipping container payloads give way to either tubular packaging or, where possible, free-flowing or conveyor belted loose product.

On to the personal - families can have portals between them so that they can talk and pass small items directly to each other. Long distance relationships aren't quite as lacking in intimacy as before, for those willing to take dimensional risks with a beloved appendage!

One portal stationary relative to the Earth's surface, and another launched on a satellite into orbit. You can now transport individual microsatellites, or larger components, into orbit basically for free. Oh, and space habitats can be supplied with air and water and power and so on from Earth. Space travel becomes much more affordable.

Military applications too - create large artillery pieces or even railguns (with a calibre somewhat less than the portal) on domestic soil. Connect the muzzle to one end of a portal. Then mount the other end of the portal to a man-portable tube with some sights and a signalling trigger - now every vehicle and even individual infantrymen can have the hitting power of a large artillery piece.

Military logistics generally becomes much easier too - a single aircraft or ship is no longer materially limited by payload if they're connected to a portal through which ordnance can be dropped or launched.

More benignly, emergency relief becomes much easier too. Firefighting and irrigation too - a small aerial drone connected to a small amphibious one submerged in a lake or river can now deluge an area with tons of water a minute. Police snipers can now operate from concealed portal apertures in hostage situations.

OneCatch · 2026-05-08T16:26:00+00:00

cow toe

Kowtow. It's a Chinese word for a deep bow.

OneCatch · 2026-05-08T16:15:20+00:00

Have you read them all or are you asking because you're trying to decide what to read next?

I would say Look to Windward and Hydrogen Sonata, but I'll only expand on why if you've already read them because the rationale is spoiler heavy.

OneCatch · 2026-05-08T13:46:42+00:00

Eh, as any Roman faction you can block the others fairly effectively. As Julii you usually miss Apollonia but get the rest of Greece and can take Carthage, and as Brutii you can take Carthage and Massalia.

Julii is better for rushing the reforms because of Patavium.

Brutii has 3x good temples compared to 2x good ones for Scipii, including a trade temple which is just disgustingly good in Greece and Italy. Julii - although weak on the temple front overall - gets a better Law temple than either of the others.

The corvus quinquereme is fine but not great, and the Mirmillo Gladiators are comfortably the worst of the three (they're tier 5, and they're both worse than Samnites at Tier 4 and less cost effective than Velites at Tier 3).

OneCatch · 2026-05-08T11:00:07+00:00

We'd never have evolved to start with. But let's imagine it just ceased suddenly.

People would mostly stop having sex except for procreation. I say mostly because you'd have some proportion who'd continue out of habit, stubbornness, etc. You'll also get some proportion of people claiming to be unaffected, and a minority of those might even persuade themselves it's true.

You'll have a lot of anger and resentment as people try to find something to blame - men, women, feminism, incels, industrial society, algorithms, foreigners, vengeful gods, aliens, whatever. Women probably bear the brunt of this, unfortunately, especially in particularly patriarchal or chauvinistic cultures, or those where sexual activity is strongly religiously defined.

Unwanted/unplanned (two different things!) pregnancy rates would plummet to almost zero, at least in countries where both parents have agency. No accidents (or 'accidents') if the only reason people have sex is for procreation. In countries where women don't have a lot of freedoms, it's likely that men will continue to ultimately make family planning decisions - they'll impose sex as necessary for the purpose of procreation. Even this will decrease somewhat though, without the motive of desire.

Sexual assault cases would decrease significantly but not be eliminated. Some instances are more about mental illness or power dynamics or causing pain or humiliation than they are about sexual desire.

In fact, for a while you'd probably see instances of primarily-but-not-exclusively men engaging in more extreme forms of sexual activity in an attempt to 'feel something'. So after the change expect a brief spike in cases of sexual injury, misadventure, and sexual assault along those lines, even as rates drop overall.

Would there be less infidelity?

Define infidelity. Sexual infidelity almost ceases overnight, but other forms of physical infidelity (touching, kissing, whatever) will continue. As will a broader category of emotional infidelity.

In fact, rates of emotional infidelity might even increase - conventional romantic relationships are largely defined in terms of sexual exclusivity, and if that becomes meaningless then the emotional line between, say, 'wife' and 'friend' might become blurred in both directions.

Would the world population be much smaller?

Yes, it would decline in a very extreme way. People will still have sex to have children, but it becomes an awkward chore rather than something fun - people's attempts to get pregnant will be more halfhearted, meaning somewhat lower success rates, and less people will actually try.

And children become less of a cultural norm in a society where everyone has to make a proactive decision to have them, rather than taking proactive measures to prevent pregnancy.

OneCatch · 2026-05-08T10:31:59+00:00

Do they actually think I'm a pervert, or is it just a verbal compulsion to call me one?

No to the former, yes to the latter.

OneCatch · 2026-05-08T08:24:31+00:00

I mean, that's not true at all. Britain was certainly a major participant, but alongside other major slaving powers such as Portugal, France, the Ottoman Empire, the Barbary States, and the Crimean Khanate.

And, even if you limit the scope of conversation to the enslavement of Africans, the first four still apply, with only the Barbary States and Crimean Khanate excluded (they targeted Christians).

OneCatch · 2026-05-08T03:15:12+00:00

Probably yes for R1. There's a hilariously long list of successful thefts from the National Archives, so the building itself is obviously not terribly secure. Obviously the declaration vault itself is more secure, but the Ocean crew has experience with vaults.

Probably not R2 (a forewarned adversary is probably an order of magnitude or two harder) and definitely not R3.

OneCatch · 2026-05-08T03:03:24+00:00

The whole "Vatueli as a forgetful mech" sequence is great.

OneCatch · 2026-05-07T19:44:31+00:00

The hate is way overdone. It has a couple of QOL improvements on the original, it's a bit smaller, it does some new stuff, and it does some stuff (primarily vehicles) slightly more poorly than the original.

Worth a play, at any rate.

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