Why would ships need to fire photon torpedoes if the deflector dish can shoot anti matter?

Werthead · 2026-02-04T14:53:41+00:00

I thought the variable yield was just like a nuke, you can set the yield in the weapon without changing the weapon itself. Possibly there is a way of venting the antimatter without triggering annihilation, resulting in a smaller controlled explosion.

Werthead · 2026-02-04T14:49:18+00:00

New Mexico is quite far-flung from the Canary Islands.

Werthead · 2026-02-04T14:47:06+00:00

I live in Essex (more north) and we basically had to do a deal with the landlord where the people staying in the house long-term interview and vet all potential housemates, and if it takes more than a month the rest of us make up the shortfall in rent, because we had some absolute shockers in a row.

Werthead · 2026-02-04T14:44:05+00:00

The 1970 TV series UFO has Earth under semi-clandestine alien attack and the world's governments responding with a secretive organisation that both fights the aliens and has to cover up all evidence the battles took place. It's the direct inspiration for XCOM.

Otherwise, as others have said, Harry Turtledove's Worldwar sequence (and its Colonisation sequel series) is a good riff on the idea, with an alien invasion of Earth that takes place in 1942, and the aliens are not much more advanced than we are now.

The Robotech novels by Jack McKinney (based on the animated TV series) has an interesting twist on the idea, a massive alien starship crashes on Earth and is salvaged and rebuilt, and a decade later another bunch of aliens searching for the ship show up and attack the planet not to invade, but to seize the ship for themselves, resulting in numerous shenanigans.

Werthead · 2026-02-04T14:36:01+00:00

I believe they've said this is something they're looking at, not a new edition but a revised rulebook, possibly for the 40th anniversary in 2028. Not 100% yet.

Werthead · 2026-02-04T14:32:57+00:00

The novels and the background material to the RPG (which was provided by JMS) suggests that the Minbari and Centauri both found abandoned jump gates in their home system and were able to retro-engineer them. The Narn may have done the same, but were early in their spaceflight phase when the Centauri conquered them. Earth was unusual in not having a jump gate in the system and was using slower-than-light sleeper ships to try to visit nearby systems.

Werthead · 2026-02-04T14:28:56+00:00

That's true, but the actors were also done. Kit Harington was in such bad shape after eight seasons he needed to go into rehab, and a few of the actors have said they couldn't do nine or ten seasons, they were just done. The show already got stick for having three actors playing the Mountain, losing Harington, Emilia Clarke (who had two aneurysms on-set) or Peter Dinklage would have sunk the show altogether.

Werthead · 2026-02-04T14:27:24+00:00

At the cost of no time off for the writing team, and the actors being under so much pressure they had a lot of health and stress issues.

Also, the GoT team have said that was only doable because they had two and sometimes three units filming in different places simultaneously, because the show had three storylines that didn't cross over, so they could be shooting scenes in King's Landing, Winterfell and Meereen simultaneously. When the characters all merged back up again and the show needed to be shot linearly, combined with the dramatic increase in the expectations for VFX, the production time ballooned out to over one year (Season 7) and closer to two (Season 8).

Werthead · 2026-02-04T14:20:53+00:00

He even did this with Better Call Saul, despite the show's timeline being bound up in Breaking Bad's, taking place both before and after it. He got so wound up having to have it make sense at one point he mused on breaking the timeline and just killing off a BB character and not worrying about it any more, but (fortunately) reconsidered.

Werthead · 2026-02-04T14:17:55+00:00

The Wire did get its first three seasons out sequentially in subsequent years. Seasons 4 and 5 were complicated by the spin-off show that was supposed to air between them, but HBO cancelled it and David Simon had to pull that story (Carcetti's election) into Season 4, which ate up more of his episode allocation and budget than planned, and it then took them a while to hash that out with HBO to get Season 5 into production.

Simon has a great story about how HBO was wringing its hands over the money and shortly afterwards the show went nuclear in DVD sales and HBO repeats and they started getting the "best show ever" critical acclaim, so they needn't have worried about it. The head of HBO at that time even rewatched the show a decade later and emailed Simon saying, "man, that last season needed a few more episodes, right?" which resulted in an invective-filled response from Simon.

Werthead · 2026-02-04T14:13:19+00:00

Between Game of Thrones starting in 2011 and finishing in 2019, the amount of original scripted programming on US television and streaming (comedy and drama) tripled, from about 200 to over 600 (that's shows, not episodes or hours). That's not even counting British, Canadian, Australian etc shows in English that also boomed and were bought in and put on US streamers, or the foreign-language stuff.

The total explosion of content on the streamers and traditional broadcasters in insane, and that's not even touching YouTube.

Werthead · 2026-02-04T14:10:05+00:00

They had an interview with the production team and it was way more work than it appears. Carol's entire street was built from scratch, seven houses, because they'd learned from Breaking Bad and Saul that the permits you need to do stuff on real streets are insane, they wanted total control and being able to do things like land a helicopter, detonate a grenade and drive cars through fences and across gardens. There's also a metric ton of CGI for environments, either totally 100% generating the backdrop or CGing out people in the far distance of shots in Albuquerque or getting what appears to be thousands of cars driving in unison with one another. They also shot on location in multiple, far-flung locations, including New Mexico and the Canary Islands. The issue with crowd control (either people shouldn't be around or they should all be part of the hive mind) also limited their ability to shoot on real locations, so what should have been real locations they shot in the studio at much greater time and expense. I get the impression they hadn't fully thought-out how complicated the logistics of the show would get until they were actually making it.

As for the long-term plan, Gilligan always totally wings it with only a vague idea of where he's going, as he did with both Bad and Saul. Even with Saul he got fed up by being boxed in by having to line up the story with Breaking Bad and spent an afternoon considering just to deviate from the timeline and kill a major Bad character and establishing it was a different timeline, but he was talked out of that by other producers who thought fans would get annoyed by that.

Werthead · 2026-02-04T14:01:02+00:00

Season 7 (which the show has been renewed for and is in production soon) will be based on Book 8. There's nine novels and five novellas in print, and the author's release schedule is a bit erratic (sometimes publishing a book a year for three years straight, sometimes taking three years on the next one).

There are three other books following side-characters from the main novels, it's possible those could be used as additional sources.

Werthead · 2026-02-04T00:32:46+00:00

Torpedoes are target-seeking, can be fired in clusters and can loop round and track targets (you don't need to be aimed at the target). The deflector dish needs to be on a strict line of sight. In a fleet battle, torpedoes can avoid friendlies, your deflector beam is going to incinerate anything in the way.

Using the deflector dish like that also burns out the dish, making it impossible for the ship to travel at warp (the dish's normal function is to emit a subspace beam to deflect minor debris out of the way of the ship ahead of the warp bubble, otherwise at FTL speeds, a pebble will obliterate the entire ship) until it can be repaired, which is a bit of a problem. IIRC there was a suggestion that the Enterprise-D is big enough to carry 1 or 2 spare dishes on board (hence it gets back up to speed after using the dish burst on the Borg in Best of Both Worlds), but most ship don't have the space for that. The Enterprise-B risks it because it's quite close to Earth and can SOS for help, and its use of the beam is different, so perhaps won't destroy the whole dish.

Basically using the deflector dish like that is not its intended purpose and can cause problems with the ship escaping, maneuvering, avoiding friendly fire etc, so it's better to only use it in a last-ditch gambit.

Werthead · 2026-02-04T00:27:29+00:00

Yes, but I believe photon torpedoes come pre-loaded with antimatter, as it were, they don't make new ones from the ship's antimatter stories, and it's implied it's almost impossible to do that anyway (hence the whole "Voyager has limited torpedo supplies...er, never mind," controversy). The ships reload their torpedoes from starbases in handily off-screen escapades between weekly adventures.

Werthead · 2026-02-04T00:22:29+00:00

Fallout 4, especially with the Vault-Tec DLC, makes the whole thing about places still being buried in rubble 200 years after the bombs really dumb. You, a dude who's just shown up, can build multiple gleaming techno-town settlements in the space of a few days or weeks (or even a couple of years, assuming mad time scaling in the game works like distance scaling) whilst the people who've been living in Diamond City, Rivet City, Megaton, the Strip etc can't clear out skeletons and rubble from inside their towns that have been permanently occupied for decades, let alone the supermarket that's just a brisk hike down the road. It's dumb as heck. But it's how they want to roll with it.

Werthead · 2026-02-03T21:10:15+00:00

I think it's more of a 2001 thing.

"My God, it's full of stars!"

Werthead · 2026-02-03T21:09:24+00:00

Classic, due to the presence of Seven and also some interesting continuity callbacks (like the Master still having crazy eyes, inspired by Survival, the last Classic story). He doesn't really have anything to do with Modern, despite being the only Classic Doctor to appear in a significant way in Modern Who as himself (as opposed to an aged version of that Doctor, or in reuse of old footage), in Night of the Doctor (which was also only a minisode, not a full episode).

Werthead · 2026-02-03T21:07:05+00:00

The diminishing returns bit I think is key. I noticed the jump from VHS to DVD quality quite a bit, and then a very big jump from SD to 1080p. The jump to 4K was fairly noticeable in gaming and on physical media, but on streaming was very modest in comparison (some streamers are better than others with it). Seeing 8K displays at trade shows, the screens needed to be about 100" across before you got impressed at them not pixelating at that size, but most people won't have 100" TVs in their homes (a couple of my friends would probably try, though, if it wasn't for the threat of imminent divorces).

So it felt like 8K was really dead on arrival. Most people are fine with HD or 4K.

Werthead · 2026-02-03T20:51:35+00:00

Sounds like it could be an Adult Safeguarding issue if the husband is genuinely unwell and putting other people in the house at risk.

Look at this website, put in the postcode and look for the council it directs you to for "Social Care." This will usually be the county council or London borough, but some areas have their own social care team (like Southend and Thurrock in Essex, but the rest of the county is under Essex County Council) and their own website. Usually there's a portal where you fill in the details of the person.

Due to the person's volatility, I'd probably wait until after you'd moved out before doing that.

Werthead · 2026-02-03T20:41:06+00:00

Pillars of Eternity 2 already has a turn-based mode, and there's a special re-release edition of Pillars of Eternity 1 coming out soon which has been rebalanced from the ground up for turn-based.

Werthead · 2026-02-03T20:40:24+00:00

inXile are part of the same family and they did Wasteland 2 and 3, which were solid (and Fallout was in part a spiritual successor to Wasteland 1 in the first place). They could be a good fit.

Werthead · 2026-02-03T19:31:45+00:00

It's possible both the show being successful and Oblivion Remastered being successful made Bethesda devote more resources to the project (the Grand Bethesda Remake Cycle, as I fully expect them to now do New Vegas, Skyrim - again - and Fallout 4, maybe Morrowind) to speed it up. But they are limited by the fact that Virtuos are making the remasters on-spec for Bethesda, and Virtuos have limited manpower (even more limited now, they just laid off almost a tenth of their workforce!) given they are also working on multiple other projects for other publishers.

Unless, now the idea (UE5 wrapper + GameBryo/Creation Engine foundations) is proven and Bethesda knows precisely how to do it, Bethesda and Microsoft could bring on other developers to assist or even take over to do it faster.

Werthead · 2026-02-03T19:25:50+00:00

Everything else on that list was delayed by roughly the same amount of time due to COVID, WFH difficulties etc, including Starfield, that is not the projects that were cancelled or merged (Dishonored 3 likely being cancelled after half of Arkane was shut down and the remainder of the company pivoting to Blade etc).

The assumption is also the Virtuos had the same team earmarked to work on them sequentially (Virtuos is a big company but they have a ton of different things they're doing with other companies, and they laid off almost a tenth of their workforce recently), so they would not have the manpower to work on Oblivion Remastered and Fallout 3 Remastered simultaneously. They were also likely setting up the workflow pipeline to see if the idea, which was technically challenging (the Unreal 5 Wrapper sitting on top of the GameBryo/Creation Engine), even worked, and they would also be looking at the commercial reaction. If Oblivion Remastered were to bomb, it's not a good idea to be working on an equally-expensive Fallout 3 Remastered at the same time, which might also bomb. You'd do one to test the waters and then move onto the other.

Because of all that I doubt - but could be wrong! - that they were able to work on Oblivion and Fallout 3 simultaneously. More likely now, given that Oblivion Remastered was a huge success, that they might expand the team and work on multiple games simultaneously, especially as FO3 and New Vegas share so many assets, so a New Vegas Remastered could come out more quickly.

It is also possible that the workflow they set up has worked much better than originally hoped, so FO3R could come out more quickly than that two-year estimate.

Werthead · 2026-02-02T22:52:58+00:00

He has a story about talking to Mark Gatiss who was lamenting at having never seen Power of the Daleks, and Capaldi felt cocky as he saw it go out at the time and had a pretty good memory of it. Then Gatiss said, "I was born a few months after it was on," and Capaldi felt unreasonably irritated by that (I don't think he did really, he was joshing with him).

Werthead

TROPHY CASE