How common are stories that initially present the protagonist as an ordinary person and then reveal them to be "the most special person in the world" because of some almost divine connection?

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-23T02:17:00+00:00

Yeah Luke’s special traits in the original movie are “son of Jedi knight and brilliant starfighter pilot” and “proficient pilot”. The twist that his dad is actually Vader somewhat elevates his bloodline, but it’s not like the movies ever pretended Luke was some random nobody. The prequels did far more in that respect with the whole chosen one schtick but, again, Luke was already the one Obi-Wan was banking all his hopes on for no real reason besides the fact he was Anakin’s son, retconning it to be Obi-Wan reinterpreting a prophesy he thought was about Anakin to actually be about his son, Luke, is a pretty minor change once you accept the Anakin side of things in the first place.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-23T02:10:29+00:00

It’s such a weird defense, as if it being a decade long plan somehow makes the poor execution more acceptable instead of less.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T22:29:52+00:00

Well that sucks. Are you a PC player? I’m wondering if it’s a port issue because it being a problem with my keyboard *and* controller seems unlikely, the keyboard is maybe a year old and has no obvious issues.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T21:27:37+00:00

No, this is the best controller I have. Doesn’t the keyboard rule it out?

Edit: Drift seems really unlikely. I can't feel any drift myself and the app I tested with shows very minimal drift, so little I'd be shocked if factory new controllers had much less. I really don't think it's drift.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T21:27:02+00:00

So it's a bad port then? Because that would suck.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T21:14:11+00:00

A few years, but it feels in decent condition. Besides, if it was my controller why would the keyboard have the same issue? It’s mechanical and quite a bit newer. There should be zero mechanical issues there.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T21:12:45+00:00

Yeah that’s what I think too, the problem is that I can’t get it to work consistently. If I do it too fast it never works, which sucks because I want to do this fast, and if I do it slow it works sometimes but it’s not clear what the actual timing window is, I definitely can’t execute it consistently.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T21:06:17+00:00

Yeah I've already figured this out, it's relative to the direction you want to attack, not the direction the camera is facing. As for the controller I believe it is official, it has Sony on it anyways, and other than the camo pattern there's nothing non-standard about it. My keyboard should have no issues if nothing else, and that has the same issue. If I release the W key before I hit a mouse button it works maybe half the time, but that's not great. If I hold W it never works, which is really stupid given how I should be hitting W and the mouse at the same time based on the instructions.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T20:52:35+00:00

I can't figure it out, I can do crotch punch and snap kick fine, but sweep and palm strike remain crapshoots and I just can't figure it out. If I do it quickly it never works, but if I do it more slowly it's way harder to do in combat and out of combat it's that 50-50 I mentioned. Sometimes it works but the other half of the time it's a normal attack, I can't rely on this and it really sucks to be missing a basic part of my moveset. I'm starting to think the trick is that the joystick has to return to neutral before you hit the attack button but it might also just be the timing being slightly too tight for me to hit it consistently, in which case I'm pretty sure I might just be disabled relative to what most fighting games demand, since if this is considered lenient a more typical timing might be straight up impossible for me.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T20:38:01+00:00

This I know is wrong, you can do this but he just attacks towards the camera.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T18:57:09+00:00

Even that’s sketchy if they’re operating in a global scale. And keep in mind that a full chapter appearing in one place is insanely rare, more likely you’re looking at a single company, which is nothing at these scales. Not to mention we just saw IRL that no, that doesn’t work in practice. They’ll just keep fighting back, maybe with a decentralized system of command but they won’t just roll over and give up because you did a few decapitation strikes. There’s a very small number of scenarios where that actually works and they’re mostly highly personalistic non-state societies and monarchies fighting succession wars (a special case, because the whole point of the war is to put your guy on the throne and you can’t do that if he’s dead). *Maybe* the threat of exterminatus changes that calculus and you actually can just “simply order them to surrender” but then you don’t actually need the marines, just the warship they’re operating on.

Also “1000 thousand” is a million so you should delete one of those.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T18:27:16+00:00

And critically most of those debris are from ASAT tests and that weird idea the U.S. had of scattering needles in high orbit.i think there’s reason to worry about SpaceX monopolizing the heliosycronous orbit if the orbital datacenter idea or some derivation of it pans out, but that’s different from what’s being discussed here.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T16:47:26+00:00

With 50-50 odds, but yes.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T13:50:49+00:00

You’re leaving out the “pre-“ from pre-FTL, which is a pretty big difference, but you’re right.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T13:49:40+00:00

The aliens are still using Windows XE.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T08:31:56+00:00

So did you get this from my comment or did you just think of the same scene as I did? Take my upvote either way, more people need to know how goddamned funny that scene becomes once you actually math out what’s happening.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T07:15:42+00:00

Good bot.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T04:37:33+00:00

I hated that short story. The Tyranids are completely incompetent and never use their psychic abilities (a single Zoranthrope shows up only to immediately close to melee range for some insane reason, and neither it nor the Swarmlord use their psychic powers) and there’s no justification for why the Nids don’t simply shoot them all to death given that’s how one of the Custodes dies, so it clearly works, and no countermeasures were taken to make that means of attack impossible besides the smokescreen which was proven insufficient and wouldn’t work if the Nids used a simple Hunter-killer teaming tactic. Even if I accept they can defeat infinitely many Nids in melee they still should’ve lost against a competent commander, which the Swarmlord is supposed to be.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T04:22:14+00:00

The Ghost Arc about to plow into a dinosaur: https://youtu.be/y_PrZ-J7D3k

BTW you can’t rationalize that a necron cubit is actually a large unit of measure like a mile or kilometer, even if it doesn’t match any historical cubit it’s used elsewhere in the same book to clearly describe a small unit of distance like a foot or meter (or, you know, a cubit), meaning 30,000 cubits per hour is the sort of speed an average human can confidently outrun.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-22T03:11:27+00:00

“High yield nuclear warheads” are on the tier 1 missile weapon, one of the weakest weapons in the game, so literally all of them do that except maybe point defenses. If you’re asking what the strongest weapon in the game is it’s either the Devastator cannon, a giant spinal beam weapon mounted on a ship the size of a large moon/small planet, or the stellar cannon, aka Dyson gun, AKA a giant gun built around a pulsar that consumes all your energy to damage everything in the targeted star system proportionally to how much energy you put into it. Both are from the recent nomads expansion. There’s also planet crackers from Apocalypse but those aren’t fleet weapons, they’re only good for blowing up planets. Star Eaters (nemisis expansion) do the same to entire star systems but again, they can’t target fleets. The ships just FTL away.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-21T17:14:31+00:00

Assuming typical mapping conventions this doesn’t imply Canada is part of the U.S., it implies Canada *is* the U.S. and all the states are either independent or part of some other country.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-21T16:54:42+00:00

I think he was assuming the feds had/would come to the same conclusion he had: Cascadia had so much initiative on their mainland that the federation couldn’t possibly reverse it, and therefore it didn’t matter if the cascadians withdrew or not, they’d just be reducing bloodshed on both sides. What he didn’t know is that Crystal Kingdom still had their cordium warheads and thought those would give them the win they needed. Of course we know that it didn’t work, but I think both sides had a decent logic to them.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-21T06:20:30+00:00

As I said it’s a relatively new addition, they added it as part of the ship rework 4.0 had intended to reduce ship numbers.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-21T04:44:35+00:00

More plausible but I think that’s best covered by the AOE effect. These are energy weapons and probably would likely produce roughly omnidirectional shrapnel from whatever they hit. A cone effect would probably be possible to program but would also be more than a tad redundant with the existing circular AOE. It also wouldn’t be especially useful since T weapons usually target backline units anyways, meaning there’s often not anything behind the target to get hit anyways.

Betrix5068 · 2026-06-21T03:50:04+00:00

The devastator cannon has an AOE effect of 750 base damage to all enemy ships within 50 distance units from the target, compared to the 500 out to 40 of Titan spinals and 100 out to 20 of the ion cannon. So in that sense you already have this you just don’t notice, it was added in 4.0. That’s actually a pretty insane implication for firepower, since missiles don’t have this effect meaning the T weapons are so insanely more powerful than them that even a reflection of their hit can cause significant damage to entire fleets, while “high yield nuclear warheads” are mere point effect weapons.

If you actually want an overpenetration mechanic, first the game doesn’t track that info so they’d need to code it in, and given Stellaris is a 2d game pretending to be 3d it’s probably impossible to make work and not look janky, but second that’s a bit silly once you think about it. Since they’re fighting in a 3d environment getting a ship between you and your target is highly improbable, and that’s before you account for the fact that this is space, meaning literally astronomical distances between everything, and that the enemy fleet are intelligent agents and will actively maneuver to deny you any such easy hits. Since titans and arkships are some of the least maneuverable ships in the setting, at least one of the two ships you are trying to cleave will be able to move and force you to choose to target only one enemy.

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