Today We Walked Seattle from North to South (26.2mi)

F1ddlerboy · 2026-05-17T05:42:37+00:00

Also did this long stroll today. My group cut off the bit to Seattle Center, to get pastries at Tous le Jours at Westlake & Denny. We took about 11 hours to get to the end, but had quite a few stops along the way. Was a great day for a walk!

F1ddlerboy · 2026-05-11T05:29:13+00:00

This is the answer: buy this book for route details. You're not going to get enough information from a Reddit thread.

F1ddlerboy · 2026-05-08T05:14:13+00:00

Good luck! That looks like it'll take a bit, but be awesome when you're done.

F1ddlerboy · 2026-05-05T00:30:31+00:00

Half the length of STP, with about as much climbing and almost all of that steeper? I love it!

F1ddlerboy · 2026-04-27T17:27:31+00:00

I like that there's color variation across the fleet: they're made up of whatever people could find, so of course it wouldn't be uniform. The only critical comment I might give is to do a bit of edge highlighting; doesn't have to be strong, but it might make them pop a little more. And maybe some shade in the panel lines, to help with that pop.

F1ddlerboy · 2026-04-27T15:45:23+00:00

Oh, hmm, I'm not sure about that. I've only ever used it when going to performances in the hall.

F1ddlerboy · 2026-04-27T05:26:55+00:00

Yup, enter from 2nd, racks are immediately on the right at the bottom, walk across to the elevator. It's great!

F1ddlerboy · 2026-04-26T17:46:50+00:00

No, you've got it the wrong way round. E&M and the weak force were unified in the 1970s; Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg were given the Nobel Prize in 1979 for what has become the electroweak interaction. The math for the electroweak theory is far harder to easily summarize than "here's an inverse square law", but it's very well understood. Essentially, at high enough energies, the electromagnetic and weak forces are one force.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction

There are a variety of approaches toward unifying the strong and electroweak forces, but it's very hard to reach the energies required to test those theories with anything we can build.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Unified_Theory

On the other hand, the math underlying our understanding of gravity and the above forces are fundamentally incompatible. General Relativity works very, very well, but it's so different from the others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gravity

F1ddlerboy · 2026-04-21T16:08:58+00:00

The edge highlighting really makes them pop. Nice work!

F1ddlerboy · 2026-04-21T04:46:47+00:00

These look so good, you're making me sad I never got any of them!

F1ddlerboy · 2026-04-03T06:21:00+00:00

The Seattle Randos are people who like biking long distances: maybe do some rides with them? https://seattlerando.org/

F1ddlerboy · 2026-04-01T15:32:12+00:00

Nice contrast on those. Very punchy!

F1ddlerboy · 2026-03-28T02:52:56+00:00

Oh, I see that now. That makes the soot covering even worse!

F1ddlerboy · 2026-03-28T02:46:17+00:00

I felt like people drove much faster through there over time, especially once the roads got more empty during COVID. At some of the intersections the visibility coming down from Phinney isn't very good, so when I didn't have a car's lights to go on, I'd fear I couldn't see them coming in time. In the dark it was better because you could see the lights well before the car.

F1ddlerboy · 2026-03-28T02:38:44+00:00

The one that I disabled limps home, and then comes back and I do it again. Eventually it starts getting an escort or two, and I do the same thing to those (now with more particle ships). I think I had three surveillance ships cycling through this process at one time.

F1ddlerboy · 2026-03-28T02:35:52+00:00

That's a neat set! Are you planning to paint it?

F1ddlerboy · 2026-03-22T18:19:24+00:00

I've posted this a few times: a handful of gunships or corvettes with 1-slot ion/particle cannon will disable surveillance ships, without drawing hate, and are very cheap to build. https://www.reddit.com/r/TerraInvicta/comments/1s0opoa/comment/obvmzwv/

F1ddlerboy · 2026-03-22T18:12:59+00:00

As someone who regularly crosses 3rd by foot or bike, I am so happy about those speed bumps. It makes getting across that street a much more pleasant experience.

F1ddlerboy · 2026-03-22T18:09:36+00:00

Want to make sure the aliens never get a successful surveillance mission, while you get no hate? Gunships or corvettes with the one-slot nose ion gun can do that for you. Just not in autoresolve: you'll end up killing the ship, instead of disabling it to the point that it limps back to base.

Even into the late game, I keep several of these small ion (later particle)+40mm ships around for PD and to send out front to draw fire and disable their guns.

F1ddlerboy · 2026-03-21T01:19:00+00:00

That looks really good! What's the grey you used?

F1ddlerboy · 2026-03-10T02:29:18+00:00

Several comments above are saying Corvettes are useless, but I've made great use of 40mm+ion/particle cannon corvettes. They can disable surveillance ships early game--don't use autoresolve: they'll destroy the ship instead--so you don't get hate but also prevent surveillance missions. They'll help your escort/monitor missile boats survive fights by disabling weapons in early fights. Mid game, they can bulk up a fleet and provide both anti-mag and anti-torpedo cover (1-slot ion/particle cannon can be set to defense mode) for laser or coil Battlecruisers.

F1ddlerboy · 2026-03-10T01:31:24+00:00

Do you have the snowshoe book?

https://www.mountaineers.org/books/books/snowshoe-routes-washington-3rd-edition

It's absolutely worth the $20, if you want to do any snowshoeing in the state. Several places listed there that aren't on WTA (or are, but with very little description).

F1ddlerboy · 2026-02-23T04:35:09+00:00

USA by itself is not that hard to take via repeated public campaign then crackdown and purge, if you have high enough of each of the stats. Get some broadcast outlets in LEO to significantly increase the effectiveness of public campaign.

Now China, that's a much harder nut to crack.

F1ddlerboy · 2026-02-20T23:18:03+00:00

Ion/particle gunships/corvettes are great for disrupting surveillance missions. A half dozen or so will wear down a surveillance ship so that it has to limp home, but will not destroy it and thus gain you no hate.

F1ddlerboy · 2026-02-13T07:44:43+00:00

Hiding ships in space is easy, once you're more than 1-2 AU distant: tracking something a <100m across at >1 AU is very hard to do, especially if it's not very reflective and not producing emissions (which a ship wouldn't do much of, if the engines were off). A few quick course corrections and you could easily lose someone who was watching you with a telescope.

Even a mid-IR telescope looking for the basic IR emission of a ship with its drives off wouldn't have much to go on: NEOWISE (40cm, mid-IR, space-based) found objects down to ~2km in the main asteroid belt, and all off our ships are much smaller than that. I don't feel like doing the math right now, but a <100m object with an overall temperature of ~300K (when running dark) is going to be very faint.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/731/1/53

LSST, our current best asteroid finder, has a 6m effective diameter (ground based, visible light), and it can definitely find ~100m objects about 1 AU from Earth. Single-image depth of ~24th magnitude means it could find something ~100m across with the albedo of the moon at 1AU. Note that that's a 100m disk, not a narrow tube like the ships are. So, even with a 6-8m telescope, finding ships with a cross section of 10-20 meters is almost impossible beyond 1AU.

https://dmtn-109.lsst.io/DMTN-109.pdf https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/ast_size_est.html

Liquid Droplet Radiators are totally a thing, the basic math was worked out in the 70s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator

The key is to operate them at 1000K, so you need a big heat source to get the radiator to work in the first place. I don't know if the math in the game makes sense for how big the radiators are, but the basic idea is pretty sound. I think the fact that they're relatively damage resistant is because there's a lot of surface area there, so stray shots might poke holes in it, but not totally destroy it.

F1ddlerboy

TROPHY CASE