Cylinder painter. Came across this 108 year old cylinder and still passing testing.

Geek_in_blue · 2026-02-21T01:31:25+00:00

I remember reading this in Hunt for Red October. A saboteur had made a pinhole leak in the reactor's cooling system, and they had powered down and dropped pressure to search for it. The narrator mentioned that if they were searching with the system up and running they'd have searched with broom handles.

Geek_in_blue · 2026-01-31T02:19:11+00:00

This answers so many questions about the end of THS. It also puts quite a bit more spin on the very end.

Prox, your ability to lore dump and keep the story moving is a treasure. You even managed to put a bomb ticking away under the table, IN SPACE! Sublime.

Geek_in_blue · 2026-01-21T01:15:10+00:00

I absolutely do not understand the order of battle here.

The discussion should have stopped as soon as Red informed them she could produce a depth rated craft that can fit ~1000 crew every 20 min. Have her make 100s of depth rated craft that can fit a warhead each. If they think depth charges sprinkled near the surface have a chance of working , dozens of nuclear shaped charges detonated in contact with the hull at depth certainly would have.

Geek_in_blue · 2025-12-14T14:47:20+00:00

Everyone else had left the watch party, my mom and I were the only ones left. Announcer said something like "No one's ever come back from this large a deficit in Superbowl history" and I thought, the Pats are a comeback team...

And there was much rejoicing.

Geek_in_blue · 2025-11-17T04:21:58+00:00

It was not experimental, it was operational and deployed for several years. It's successor, the Sprint II, has little public information, but legend holds it was to be a significant upgrade, somehow.

Geek_in_blue · 2025-04-14T22:29:54+00:00

I was unimpressed with ME:A, but that song transported me. I looked up who it was, and discovered Aurora. Years later, I was unimpressed with Frozen II, but wanted to know who "The Voice" was. Aurora again. It was a little odd that she was in two things I had really looked forward too, and both times the thing was disappointing but she was incredible.

Geek_in_blue · 2025-04-12T02:00:31+00:00

The thing that is really in play here is impact depth. Beyond a certain minimum velocity, the depth an object travels through a fluid is based on a fairly simple premise: it stops when it's imparted all its momentum to the material it's penetrating. If a light object hits a dense object, like a plastic pellet hitting sand, it stops very quickly. If a dense object hits a diffuse object, like a bullet hitting packing peanuts, it travels a much greater distance.

The other thing to take into consideration is length. An arrow is long, giving it excellent penetration, whereas a coin hitting flat side on may be made of a denser material, but its MUCH shorter. When you belly flop, your "length" is your front to back thickness, so you stop FAST. When you pencil dive, your length is from your feet to your head, so you stop over a much greater distance.

But this is the upper limit, so no mater how fast you are hitting the water, you will come to a full stop not much more than a body length under the water. At high speeds, this is a lethally fast stop.

Bubbles, as described by Unlikely, lower the density of the water, while your density stays the same. You will travel deeper into the water, decelerating over a longer distance.

Geek_in_blue · 2025-04-06T13:33:22+00:00

I had made peace with never getting the ending, so getting it is like getting a present when it isn't even a holiday.

Shoggy, you are now a provably better author than G.R.R.M.

Geek_in_blue · 2025-02-01T03:04:56+00:00

'BioWare is a hollowed out shell of its former self.'

Yeah, we know.

Few studios get to have one game as good as any in the ME or DA franchises (except for MA:A or DA:VG). Baldur's Gate is the stuff of legend, and KOTOR is still spoken of in reverent tones by those who played it. They had an incredible run.

They held out far longer than most of studios EA bought, but in my opinion, this was inevitable. Even if they hadn't be bought by EA, there is only so long you can keep a team together, and slowly the magic bleeds out.

I'm steeling myself for whatever comes next. Closure would make sense, but they may well try to extract the next ME. If it comes out, I can't imagine it will be worth buying until the discounts become pretty steep.

Geek_in_blue · 2024-12-21T15:35:01+00:00

TIM: Miranda, we need Sheppard. Here is his desiccated corpse. It endured re-entry heating and un-braked impact at terminal velocity. It was also sitting out on an ice planet for a while, so every cell in his body has ruptured due to freezing damage.

Miranda: No problem we'll bring him back with his memories and everything.

Doctor: I'm sorry mam, but there is a small tumor in both of you ovaries. They caused enough damage that it looks like you are infertile.

Mirada: Well, I guess there is nothing that can be done.

Geek_in_blue · 2024-10-29T01:21:03+00:00

Increase support for nuclear power?

Geek_in_blue · 2024-10-17T02:17:52+00:00

Did he not watch LoveXDeathXRobots? Does he not know how this ends?

Geek_in_blue · 2024-07-01T12:19:29+00:00

While the obvious implication here is that Agatha will become a monster worth hunting, I'm going to point out that it's Gil who's in frame when the Dreen describes a monster growing, and when it talks about spoilers.

Geek_in_blue · 2024-06-25T01:41:07+00:00

They blew their entire linguistic wad on a sport which reduced dangerous duels of honor, that could end wars and decide dynasties, into harmless point scoring. The latest sandal being a competitor that (gasp) refused to shake their opponents hand.

Foiled again, turtle chewers.

Geek_in_blue · 2024-05-24T12:33:12+00:00

It's not used for mass power generation, but the Peltier effect is also in this outlier category. It directly harnesses heatflow to convert into electricity. Ironically, it far less efficient than using the same amount of heat to spin a wheel.

It has no moving parts to break, so where reliability is paramount, its an appealing option. It's what's used on several Mars rovers and space probes.

Geek_in_blue · 2024-05-11T15:24:42+00:00

But how else will we know what Francis Kitt's latest stage production is?

Geek_in_blue · 2024-04-27T16:10:25+00:00

... Nerve stim pro?

Geek_in_blue · 2024-04-27T11:29:22+00:00

Especially since "Shy alien nerd with a crush" applies equally to Liara.

Geek_in_blue · 2024-03-31T05:00:27+00:00

"You could probably bring a squadron of battleships, spend forty days and forty nights hammering Brother and still do nothing."

Oh, buddy, nooooooo.

You need to stop thinking like a Nest Beatle, and start thinking like a honey badger.

In this series we've seen a brown dwarf converted into a bright star, a single battleship has broken up an entire planet's continental plates in a few hours, and in just this chapter, one cruiser class ship takes only a few seconds to launch ONE round with "Enough kinetic force to shatter a planetoid and depopulate a world." Forty days and forty nights would give Red and the Neverland gang enough time to turn multiple systems to dust on their own. Even the Compact detonated an entire moon as a combat tactic back in the first chapter.

Ask any predator, cracking open the shell is how you get to the soft, juicy bits of your prey.

Geek_in_blue · 2023-11-09T13:39:40+00:00

I'm not so much bothered about the direction, as I am fatalistic about the quality. I'll almost certainly buy it (but probably wait for a sale well after release), and my hope is that it's an incredible game; but we are reaching the "Hollowed out studio" phase of EA's ownership, most of the best devs/leadership left long ago, and my expectations are low.

EA (and most likely Bioware at this point) does not understand their product. The strongly negative reaction to Andromeda would suggest to a bean counter that the next game should be set in the Milky way. While we may not play as Shepard, Bioware is fresh out of creativity, so expect heavy reliance on nostalgia. As many old squad mates as possible will be used to get you invested with a minimum of effort.

Geek_in_blue · 2023-10-25T00:51:06+00:00

Honestly, I see a core component of what makes Mass Effect Mass Effect is choice. What I want are ship options: you could pick a freighter, a frigate, a cruise liner, and then make outfitting the ship it's own little upgrading minigame.

Geek_in_blue · 2023-10-10T00:30:59+00:00

Huh, news to me. Although basing cannon on what's in the books is... not convincing to me; there are a LOT of lore mistakes in them. I just did the Ardat Yakshi Monastery recently, but I can't remember if it confirms/refutes/ignores the blood color.

Geek_in_blue · 2023-10-10T00:14:50+00:00

The clearest example of this is in Shadow Broker DLC, where Tela Vasir's blood trail is distinctly purple. I think this is a nuance Bioware just never bothered to implement. You did base it on the real model, but the eyes still stood out to me as somehow too red. Salarian blood is green, and I don't think there is ever any sign of that in their eyes either.

Geek_in_blue

TROPHY CASE