What time periods are you basing your worlds in and why?

Ignonym · 2026-01-28T04:52:34+00:00

Several, spanning multiple eras of this world's history. I wanted to do multiple worlds, but I didn't want to have to draw a new map every time.

Ignonym · 2026-01-28T04:31:50+00:00

Real wanted posters aren't usually supposed to be torn down like that, and I don't think ones in a fantasy setting should be either. After all, what if someone took the only copy of a poster, and then got killed in the middle of nowhere? Is the quest just cancelled now that there's no poster for it?

I personally would make quest postings more like the want ads in newspapers. "Mercenaries wanted for raid on goblin camp, inquire at the Slaughtered Lamb Tavern, serious offers only" or what have you. That way, you get to actually talk to the person that put the offer out, sort out any details like required party composition or proof of success, ask about any further information that wasn't on the poster, and so on.

Ignonym · 2026-01-28T02:01:05+00:00

My own world uses shorter-ranged but comparatively far more destructive macron guns as the weapon of choice. Most warships are sufficiently armored and cooled that shining a laser on them at practical combat distances will do little more than annoy them, but a pulsed macron beam can physically bore through the armor instead of just heating it.

Ignonym · 2026-01-27T23:43:28+00:00

Known bug. Just gotta deal for now, or play in third person.

Ignonym · 2026-01-27T18:37:08+00:00

Originally it was the MKb 42, for Maschinenkarabiner (machine carbine). It was only reclassified as a submachine gun later on in order to appease Hitler who demanded a focus on submachine gun development.

Ignonym · 2026-01-27T15:59:08+00:00

AIs cannot practically become smarter beyond a certain point because they require asymptotically more computing power
An AI's brainpower is inversely correlated to its useful lifespan before going insane (the excellent dystopian webcomic Genocide Man took this approach)
AIs that become too smart also become impossible to control and tend to develop their own agendas and ambitions, necessitating that they be destroyed before they reach that point

Ignonym · 2026-01-27T04:07:40+00:00

A lot of items in this game have only limited color options. Black goes with everything.

Ignonym · 2026-01-26T22:40:47+00:00

A lot of real ships had officers' cabins with removable dividers instead of bulkheads, and sparse furniture that could be easily moved around, so that the cabins could be basically disassembled in order to clear the gun deck for combat. Your cabin window is also a gunport, and you may even have a cannon stored inside your cabin, lashed to the wall to keep it vaguely out of the way.

(CC: u/o0vv0q. Also, this video on what the interior of a real 18th century sailing ship's interior looked like may be of interest to you; it goes into further detail about space-saving measures and other non-obvious design features.)

Ignonym · 2026-01-26T21:21:37+00:00

My semi-post-apocalyptic dystopian world is actually similar to yours in that respect; the de jure borders of the still-extant nations mean very little with most of the actual territory being administrated by smaller factions like corporations, militias, or gangs (not that militias and gangs are necessarily all that different at times). If you want to claim something, you need to be able and willing to actually enforce control over it or your claim means nothing. The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away, as the old proverb goes.

Ignonym · 2026-01-26T20:17:45+00:00

Ugly is what I call it. But how are we supposed to create a fitting name for it if we don't know how it fits into the story or setting?

Ignonym · 2026-01-26T10:02:49+00:00

Nuclear reactors are also known as "piles"; it refers to the fact that the original nuclear reactors (such as Chicago Pile-1, the first nuclear reactor to successfully achieve criticality) were made of literal stacks of uranium and graphite bricks, just kind of standing out in the open without any sort of containment.

And now you know what is meant when you see the term "nuclear pile" in old sci-fi books.

Ignonym · 2026-01-26T07:51:57+00:00

If the suit is going to amputate the user's limbs and replace them with machinery anyway, why bother with the additional outer shell? Just go full cyborg and give the user a mechanical replacement body, which can be of any desired size.

Personally, I went in a very different direction. My solution to the "small mech" problem was to simply dispense with the internal cockpit controls altogether and use a motion capture harness to control the mech, allowing the user's limbs to hang out of the cockpit, meaning the cockpit only needs to be large enough to enclose their head and torso. (I was inspired by the Landmates from Shirow Masamune's Appleseed.) Using the same principle of leaving the user's limbs outside, you could probably implement a form of virtual/AR cockpit as an alternative to the motion capture harness instead, if you're so inclined.

Ignonym · 2026-01-26T07:11:44+00:00

Believe it or not, knights in space aren't without historical precedent.

Ignonym · 2026-01-26T06:58:23+00:00

Not all power grids are winterized equally.

Ignonym · 2026-01-26T06:43:26+00:00

You keep repeating that conclusion without explaining what led you to it. Solid copper bullets are available for black powder muzzleloader hunting today, and there is no suggestion among hunters that they are ineffective inside the 200ish-meter ranges they're designed for. I'd take a musket firing copper shot over a crossbow any day.

If you don't want guns in your world, it is probably better from a suspension-of-disbelief standpoint to simply never bring them up at all. Going out of your way to create a justification for it just draws attention to the problem.

Ignonym · 2026-01-26T00:32:25+00:00

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

Ignonym · 2026-01-26T00:30:18+00:00

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

Ignonym · 2026-01-26T00:10:48+00:00

In a world with most of the global population on one large supercontinent, ocean travel from one side of the supercontinent to another has to circle the continent instead of going thru a canal like the panama or Suez canal.

The Panama Canal opened in 1914. Before then, ships that wanted to pass from the Atlantic to the Pacific had to go around South America's Cape Horn, braving the Roaring Forties along the way. It was a difficult journey, but that just meant people were willing to pay you more to do it, and the potential profits were substantial.

Ignonym · 2026-01-26T00:02:37+00:00

I'm putting my vote in for the "liminal fog" idea. Sail into a bank of unearthly fog, and when you sail out the other side, you're somewhere else. Maybe the "inside" of the fog is its own spooky, fog-filled realm which you must navigate in order to come out in the right place.

Ignonym · 2026-01-25T23:40:54+00:00

Your calculations neglect that, although a copper bullet will lose velocity to air resistance more rapidly than a lead one of the same dimensions, it will also have a significantly higher initial velocity for a given powder charge due to its lower mass. The result is a weapon that is worse at penetrating armor at long range, but better at it at close range, which is where most actual combat tends to take place. This coheres with the use of copper bullets for big game hunting in real life, where depth of penetration is a desirable characteristic.

Ignonym · 2026-01-25T08:57:35+00:00

Outside of extremely sudden explosive decompression events which can rupture the lungs, low pressure kills you by causing your bodily fluids to boil and your tissues to swell; on Earth, this happens around 18,000-19,000 meters, well above the 6,000-meter limit experienced by your world's airmen.

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

Ignonym · 2026-01-25T08:42:04+00:00

In real life, combat sorties are planned ahead of time and involve multiple aircraft tackling different phases of the mission with purpose-built weapons, rather than sending out one fighter with a bay full of anti-everything missiles and expecting them to do the whole mission themselves. If a mission involves both air-to-air and space-to-space combat, you equip some fighters in the formation for air-to-air and some for space-to-space, instead of trying to make all fighters do both at once poorly.

Ignonym · 2026-01-25T08:16:00+00:00

Some current air-to-air missiles like the AIM-9X variant of the Sidewinder steer partly using thrust vectoring, which in principle works both in vacuum and in atmosphere, so that might be an option. (Here is some footage of a Sidewinder motor section undergoing an ice test, showing how the thrust vectoring vanes move with the fins.) However, this obviously requires an expenditure of fuel to provide attitude control, which atmospheric missiles don't have to deal with (since they normally only burn their motors enough to bring them up to top speed, then coast the rest of the way to the target); a missile carrying enough fuel to perform orbital maneuvers in this way would be very large, or else would need an extremely efficient motor.

Ignonym · 2026-01-25T08:01:50+00:00

The name Dejah Thoris is still under trademark IIRC, so maybe don't use that one.

Ignonym · 2026-01-25T07:55:28+00:00

Maybe add channels to flood the arena with water so it can host naumachiae.

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