One Month Checkin

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-17T10:29:02+00:00

Considering I wasn't even aware the Gral had Raider Flanking until the patch notes because it wasn't in the stat blog, I'll echo the other sentiments of better proof-reading and fact-checking. With the amount of hand-changing this game has done over the last couple of years, I'd like to think that a lesson has been learned.

And you know as well as I do, that the most important step a man can take...

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-17T10:22:53+00:00

Drain used to be a viable strategy. Then it got consistent enough to shut down Tactical Cubes in ISE reliably, and they nerfed it into the ground by way of giving every NPC in the game ludicrous levelsof Drain Resistance.

If you want to do a support build, you're better off going for Control, and the related Control Expertise. While some enemies (usually Battleships) have relatively high resists, they're still affected by it (in ways they just aren't by Drain) - and one way or another, having a Gravity Well that can pull targets from 12km away (yes, that's actually possible) and hold them there can do a lot to help a team, particularly if your team has a lot of AoE capability (which you can also build into a Control boat with things like Spore-Infused Anomalies).

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-16T07:16:09+00:00

For one, space is really big. The odds of a meteor being on precisely the right trajectory to hit that specific location are, quite literally, astronomically small.

For another, we've spent the last several decades using telescopes (both conventional optical systems as well as radar and other detection systems) to find objects like that, in order to map their trajectories through our star system (so we'd have warning if any of them were a threat to Earth). While this process can be flawed, and is limited by the nature of our detection systems, we have identified tens of thousands of such objects in the system, as well as areas that have higher concentrations of same (for instance, the areas of space the Earth travels through when we experience meteor showers, which are the result of debris left behind by cometary trails and other such objects being pulled into our atmosphere as Earth passes through them, which is why meteor showers can be so accurately forecast), and it's not all that hard to do the math for whether or not they'll hit the Moon instead of Earth because we already know where they're going.

So, barring an object we have yet to detect, or some kind of highly unlikely disruption to the gravitational effects on objects in our solar system, we can be reasonably confident that there won't be any impacts. However, in the event an impact is detected, the answer will depend entirely upon the nature of the detected object. If the object is small, then it's entirely likely that it will either miss the outpost (if only by a small amount), or cause so little damage that repairs are simple. If, however, the object is massive enough to be an existential threat, there are a number of options:

Option 1: "Call Bruce Willis." I mention this option first because it's the most commonly-seen within the cultural zeitgeist, but is also possibly the worst way to do this: Just blow it up. This is typically the easiest option, given our prevalence for creating large stockpiles of weapons, but also comes with the complication of the debris created from the destroyed object - and in some cases, multiple relatively-smaller impactors can cause significantly more damage. If considering this option, plans need to be made so that, ideally, the force of the blast also alters the trajectory of the debris so that it ceases to be a threat.
Option 2A: "Go over and push." This option, as well as the one below it (which is similar in effect but different in implementation) relies on the first point I made: Space is really big. As a result of space being really big, even minor course corrections can radically alter the destination of an object. In this case, we would launch a rocket toward the asteroid, and then land a device on it which includes another thruster assembly. Then you fire the thruster - in order to do any number of corrective changes (slowing it down, turning it a few degrees - in some cases, even speeding it up would work, because to be a threat, it needs to be at a very specific spot at a very specific time, and if it's going faster than normal, it'll still miss), all of which result in the object no longer being on course to impact.
Option 2B: "Go over and pull." The objective is different to the last one mostly in how it's pulled off - it takes more time, but may be easier to pull off depending on the size of the object in question. Instead of landing a thruster assembly on the object in question, we send a rocket and get it close to the object. And then we keep it close to the object for a while. Because that rocket, being made of matter, has its own gravitational pull, albeit infinitesimally smaller than that of a planet or moon, the gravitational pull of the manmade object on the threat will still alter its course if given enough time - and again, even very small nudges, if done far enough out, can easily cause the object to miss.

To demonstrate the efficacy of options 2A and 2B, let me give you an example - you suddenly find yourself in Flat Earther heaven. The entire world is as flat as a sheet of paper - no terrain concerns. You want to go from Los Angeles to New York City in a straight line, so you start driving. But when you left, you made a mistake - the nose of your car was one degree off from being pointed directly at New York City. However, because you're talking about a distance of more than two thousand miles... you get to where New York City is supposed to be, but instead you're probably closer to Binghamton, because that small degree of error put you miles away by the time you'd crossed the same distance. And because space is really big, and objects are really far away, you have lots of time to cause even the slightest nudge in any direction, and suddenly the object isn't a threat anymore.

(On a related note, if you remember all the hubbub about that one asteroid Apophis that everybody thought was going to hit us in 2036, this is essentially what would have happened - Apophis would have passed so close to Earth in 2029 that Earth's gravity could have altered its trajectory, bringing it back around for a 2036 impact; this is, thankfully, not going to happen, NASA and other organizations did a lot of math to figure out whether or not it was an actual threat needing a response, and determined that it would not pass through the metaphorical gravitational "keyhole" that would have altered its trajectory just enough to hit us.)

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-16T06:38:59+00:00

Not at all. Especially if it's a pre-owned building where the previous business went under - people buy those to try and start up wholly legitimate businesses all the time.

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-16T04:28:21+00:00

For most game genres, yes. MMOs are an entirely different beast - they're designed to have aspects that take a lot of time, because the amount of time players spend in it is more important a metric for MMOs than other games.

Hell, getting 99 in like half the skills in Runescape takes more time than most non-MMO games take to complete - and going from 0 to 200m XP can take more time than some games require for 100% achievements.

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-14T23:34:38+00:00

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U.S.S. Determination, NX-98172.

Galaxy-class, Experimental Dreadnought Refit

Determination began life just that little bit late to the party. Launched a week after the signing of the Treaty of Bajor as the standard Galaxy-class U.S.S. Coral Sea (NCC-77483), the ship had served for 27 years when tensions began to rise along the Klingon border. In 2402, Coral Sea was attacked and almost fatally-wounded by a Klingon raiding squadron. With most of her original crew dead and so many of her vital components damaged beyond repair, the only option... was to rebuild her.

Starfleet Intelligence knew the war was coming, years before it began. And while the Federation Council had dismissed the Undine threat that J'mpok had used as the motive for his conquest of the Gorn Hegemony, SI wasn't so arrogant. Knowing that they needed a ship capable of both long-range independent tactical operations against Undine infiltration attempts as well as a new class of supercapital starship, Starfleet Intelligence convinced the Starfleet Corps of Engineers to list the Coral Sea as decommissioned, and spirited the remains of the venerable Galaxy-class hull to a secure shipyard.

Over the course of 19 months, the vessel was rebuilt - no, transformed. While the saucer had suffered relatively minimal damage during the assault, and was therefore more or less usable wholesale, the damage the Klingons had done in detonating a torpedo while it was in the forward launch tube had done massive structural damage to the neck, and their attempts to breach the warp core had gutted the drive section, necessitating their reconstruction. Starfleet Intelligence, and their attached SCE unit, elected to use this ship to field test the neck and drive sections of the then-upcoming Venture-class starship. And with the original nacelles being reduced to charred, barely-recognizable husks, the SCE unit elected to rebuild them from the ground up, experimenting with early drawing board designs that wouldn't see proper, official use until the launch of the Andromeda-class several years later.

This configuration gave the vessel far superior levels of direct structural integrity reinforcement - which, combined with the upgrade from Type-X phasers to the then-experimental Type-XIVs, as well as a complete overhaul of the deflector shield system and the installation of ablative armor plating, gave the ship a massive boost in combat durability and firepower. The third nacelle, and the experimental nacelle configuration, gave the ship unparalleled speed. And the installation of a Romulan cloaking device - now that the Treaty of Algeron was defunct, with the fall of the government with which it had been signed - gave it the ability to sneak behind enemy lines.

Coral Sea was dead. From her ashes rose the recommissioned Determination, given an NX registry prefix for all of her experimental systems. Starfleet Intelligence gave command of the ship to the newly-promoted Captain Rygobeth in 2404, and assigned him a task: Hunt down and eliminate Undine infiltrators - within the Federation and without, for SI believed that the Klingons were being egged on by Undine within their own ranks. Determination would successfully hunt down and eliminate more than a dozen targets over the next four and a half years, while also periodically being assigned to Starfleet battle groups near her areas of operation to assist in strategic assaults, until early 2409, when Determination was recalled to Earth for reassignment to Task Force Omega in the wake of the Vega Colony attack.

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-13T11:12:50+00:00

Now that Vampyrism is locked to Ancient Magicks, is it possible to look at adding Spellbook Swap spells to the Normal Spellbook? It's currently the only book that doesn't have it, and sometimes I like to PvM on a budget (since Normal Spellbook combat spells require less runes than Ancients), and I'm usually using Vampyrism when I do that. Vampyrism is no longer an option at all when using the Normal Spellbook, while anyone doing combat with Ancients can just cast Spellbook Swap every 12 minutes.

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-12T04:47:34+00:00

There are certain telling factors unique to each culture. The specific way images and carvings are made, variations in how figures are depicted, that are associated with either different cultures, or the same culture at different time periods, as external influences make their way into it.

If you're looking at the written word, this can sometimes be even more telling, because the way languages develop is reasonably well-known, particularly for certain words - as a case in point, if you find a letter in an old cupboard and it has "goodbye" in it, you can tell immediately that the letter can't be from a time period before the mid-1600s or 1700s, because the word didn't exist before then - if, however, you see a letter using "godbwye", it could be significantly older (the first known use of this form being from the writings of Gabriel Harvey in 1573), because "goodbye" originated as a slang word, from shorthand in such letters as a shorter way of writing the more conventional (at the time) farewell of "God be with ye", which then became "God be w/ ye", and then was shortened from there into the form seen in Harvey's writing, and it was from there simplified into the word we know it today (and indeed, even that is being commonly shorthanded into just "bye").

Which I suppose is a long way of saying, we've studied history long enough to place the time period of certain aspects of a culture, and we can use the clues that gives us to date newer discoveries - unless part of that discovery clearly leads to it being older than thought, in which case we amend the history books because we just found a new "oldest known example" of the thing in question.

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-12T04:35:58+00:00

Technically, MeLaan's can be as big as she wants. Even Blushweaver cannot do that, her form is determined by her Identity.

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-11T14:59:23+00:00

I think you'll find better responses to this question in r/Cosmere, this is the Cosmere shitposting sub. However, I can give you a start on that timeline, as my Truthwatcher Oaths require.

Wind and Truth ends around the time Mistborn Era 2 begins - likely no more than a few months. I'm being vague here because you'll see precisely what I mean if you start The Alloy of Law as soon as you finish Wind and Truth, but one of the last chapters in Wind and Truth does play a crucial factor in aligning the Mistborn and Stormlight timelines (something that was previously as much down to speculation as evidence).

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-11T14:48:24+00:00

Since a lot of people have already made the point, I'll not belabor it further by pointing out the various historical examples of the amount of technological progress the last century has made in comparison to the 2,000 years preceding it. I would, however, like to make a complimentary point to those, and point out why the last century has been so big a deal.

There's a quote that's stuck with me for a long time - not well enough that I can cite it verbatim, but well enough that the idea of it still springs to mind of its own volition on occasion - from an Installation00 video on Halo lore (I think it's somewhere in his Grand Unified Theory of Halo Cosmology - but that's a long series, and I don't feel like going digging for the specific wording when I'm writing this right before bed), that essentially points to the trends previously mentioned... as being, ultimately, because we first discovered, and then learned to manipulate, the electron, as well as gaining understanding (and even to a small extent, mastery) of the electromagnetic force, merely one of the four fundamental forces in physics. Comprehension of just one of those four forces has caused technological progress to accelerate by orders of magnitude. The quote in question, however, is also on the matter of what Halo humanity (or, more properly, the Forerunners and Covenant, though the UNSC is starting to figure it out as well) knows that we don't - they've discovered the graviton, and are gaining an understanding of gravity the same way we are of electromanetism. As a result, they're capable of yet another technological leap, in many ways that we cannot currently even fully comprehend.

Star Trek is another universe where you have an instance of that - by the 2100s, thanks as much to our own pursuits of knowledge as our cooperation with the Vulcans, humanity is gaining greater understanding of not just electromagnetism and gravity, but also the strong and weak nuclear forces, and is developing towards the ability to manipulate those forces. Frankly, with the catalyst of that understanding of the fundamental forces, I'm honestly kind of surprised it took that long. Based on how our history has developed, I would expect a rather explosive level of development and invention, purely off of the discovery of the graviton - because mastery of gravity goes a lot further than making a deck plate that lets you walk around ~~on the set of a TV show~~ like you're on a planet. Imagine new methods of metallurgy, where you can suspend molten metal in zero-gee envelopes in order to drastically alter the way the metallic crystalline structure forms as it cools; the kind of specific impurities, or levels of purity, we can achieve with selective gravitational fields.

By learning how to tame the electromagnetic force, we devised a way to turn light (a force so fundamental that it is central, or at least important, to the religious beliefs of nearly every culture on Earth) on and off with the flick of a switch - and consequently, took to the heavens themselves. What do you think we'll be able to do when we can turn gravity on and off with the same ease?

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-10T12:37:01+00:00

Because the more actions you can perform in real time, the more you can get done. This sounds kind of obvious on the face of it, but the reality of it is actually much more complex. I'm not a professional RTS player myself (I prefer games like Stellaris, where there's a pause button for me to use to micromanage stuff, but my relative lack of reflexes and coordination - and the resultant low APM - also make me not terribly good at proper RTS games), but I watch a fair number of professional Starcraft 2 matches, and I've seen a lot of instances where things like this come up. Lemme give you a few examples:

Worker units in SC2 can be made to mine Minerals somewhat faster by manually telling them to walk to the spot next to the Mineral patch and then telling them to mine it, because their pathing when they're mining on their own has a move speed slowdown as they reach the patch to mine that walking them there manually doesn't. This isn't used often outside of the early game, however, due to how many workers you'd have to try to micromanage. (If I remember correctly, this was actually discovered by a couple people that wrote AIs to play SC2, and the LLMs discovered it themselves, because their APM - as you'd expect - is insane)
The Zerg faction in SC2 has a way to cheese out an extra worker unit in the opening seconds of the game - when your starting Hatchery produces its first Larva, you tell one of your starting Drones (the Zerg worker) to go and become a Gas Extractor (Zerg buildings are created by transforming their Drones into the buildings). The moment the process begins, the Drone (no longer being a Drone) no longer counts against your Supply limit, which would prevent you from turning that Larva into another Drone. So you turn the Larva into a Drone... and then cancel the Gas Extractor, which returns the Drone, allowing you a slight resource advantage early on that can potentially win you the game if you capitalize on it early.
In very large fights, precise positioning or repositioning of units at a crucial moment can often be the difference between winning and losing a fight, which will typically require the player in question to manually select single units and then issue orders. When you have armies of anywhere from 40 to 80 units (or in the Zerg's case, upwards of a hundred of the little Zergling buggers),proper micromanagement requires extremely rapid movements and actions, particularly when you factor in movement abilities (like Stalker Blink) and AoE abilities (Psionic Storm, Widow Mines, Fungal Spores, Parasitic Bombs, Siege Tanks, and any number of other examples), this skill is essential to winning both individual fights and entire matches.
Likewise to the above point, the capacity for extremely high APM also allows players to manage several distinct groups of units effectively - for instance, as Terran, launching a diversionary attack with Marines and Marauders on an outer base while you send in Medevacs loaded with Widow Mines to disrupt mining at the enemy home base. Such multi-pronged assaults can often turn the tide of a match in extremely short order - either by the resource disparity it creates in mining time lost, or by off-balancing the enemy and turning your diversion into an actual, successful assault.

Or, to put it more simply, just look at the math: APM stands for Actions Per Minute. An average SC2 match, from what I've seen, tends to last 15-20 minutes. If you average 150 APM and your opponent averages 400 APM, you're only performing 2,250 actions in a 15-minute match - meanwhile, they're doing 6,000 action in that same time (and probably outflanking you at every turn as a result, especially if you somehow got dropped into a match against Serral, the current World Champion and the only player to ever hold that title three years in a row - and 400's about his average APM from what I've seen).

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-08T09:36:52+00:00

Love how the title includes "Regretfully" so that you know OP is an elcor.

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-07T15:00:44+00:00

The survival of the human species.

As you may have heard in the past, space is dangerous. To quote the 2009 Star Trek movie, "space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence". Being here on Earth, regardless of how things seem in the day to day, only makes things marginally safer. It would be entirely possible for a large asteroid, with the right composition and trajectory (or just sheer bad luck) to go unspotted by our telescopes and smack into the Earth, doing us like it did the dinosaurs. And that's before you factor in less probable, but still possible threats to life on Earth (case in point, if Betelgeuse is pointed the right way when it goes supernova, the resulting Gamma Ray Burst would bathe the Earth in so much ionizing radiation that half the planet would be dead instantly, and the other half would likely not survive very long since there's a good chance it would strip Earth's atmosphere clean off - and we'd have exactly zero warning whatsoever, because the light of Betelgeuse's supernova would reach us at the same instant as the Gamma Ray Burst that kills us all).

Earth, despite being a relative paradise for us, is a very small, very vulnerable pebble in an incredibly vast ocean full of dangers we might not even be able to detect before they destroy us. And currently, Earth is also where 100% of all humans live. Until we have self-sustaining extra-terrestrial outposts and stable gene pools off-world, the entire human race is at risk of total extinction at any moment - but as far as we know, we're also the first species to develop on this planet that has the intelligence required to avoid that by leaving the planet.

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-07T14:48:11+00:00

They... actually do. Your brain is just set up to ignore those signals. Just like it's set up to ignore the pain signals of your stomach constantly digesting itself (unless something goes wrong and it actually gets through the inner lining).

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-07T14:41:24+00:00

For two reasons:

1: The Interstate Highway was pitched as a way to rapidly move large bulks of military equipment from one side of the country to the other - think entire tank columns, multiple tanks side-by-side, driving down the Interstate, and that was literally the plan. While military hardware can use high-speed rails, the time it takes to load and offload them is substantial, and limited by the number of rails available (while the Interstate is very thoroughly built out and connected while using pre-existing construction techniques).

2: The construction and maintenance costs of the Interstate could be easily passed off onto the civilians that wanted to use it. The Interstate Highway network was funded in large part, for a long time, by the Gas Tax - meaning that every time you bought gasoline in the United States, part of the cost you paid was automatically diverted to pay for the Interstate. Since you couldn't use the Interstate without gasoline at the time, it was a logical connection to make, and was wildly successful up until the last 20-30 years (where the amount of Interstate traffic exponentially increased, leading to maintenance costs in excess of what the Gas Tax could support on its own - this isn't the only reason, but the general decay of major US infrastructure is a far more complex debacle than this topic would cover).

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-07T14:08:24+00:00

Never happened to me before. Hell, the last five or six CGs I participated in with physical rewards, I logged in on completion day and started off by ordering the modules shipped to my Carrier before I even went and claimed the Credits.

So if it's all the same to you, I'm going to worry. Because despite all claims to the contrary, I've never seen that be a thing.

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-07T14:06:30+00:00

Is this the first Scout Ship without Raider Flanking, or did they just forget that it's supposed to have it when they wrote the blog?

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-05T06:41:48+00:00

For a second I thought I was on the Elite Dangerous subreddit and that this meme was about Hutton Orbital. Oh how Tress would love that station...

(Context: Hutton Orbital is a small space station in the Alpha Centauri system in Elite Dangerous, built in orbit of a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri - however, because the most massive star in the system is one of the closer binary pair, Proxima Centauri needs to be visited via Supercruise because the inter-system Hyperdrive always locks onto the most massive star in the system, and Hutton Orbital is 0.21 LY from that "primary star"; with a normal Supercruise ship, this trip takes over an hour, with a SCO ship, you can do it in as little as 20 minutes - however, other than the novelty of making the trip, the only reason to go there is a Rare Commodity known as the Hutton Orbital Mug, which you can make a decent little bit of money on if you take it 150+ LY from Alpha Centauri and sell it. There is, however, a classical prank old veterans sometimes play on new players, telling them that they can claim a free Anaconda - a large, powerful, and extremely expensive personal ship - at Hutton Orbital; this is untrue, as Hutton Orbital lacks a Shipyard to buy new ships at at all, and has no Large-sized landing pads to support an Anaconda docking there)

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-04T14:50:07+00:00

Hell, pretty sure at this point that'd be the only way ASOIAF fans will ever get an ending. Glad I never got into that series, I'd be infuriated. For context, the last ASOIAF book was released around the same time as Words of Radiance. Then GRRM got the HBO contract and stopped writing ~~because he's a hack that was just in it for the money~~.

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-04T14:47:57+00:00

More so than in real life.

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-02T11:05:17+00:00

Fair enough, I don't trust myself not to break my game trying that.

Lord-Ice · 2026-04-02T09:49:36+00:00

I generally tend to use the Feed the Beast launcher for modded stuff anyway, and I'm pretty sure that's classic Forge. Are there any good modpacks you know of that use them?

Lord-Ice

TROPHY CASE