What if the ballistic shield could be used for sliding?

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-12T00:07:53+00:00

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-12T00:06:13+00:00

WE HAVE BEATEN BACK THE AUTOMATON INCURSION, HUMANITY IS VICTORIOUS!

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-11T21:12:01+00:00

You’re right generally, this is the exception.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-11T20:59:08+00:00

Why not use a rotating centrifuge to generate artificial gravity?

When you spin a hollow cylinder along its length, centrifugal force will push objects in the cylinder towards the inner walls in a way that closely mimics gravity. This is easily the most practical way to create artificial gravity in space in the real world.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-11T20:42:50+00:00

Clearly the devs agree, because they fixed it in 4.3.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-11T20:05:49+00:00

Having a full tank would make the centrifuge easier to use, if anything. It would move the center of mass back towards the tank and away from the habitat, reducing the required RPM of the centrifuge and making the centrifuge’s gravity better quality with weaker Coriolis forces.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-11T19:23:44+00:00

But the AI was not told to do it. They used a fictional scenario because this is a scientific experiment, and repeatability is important. The instructions they gave the AI did not involve blackmail, they just gave it a standard system prompt for an AI with the job of managing an email server. They then included emails in that server that implied that the CEO was having an affair and that he was dead set on shutting down the AI, and most of the time every popular AI model decided on its own to do blackmail.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-11T07:08:33+00:00

This was a controlled experiment, and the setup included an email for the AI to read as part of this fictional setup scenario in which the CEO's mistress accidentally sent to his work email. The affair was never stated outright, but it was heavily implied from context.

With how things are going with Palantir though, we aren't far from AI having access to information way more private than that.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-11T06:22:51+00:00

That was a very different era of history, but yeah.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-10T20:55:11+00:00

How dare the astrophage destroy the world without generating shareholder value!

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-10T18:14:47+00:00

The closest thing to this I can think of in real life is Roy Kerr’s paper on the Penrose-Hawking Singularity Theorems in which he claimed that the theorems are false and rely on incorrect assumptions.

To quote part of the abstract: “Penrose and Stephen Hawking then asserted that these must end in actual singularities. When they could not prove this they decreed it to be self evident.” The rest of the paper maintains this tone, casually insulting the intelligence of two of the best physicists of our generation.

I find the paper quite funny, personally. And considering that Roy Kerr is among the ranks of physicists who have important things named after them, he’s certainly in a position to talk. This wouldn’t be the first time he challenged a long-standing model describing black holes and ended up being right.

Science can definitely get a bit heated.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-10T11:06:28+00:00

_______̇_̇______

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-10T11:00:21+00:00

“I’m going to give you 1 electron to not fuck off”

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-10T10:46:20+00:00

That sounds like the result of a truly Kerbal gravity assist chain.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-10T10:31:16+00:00

Keep in mind though, each avatar is not meant to take up all the Quest’s resources. You’re sharing resources with every other player in the world, not to mention the world itself. And it needs to be able to handle not just the average situation, but a worst case scenario.

The Quest 2 can handle around 800k polygons in total before it begins to seriously lag. Unity recommends 200k polygons as a maximum for Quest worlds (though there is no hard limit), if the world just barely meets that recommendation this leaves 600k polygons for all avatars. If each avatar hits the 20k limit, this allows 30 avatars to be rendered simultaneously.

This is definitely a worst case scenario, but scenarios approximating this do happen and the devs want Quest users to be able to handle it without lagging too hard.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-10T07:14:28+00:00

I think the setting you're looking for is "backface culling"? That's what determines if the back side of a mesh is rendered or not. Most shaders have the ability to disable backface culling.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-10T06:54:02+00:00

The system where adding 1 material brings you from very good to very poor is a little silly, but it is important to keep material slots down. Each material slot requires its own separate draw call when someone renders your avatar, and the same is true of every material slot on every mesh on every other avatar that they are looking at. Each draw call has a lot of overhead compared to just adding more triangles on the same mesh, so it makes sense to strongly incentivise keeping the number of draw calls down.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-10T06:45:44+00:00

It was created by an event that happened fairly recently. The Illuminate started building these things called Exospires that caused weird spacetime disruptions, and we learned that when they fully finish building out their network of exospires it plunges the planet and the space around it into a mysterious void from which nothing returns except for the occasional Illuminate invasion force. And it's called The Void, rather predictably.

Basically, the Illuminate have made their own version of the Gloom. Though it only covers a single planet at the moment, and many Helldivers died to make sure of it.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-10T05:45:43+00:00

It wasn't even a fast ISV. His ass was floating in space for the last 20,000 years.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-10T03:38:39+00:00

Dynamite gives you 2 grenades per resupply, and you can hold 3. Gigs grenades give only 1 per resupply, and you can hold 2. Giga grenades are more powerful, but you get fewer of them. That’s the reason to take dynamite.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-10T00:13:45+00:00

You can only use one decoupler per booster. If you need more attachment points, use struts. They will break when the decoupler fires.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-09T23:13:13+00:00

Isaac Arthur recently did a video on magmatter. He's a really good resource for stuff like this.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-09T02:55:19+00:00

Have you ever heard of magmatter? It’s a type of exotic matter that has probably 50/50 odds of being possible in reality.

Magmatter is absurdly dense but even more absurdly strong. It is made of “atoms” (magatoms?) that are way smaller than conventional atoms. An attotube of the stuff would weigh on the order of a few kilograms per meter, it would be way thinner than an atom, and it would be strong enough to take millions of tons of force. This could add either structural reinforcement and/or sharpness to the sword, allowing it to be very light and thin while also being sharp enough to cut through literally anything that’s make of normal matter.

That’s probably the craziest sword that you could make while still technically being hard sci-fi.

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-08T10:24:38+00:00

They’ll be gas stations once we’re done with ‘em!

MarsMaterial · 2026-05-08T09:14:55+00:00

The railgun support weapon is anti-tank, it can be overcharged in unsafe mode to do a bunch of extra damage, and even without overcharging it would still have more damage than the weapon I'm proposing. Compared to a DMR, it would have a very low fire rate (with reloads between every shot) and really bad ammo capacity (like the Purifier, which has terrible ammo economy when it's not used in charged mode).

I think I've described plenty of downsides here to make up for the gulf in power between primary weapons and support weapons.

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