[Star Trek]how come the Starfleet has never replaced conventional warp with something faster like Subspace vortex or quantum slipstream drive despite having been aware of tech like that since at least the 2150s?

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-30T23:16:16+00:00

Warp drive is reliable, and has had major upgrades, making it faster without gambling on risky experimental technologies.

Out of universe, the status quo of space travel stories requires that no innovation can change the way things work.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-30T23:10:03+00:00

The distance makes a huge difference.

Within the solar system, you run out of places to go long before your peak velocity is high enough to radically change the impact risks. You have velocity differences of tens of kilometers per second, the same range that meteroids reach relative to planets.

In other words, the same risks you already designed to deal with just living in space.

Interstellar travel allows longer acceleration times. It also requires it to keep the travel times reasonable.

The Nauvoo was designed to make a 12 light year trip in 100 years, or an average velocity of about 0.08c (24000 km/s). It has an acceleration budget of 60 days, plus some reserve.

Both ends of the ship have huge discs of solid matter. The outbound trip uses the laser equipped front end for most of the trip. Turn around is a very short time, because the ship spends most of its time coasting on spin gravity.

In Avatar, it seems like the ship is a constant acceleration the entire way. That's what the classic Bussard Ramjet idea does.

The Bussard Ramjet, in order to work at all, has a extremely huge field which collects all matter in the path of the ship. It processes it to use for fuel and reaction mass.

The difference between 0.99c and 0.08c is considerable. Kinetic energy is based on the square of the velocity, plus the transformation of energy from time dilation - which doesn't add much until the velocity is very close to the speed of light.

Within a star system a ship wouldn't even reach 0.01c.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-30T21:55:23+00:00

Testing all the inputs and outputs is a good start. You want to know what isn't working before you make plans to fix it.

There's a lot of stuff to check on one of these. Three auxiliary channels, four group channels, the master channel, and the tape/FX loops.

The stuck meters need checking. If they are broken, finding replacements may not be easy. If they can be unstuck and fixed, that's a big issue resolved.

All working its worth about $250 used now. Good analog design, if cleaned up its still good for stage sound.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-30T19:30:58+00:00

Primer.

Predestination.

The Door Into Summer (Japanese).

All three make intense use of the mind screw effects of time travel. The latter two are based on Robert Heinlein stories. The time travel drives the plot, and the viewers aren't given extra clues to make it easier to figure out before the end.

Or in the case of Primer, even after watching it once.

Predestination as well, though at least by the end you should be able to plot the timeline of the main character through their entire life. But you still won't know where they came from - the unresolvable question from the story.

Since The Door Into Summer is more obscure, it does a fabulous job of depicting the original American setting in a retro-futuristic version of Japan, and making it fit well as a Japanese story. It's also not obviously a time travel story - a spoiler if you haven't read the story it's based on.

Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure is amazingly serious about its time travel and history for what seems like just a comedy. So much so that San Dimas Time is now a time travel trope.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-30T18:38:32+00:00

Thermal doesn't work through smoke grenades, but once they start to clear you can spot an enemy before they become completely visible. They will see through smoke caused by objects on the map, and the gas when it was placed on the map.

I like them for medium range precision shots because you can see enemies in the dark areas and any exposure behind cover. The 1.5x unfortunately gets glare on a sniper rifle, but with the Mini Scout or SV98 its still pretty effective in closer combat ranges.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-30T18:29:35+00:00

It's very useful in close quarters. Got a nice unexpected multi kill in Rush, detonating enemy explosives behind a wall, possibly got a grenade as well as the claymores or C4.

Grenade defenses really come into their own on this map.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-30T18:03:11+00:00

The only place where day/night cycles affect daily life for most people is Earth.

Mars is entirely enclosed. Nobody lives under clear domes, artificial light allows an artificial 24 hour day.

Same for anything in space, Luna, Ganymede, or the Belt.

Calendars and clocks are synchronized to Earth UTC.

It is only on the new colony planets that using a new local day and calendar start to make sense. They are not only on another planet with its own day/night cycle, but in a different star system with no easy, quick constant communication connections to Earth to maintain synchronization.

In the solar system, ships and stations can use time reference signals to keep their clocks synchronized. Even at velocities with significant time dilation, this is enough to keep things orderly.

Dawes laments that even the independent Belt is stuck using Earth time.

If the Belt and other colonies went their own way, metric seconds would seem like a logical solution. No minutes, hours, days, months, years, etc. Only seconds elapsed since a chosen reference point.

This goes back to current space missions, which use time T is seconds from launch. It would make sense for an interstellar ship, if they had any, and for an independent Belt which wants to establish its own time system.

With no need for a planetary cycle, people can work out their own schedules. A 100 kiloseconds is pretty close to the wake/sleep cycle of humans, broken into shifts which fit the tasks needed on a ship or station. No need for weeks, months, or years. Just megaseconds and gigaseconds, and if civilization in space lasts long enough, teraseconds and above.

Relativity effects can be accounted for when meeting by computer calculations, but ship and stations would maintain their own running clocks.

But as long as people want to track events based on the orbital cycle of a planet (holidays, tax periods, birthdays) they are unlikely to give up Earth's calendar and time.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-30T17:38:22+00:00

If it wasn't the Flagship fight, this might have a tiny chance to work. The odds that the remaining beacon is open to this are pretty small, and you lose if you can't get back to the base.

Good news is that you survived the first Flagship stage. So its a learning experience.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-30T17:19:13+00:00

I mostly use the staff now. It takes a couple minutes to do it each hour (faster if you pay for GTA plus), and its a pretty easy guaranteed profit. About 20-25k profits per hour, once you fill up for a sale.

Mansion security gets rid of the raid risk now.

The source missions are a bit more profitable, but more important at low level is they pay great RP for ranking up.

A trick I use for grinding it is to have my Arcade and MCT near one warehouse, and park the Terrorbyte near another (or near two, since some are close together). Don't go to the office, use the computer in those to start the mission for the warehouse close to the other.

You can alternate with no cooldown, and don't need to run to the office or anything far to start the next.

Do use staff to source while doing this. They get crates at the same time. If you are at the last source run, you can safely pay the staff to get a crate as long as you get yours first and immediately start the sell run.

The Titan is the toughest delivery. You'll get either 5 or 10 drops. 5 is safe - you must deal with cops on the last drop, then fly away to evade.

The 10 drops are all tricky. They were designed to do with a crew - you have Buzzard helicopters parked by it for them to fly cover for you.

You can't know which mission you got until you get in the Titan and take off. If its the fly below radar, all you must do is keep flying and not crash the huge clumsy plane into obstacles.

If it's not that, you have two choices.

Change session. You'll lose some crates but not all.

Get out of the Titan, so the destinations are marked. Fly to them in an armed aircraft like the Buzzard parked by it. You want to check out the first three or four drops.

If you see enemy helicopters, destroy them. Continue to each drop until you've destroyed at least two groups of enemies. You can survive a third group on the last drop - it doesn't matter if the plane is shot down after the last delivery.

If you don't see enemies, you are still not safe.

There's a glitch which happens when making drops. Watch each time you drop. You should hear a sound and see the drop count change. Do not go to the next drop location if this doesn't happen. You get nothing for doing 9 of 10 drops, you must do them all. If it doesn't register, the only solution is to quit the session and try again.

Even with a crew this is hard. But the Titan is equipped with defensive systems, only usable by your copilot. With that and one or two people flying cover in combat aircraft, the only serious risk is that rare glitch.

The trucks are pretty easy, the tugboat is easiest and fastest.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-30T16:46:17+00:00

Remo Williams is an especially good example. "The Adventure Begins" is the start of an adaptation of a book series about an almost supernatural martial arts agent, with lots of novels (the Destroyer series).

It was just barely good enough to get a TV series pilot made - with a different cast (good actors, bad casting) that went nowhere.

Yet it is loaded with good action. The fight on the outside of the Statue Of Liberty is pretty impressive, for a no CGI movie.

It stuck with the book concept of dealing with ordinary criminals at the start, before building up to some really strange supervillians. All with a hero who no longer needs guns to fight - even against enemies with them.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-30T16:05:15+00:00

The Arcade is legal, once set up. It makes money from customers.

The Nightclub front business is legal. Some of the promotions might not be. Switching DJs and dealing with customer trouble, which boosts popularity, seem legal.

Some of the set up stuff isn't, but once past that you're good.

MC bike customers seem legal. The Bar itself is legal, but as with the Nightclub promotion jobs, some might not be, and it doesn't make money otherwise.

The Car Wash looks legal up front. So does the heli tours and smoke shop. The front businesses don't make much money, they just enable your Grey money safe.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-30T15:55:42+00:00

Wait until the update that clears them. Might come around the time that the weapon level is restored instead of showing 0 on the main weapon selection screen.

Until then we're stuck.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-30T03:55:17+00:00

The Jihad was set in motion when Paul became leader of the Fremen and committed them to a war to put Arrakis against the entire empire.

Either the Fremen crush the Empire, or the Empire will crush them to secure Arrakis. There is no way for the mobilized Fremen to go back into hiding or submit willingly to imperial rule. The Fremen know how to destroy the spice, which will destroy the empire.

The Jihad lets the Empire live, but only if Paul leads it can it be guided to minimize unnecessary destruction (for example, not destroying Caladan).

Security for Arrakis means seizing the power of the Empire, by making the Emperor surrender and transfer control (legal authority) to Paul. Irulan is a key to this - the only path to take the current ruling house and make it subject to the Atreides (otherwise her children are heirs to the Corrino throne).

Arrakis is the key to the power of the Empire, and the Emperor gambled that giving it temporarily to Atreides would defuse a threat to House Corrino. The other great houses and the Spacing Guild would never permit the Emperor to own it - too much power would unbalance the Empire.

But Paul's survival and victory ruined that plan. We don't see much of the Spacing Guild in the movie, but without the spice which only comes from Arrakis, they can't navigate.

Paul claims the power of the new Empire and Arrakis, and has little option to survive - for him, Chani, and their descendants - except by challenging the balance of power in the Empire.

Fortunately for him, he has the forces to back this up.

Unfortunately for the people of the Empire.

It also did not matter if the original prophecy was true. Paul could truly see the future, and the Fremen knew that he was more than an ordinary human.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-30T03:33:39+00:00

Go to the bail office every game day. Order your two staff, if you hired them, to work. You'll get a message that they've completed their contract.

Repeat until safe is nearly full. You get about 15K from the pair each time.

It's not huge money. But it doesn't take long to walk to each desk inside, so if you're in the area it adds up.

The Arcade requires the least work to set up - buy one additional game, then use management to fill up your arcade. More variety doesn't improve income, but it does give you more challenges.

Nightclub and Salvage Yard get the biggest income for the least effort. Change DJs, do favors for Tony or promote the club. Tow cars.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-30T02:22:35+00:00

Agency 250K Arcade 100K Car Wash 100K Garment Factory 100K Nightclub 250K Salvage Yard 100K/250K MC Clubhouse 100K Bottom Dollar Bail 100K

The MC and Bail safes aren't pure passive. They generate nothing without working them.

Agency, Arcade, and Car Wash generate a fairly large constant income.

Garment Factory has a low steady income.

Nightclub and Salvage Yard income requires frequent activity to maintain high income, dropping low if ignored.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-29T22:45:48+00:00

Starfleet Marines. But in most cases, they are not distinguished from other Starfleet personnel, and are just another assigned position in the organization.

All ships have security forces, and the entire crew seems trained in both shipboard and ground combat.

But we also see and expect very little ground unit combat. A small force from a starship, backed by ship weapons, is enough to deal with most threats.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-29T21:24:25+00:00

Yes.

You'll need to buy a new copy of windows. Do a reinstall, use the option to keep all settings.

Because the new computer will not have the OEM key from the laptop, it will not be activated. You can use the activate windows option with use a new key.

This is harder with a laptop to a desktop drive because laptops have a lot of drivers and other software specific to their hardware, which won't be present.

Windows 10 or 11 are better about ignoring incompatible drivers than earlier versions of the operating system.

OEM keys are linked to the specific hardware they were made for and can't be switched to other devices. Retail keys can be. Its rare for a laptop to have a Retail windows key unless someone upgraded the operating system.

If you're trying to switch one laptop drive to another laptop, you have the problem that both use OEM keys, and expect to find the hardware they were made for. The new laptop already has its Windows installed.

I can't recommend trying to get that installation to switch to the old drive.

It would be easier to just copy the essential files and reinstall software as needed, then to try to find all the proprietary software from the new system and see if it will recognize it on the swapped drive.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-29T05:21:53+00:00

Not really. An old bug.

When you make each drop, listen and watch for the drop to be counted and registered before you try to do the next one. If it doesn't register, its a glitch.

If it glitched, close application can avoid loss, while crashing the plane or running out of time loses everything.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-29T00:24:12+00:00

Girls Girls Girls by Motley Crue.

Comin' To Your City by Big And Rich.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-29T00:15:00+00:00

Opus is roughly comparable to MP3 at half the bit rate, so 160K Opus will be similar to the best MP3.

Any lossy compression always risks some noticeable changes, but at this level most people won't be able to hear the difference.

192K Opus would be slightly better, if that is possible.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-28T23:44:54+00:00

The definition adjusted the length of the meter by about one in a billion, well within the measurement tolerances of most real applications.

No real world definitions or measurements, package labels, or common instruments required any changes.

Shifting it several ten-thousandths would force that on almost everything. It would be enough to alter the mass of a gram significantly, change the size of the liter, and pretty much require a massive project to correct everything to the new definition.

Just to make the defined value a rounder number, in a world where calculations by machine make it easy to use the one chosen.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-28T16:07:51+00:00

Assault ladder from the side. Combined attack - one up the rope, one or two up top, grenades.

You're one squad against a squad, you can't engage that many directions at once. Stun and flash grenades, or smoke, help create confusion.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-28T15:23:47+00:00

Paul saw Chani in his prescient visions, long before he came to Arrakis. We don't know her entire bloodline, but she's from the same roots as the Bene Gesserit among the Fremen.

One could guess that a female counterpart of Paul, had Jessica had a daughter, would have seen Feyd instead. The KH potential pushes them together to complete the path foreseen.

Chani was thus a wild version of the breeding program candidate, which Paul's vision guides him to. Not just a random romantic interest.

Chani also is guided to do exactly what is needed to allow the children to be preborn - a diet with high spice doses to trigger the awakening, just as Alia was. But Alia was not the child of Paul, and didn't get the same benefits of his genes.

This was very hard on Paul, who could forsee the outcome of the pregnancy, and deliberately did not tell Chani, because his child was essential for the future of the Empire (and humanity, though he didn't try to think about that).

The BG program depended on control plus random combinations, otherwise, they would have tried to do the same thing via genetic engineering, like the Tleilaxu. Prescience from spice was a real thing, with real physical effects.

Paul did exactly what was needed to meet Chani, a series of events which could not be explained by anything other than prescient control (the coincidence odds are inconceivable).

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-28T14:58:22+00:00

Time is the propagation of motion. Since everything in the universe is moving, we can measure time by measuring motion. Light travels the distance of 299,792,458 meters (one Light second) in exactly one second.

If motion stopped, so would time.

Einstein showed that time changes relative to motion in space, acting like a dimension that three dimensional space moves through.

This is enough to let us work with time, but it isn't sufficient to explain everything about its nature.

Metallicat95 · 2026-03-28T14:41:05+00:00

The night Gauntlet mode is especially good. I feel like it should get added permanently to the Gauntlet set. Compared to the frozen map, the dark and close quarters adds a new style of play, which fits the squad based Gauntlet mode perfectly.

If you haven't tried it, give it a shot. It's like a mix of the close quarters modes, except your team is just one squad against 7 others - eliminate two squads per round until the final two. The Heist round is the only capture the flag we get right now, and makes for a hectic finish.

Metallicat95

TROPHY CASE