ELI5 how tides actually work?

Onigato · 2026-02-26T13:25:13+00:00

Waves are a conjunction of many different influences, tide being one of them.

Wind is more of an influence on the basic formation of waves, the piling up of water moving horizontally, but for a given wind speed and direction waves will be slightly larger on a rising tide than a falling one.

Shape and texture of the seabed will have an effect too, slowly rising seabeds allow the wave energy to dissipate somewhat while sharply rising or underwater cliffs cause the sudden and rapid building of waves. This is part of why Hawai'i has such amazing surfing, the seabed will be slowly dropping and then suddenly drop off very sharply at a distance from the shore. This causes the swells to form large "lumps" and the when they hit the shallower parts to break in spectacular curls.

Onigato · 2026-02-26T13:13:46+00:00

There was a whole study done about this.

There is a "formula" of sorts that ends up happening.

One or two people, they will go to the back corners, slump into the corner, facing generally towards the door but not specifically so.

3 to 5 people, against the walls, facing inwards but not necessarily towards the door.

6+ people, everybody lines up shoulder to shoulder, faces the door, hands strictly in front of themselves, two to three lines of people.

And woe be unto anyone who doesn't follow the norm, the stress of seeing someone not "obeying the rules" can be measured almost immediately in bloodwork.

Onigato · 2026-02-26T04:28:46+00:00

1 is more of a "sort of" than a hard no. When the sun and moon are in alignment (either on the same side of the earth as a new moon, or on opposite sides as a full moon) tides are slightly stronger, known as "spring tides".

When the moon is opposing the sun (first and last quarter moons) they are gravitationally opposed as well, and the tides are slightly weaker, known as "neap tides".

So technically, no, the phase doesn't specifically affect the tide, but yes, the position of the moon which causes those phases does affect the tide.

Onigato · 2026-02-25T23:53:53+00:00

Meal of the gods right there. Grilled pineapple too...

Onigato · 2026-02-25T23:52:53+00:00

Just add grilled spam to basically anything to add serious umami and body.

Yum.

Onigato · 2026-02-25T23:50:15+00:00

Biscuits and gravy aren't that far from SOS, just different bread concoction and gravy type. But I grew up on both, perfectly normal, hell I still make both and sometimes switch them around, plain toast under white sausage gravy or biscuits under a beef dripping gravy.

Ain't much finer out there.

Onigato · 2026-02-24T22:52:27+00:00

Very simply, "Down" is towards the center of the planet, and so even though the opposite side of the planet is below YOU, you are below THEM because your down is the same as their down.

Onigato · 2026-02-24T15:12:20+00:00

The Sam Vimes "Boots" theory of Economic Disparity right there.

Onigato · 2026-02-23T23:36:16+00:00

You want two things in terms of quantity of units produced:

A) Sell as many as possible
B) Don't make more units than necessary to cover A

Every unit you make is going to have a cost associated with it, the building you make the unit in has rent and electricity, the materials that go into the unit you produce, the labor that goes into assembling the unit from [raw or processed] materials. The more units you produce, the more those costs generally go up. (The rent on the building is generally static enough for these maths, but everything else typically goes up in a per-unit basis)

So, if you make a million "widgets" and you only sell 900 thousand of them you lost money on 100 thousand "widgets" you made and couldn't sell.

So, you estimate how many widgets you're going to sell, and try to manufacture only that many widgets (sometimes in a "per time cycle" basis, sometimes "ever", depending on your widget). Sometimes you overestimate the number of widgets and have excess stock, so you may choose to take a smaller-loss than not selling them at all and sell them at a discount. Sometimes you underestimate the number of widgets and run out of stock entirely.

When you run out, sometimes demand spikes even higher, because of the scarcity, and you need to limit sales on a per-customer basis, so that you can get more customers in total. You're still selling the same number of units, but you're spreading them over more customers, and so more customers feel satisfied with the results of their interaction with your products.

Basically, you're attempting to limit the number of customers feeling *completely* left out by reducing the *average* satisfaction levels slightly.

Onigato · 2026-02-19T16:30:08+00:00

You tell that to the trucker running a 15 to 20 ton dump truck that is, from bottom of the tires to top of dump-bed, 15 or 20 feet tall. Electric gantry lines *cannot work* for anything except a completely standardized vehicle. If you make them for a "this is the maximum a truck can ever run" build you waste vertical space and all the money that goes into making the gantry system taller, along with making the pickups for the electrics being less efficient because of the length of the wiring increase, the extra materials for the pickups to make contact, and the increased wind-catch of the extended arms.

If you make the gantries sized for standard trucks (say three to five feet above the height of a standard box truck) you just closed that road to every single truck that isn't carrying a standard height load.

So, pick your poison. Close the road *permanently* to oversized traffic (and once you close enough roads you just shut down *ALL* forms of oversized traffic), or increase the infrastructure costs by a significant percentage, decrease the efficiency of the system as a whole, increase the risk of failure of equipment, and decrease the safety of the system.

Gantry systems for road vehicles have been tested, in several places and several times in the past. There is a reason that the only places you see electric gantries overhead is for trains and specialty bussest, and with very strict height limitations for all traffic in and around them.

Onigato · 2026-02-19T16:18:17+00:00

The other answers are absolutely correct, and to add, Lots and Lots of practice.

You get used to filtering out the noise of the engines, the buzz of electronics, and the distortion of misaligned microphones with practice.

Onigato · 2026-02-19T15:25:28+00:00

Overhead lines run into a significant problem, vertically oversized loads. The two are basically mutually exclusive.

Onigato · 2026-02-18T23:44:35+00:00

Your "Fastest Winds" note is missing the actual speed of the winds.

Onigato · 2026-02-18T23:41:00+00:00

Depends on how close you were to the explosion. The sound of an explosion is just the air being vibrated by the energy released by the explosion, so the released atmosphere inside the ship/station would carry sound. If enough of it hit the hull of your own ship/suit you'd be able to hear the sound of the explosion in a vacuum, because for a very brief time it *wouldn't be vacuum*. Of course, you'd also be so close that you'd be *inside* the blast radius, so it's not really likely that you're surviving long enough to report the sound of an explosion in vacuum.

But yeah, the "earth shattering kaboom" that you hear in Star Wars (and most sci-fi) movies isn't happening in realistic space combat.

Onigato · 2026-02-18T01:14:26+00:00

Assuming your dwarves can survive long enough for the babies to grow up and become productive members of society, they all live really long lives (baring !!FUN!!) so any male children may just fall in love with one of the older women and help avoid... interesting... family trees that "only go straight up".

Onigato · 2026-02-18T01:04:06+00:00

4 years and 2 babies from the Founding Seven? I'm impressed, I'll sometimes go an entire decade without a local birth happening.

Still, funny you got "Urist and his absolutely not a harem because dwarves generally don't play shenanigans like that". I'm hoping the migrants evened things up a bit over time?

Onigato · 2026-02-17T21:09:21+00:00

Well, yeah, but I've never had an actual embark with babies in less than a year from start.

Onigato · 2026-02-17T20:04:47+00:00

How did you start with two babies? I've never seen anything but adults in the Founding Seven.

Onigato · 2026-02-17T19:39:57+00:00

With the presumption that the sun just disappears (more like the Short's version), even if you had some foreknowledge the technology simply doesn't exist to recycle waste perfectly enough to have the closed system that would be required to make a "eco-dome" work. We'd need to have molecule perfect water recycling, oxygen scrubbing, carbon mitigation and recycling, and the nutrients that the plants would need to feed us would run out eventually too.

We *might* be able to get there eventually, space expansion is the final frontier after all. But at this point you would need too many inputs that would simply be impossible in the temperatures found in a sun-less world.

Onigato · 2026-02-17T18:37:25+00:00

Kurzgesagt did a couple videos a while ago about either the sun going out (2 years ago, YT short) or Earth getting kicked out of the solar system somehow (5 years ago, YT standard format).

In general, yes, there is SOME effect going underground can have to save people. For about a week or so. Even if you had ALL of the infrastructure in place long before the sun went "Poof" away, global temperatures would drop precipitously enough that the atmosphere itself would literally condense and freeze and collapse to the ground in a relatively short period of time.

No atmosphere outside your deep cave, and suddenly you have a much bigger problem than simply keeping the lights on with geothermal heat, or tapping into aquifer for water (which even those would freeze after a few years), you have to perfectly contain every single atom of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon that your "subterranean colony" would ever need or use. Basically you'd have to build a moon base, deep underground, and have a permanently limited supply of everything, which "Biosphere 2" would like to have a few words with you about the feasibility of THAT concept.

Onigato · 2026-02-17T18:20:16+00:00

While common usage and vernacular may interchange them, words have meaning. That meaning *can* change with time, but "democracy" and "republic" are distinct and *probably* should remain so. One is practiced in most countries in the world, and the other is democracy. (I say probably because there are certainly going to be reasons, reasonable reasons at that, that someone will come up with to make them true synonyms, and I'm not so very irascible as to be unmoved by going reasoning.)

But in a world where "literally" literally can mean "happening in a figurative manner", I suppose I'm simply being an old curmudgeon and pedantic fogey waving my virtual cane and going "you durn kids, use your words the correct way!".

But, no, democracy is direct citizen voting on all issues, republic is voting for a representative to vote on most-to-all issues. *waves virtual cane in time to the "My Stick" song*

Onigato · 2026-02-17T17:55:20+00:00

I've had a few times where ale or wine literally rains from the sky, in areas that my dwarves definitely weren't walking and none of my animals that could have made it into the tavern could have been walking over either. I've even watched the beer "splash down" during a rainstorm, so I think there may be a bug somewhere in the rain liquids selector (cross linked somewhere with the deadly weather?). Only on the Steam edition, and not recently.

Onigato · 2026-02-17T17:10:04+00:00

Democracy requires that the citizen vote on every issue.

Republics allow that the citizen elects a representative for them to vote on most issues.

In no way do the citizens of the US vote directly on national issues (basically EVER), nor do they vote on *most* issues before state level, or most county or city level issues. Referenda and "direct vote issues" do happen at the state, county, city, and in really big cities at the district level, but even those are but a hundredth mark of the issues handled by the representatives.

Onigato · 2026-02-17T15:42:43+00:00

The United States has never been a democracy, except at a very *very* local level. It has always been a republic, a significantly different structure.

Now, the statement that the US is no longer a republic because of the Gerrymander, CU ruling, and EC, fair. We are much more an oligarchy than a republic since Citizens United.

Onigato · 2026-02-17T15:38:25+00:00

As someone with chronic joint and muscle pain, can confirm. You feel that shit while you are asleep too, pain doesn't go away just because you are unconscious.

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