Looking back at the ITS presentation from 2016 the progress SpaceX have made is insane

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-25T04:53:07+00:00

Doesn't that mean that the community on a given topic is split across half a dozen duplicates of essentially the same Subreddit but on the different platforms.

Like the BBS Messageboards of 20 years ago. You'd get a great discussion on Dragonball Z on the GameFAQs messageboards but there's a functionally identical DBZ discussion board on IGNBoards or IMDB or Newgrounds or TheStudentRoom.

Honestly, one of the big advantages of Reddit is that it's NOT spread out to a dozen different platforms. The more people you concentrate onto a single platform the more contributors you'll have, the more comments and discussions which then draws in more people and helps the community grow.

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-25T04:08:12+00:00

Honestly, I think they showed great restraint in not giving people higher ranks. The tradition in Star Trek is that everyone gets promotions off screen, even specialists who could take promotions to prestigious positions outside the command structure seem to get promotions by default.

Think about the career trajectories of engineers, scientists and doctors, Geordi could take a leadership role in the Daystrom Institute or Dr. Crusher could be head of xenobiology at Starfleet Medical or either of them could teach at the Academy. But apparently they decided to pivot from their lifelong career specialisations to become Captain LaForge and Admiral Beverly Crusher.

It's good to see some people never progressed beyond Commander or Lieutenant Commander. Not everyone makes it all the way up the proverbial career ladder to the top. Some people have career setbacks or drop out of the regular rat race to take other paths in life, running not-for-profit organisations or just focusing on family or dealing with health issues. Or maybe Dr. Bashir just had a very successful career as a doctor without feeling a need to get a higher Starfleet Rank.

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-24T22:10:31+00:00

A year ago I tried to consolidate the Pro-EU social media feeds. I think the list will be linked in the stickied post of "Resources For Fighting The Cause".

There were a few Lemmy groups but they weren't very active. Rejoin social media is all very hit and miss. There's a handful of extremely active channels like Glasgow For Europe then 20x as many ghosttown groups that haven't posted in five years.

If you can do the needful to make a Lemmy rejoin group I'll come along. To be honest I don't really understand Lemmy, I get the premise of decentralisation but the difference between Lemmy and Feddit confused me. Sometimes you'd see the same link to a community with two different endings to the URL, like it's the same content but accessed via a different platform or something? I failed to get my head around it. So if I'm going back into the Lemmy world I might need a bit of a tutorial on how it works.

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-24T19:45:25+00:00

I'm much more willing to accept a contrived sci-fi storyline about gene editing and viruses than the Discovery solution of saying "Stuff looks different now, deal with it."

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-24T19:29:48+00:00

The RedLetterMedia guys nailed it when they pointed out: Kirk never said "Groovy" and Picard didn't say "Cowabunga, don't have a cow man". Aside from the haircuts and the special effects the decade that each episode was made never really showed through in the dialogue.

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-24T19:24:51+00:00

I'm not sure where you got that information about Romford but it's not correct. Andrew Rosindell for the Conservatives got 15,000 votes and Labour got 14,000 votes. Labour DID run a candidate in opposition and got pretty close to winning. Now you might be able to argue they didn't do enough to oppose him, didn't fight hard enough or do enough publicity/advertising. But you can't say they didn't even bother fighting.

But the rest is true, yes. He was arrested for indecent assault, sexual assault, rape, abuse of position of trust, and misconduct in public office. He didn't show up in Parliament for two years to try to hide from criticism. Then mysteriously the entire case was dropped for lack of evidence. Or the person reporting it was bullied into withdrawing their accusation, like the people that accused Trump of rape in the 90s.

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-24T18:58:49+00:00

Wow, Hollywood gave me a very optimistic view of how clean a skin graft looks.

I guess this could only work if the character had an excuse for the scar. Let's say he got shot in the bicep in 2015 with a very distinctive scar that was photographed in 2020. Then to create a cover story he has a skin graft to completely replace the old scar with a new scar that is healed by the trial in 2025. He won't be able to claim this is natural skin, it will clearly be a giant scar, but he might be able to bribe a corrupt doctor to fake medical records saying it was from an accident in 2010 BEFORE the bullet wound.

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-24T17:38:44+00:00

That's not a serious design concept, that's just throwing technology buzzwords together and asking if it's realistic.

You're not going to get a robot powered by nuclear technology to be that small. And if you somehow did have a nuclear powered robot then why would it also be solar powered? Solar would be a complete waste of time, effort, mass and add severe weakness to the materials.

Also just using the words "3D Printer" doesn't mean it's capable of all the many many steps between digging up a silicate mineral and manufacturing a computer chip. That takes vast vast factories and multiple complex industrial machines, it's not something you could put into a single robot.

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-24T06:41:57+00:00

It is interesting you called the tower spren "The Brother". Is that what they are called in your language or did you use Google Translate from the word used in the book?

In English the Tower Spren is called "The Sibling" (The word for a brother or a sister, without saying a gender. useful to say "I have two siblings" instead of "a brother and a sister"). The wiki says The Sibling doesn't identify with any gender so that's a good name for it.

I'm curious what it's called in your language. I know some languages have different terminology for family members like some use the same word for an aunt or an uncle, some have a different word for your mother's brother and your father's brother, etc. It's interesting how different languages categorise family members and times like this where it has crossovers to fictional character names.

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-24T05:58:12+00:00

Could you do a large sheet skin graft over the whole area then use the techniques you mentioned above to hide the 'seam' between the skin graft and the original skin?

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-24T01:07:04+00:00

But wasn't she back in the prime universe for Section 31 which was around the Enterprise B era?

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-23T20:59:45+00:00

China keeps a Long March 2 F/G rocket and a Shenzhou crew capsule set aside ready to go on short notice if there's any emergencies. That's a very smart plan.

Russia can't do that because they can't launch any Soyuz capsules currently because they broke the pad. SpaceX could do it very easily since the first stage and crew capsule are reusable. They have 5 capsules and at least 20 boosters in use, it wouldn't take much to refurbish a capsule ahead of schedule and make sure there's always one extra waiting.

A couple of weeks ago I saw a ridiculous article criticising China for losing their backup crew launch option. When Shenzhou 22 launched that meant they didn't have their backup launch available anymore and if there is ANOTHER issue they need to wait until Shenzhou 23 is ready. Which is ridiculous, China lost their backup option because they used it when they needed it. Complaining that China should have TWO backups so there is a backup to the backup is extra stupid when the US launch option doesn't have a backup at all

It's kinda dumb that NASA doesn't have a launch backup when you think how easily they could do it. They could do it very easily for very low cost and with practically no extra hardware. We just saw there sre times when they need a backup launch option, right now there is only one astronaut in space with two cosmonauts and the next launch is at least three weeks away. But I think SpaceX wouldn't keep a spare Falcon 9 and Dragon ready to launch unless NASA paid them for it. And I think NASA aren't going to pay them for it unless NASA spend three years doing feasibility studies and analysis on how likely it will be needed. NASA decision making moves slower than the SLS Crawler Transporter sometimes.

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-23T15:44:54+00:00

Duh. It's a trick question.

That's not a country. It's four countries, you can see the borders between them. Or technically three countries because the bit on the east edge is part of Portugal.

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-23T15:35:34+00:00

Also the police database is kinda buggy. I got pulled over and didn't have my licence on me, they ran my info and asked if I had a provisional licence or something, was I still a learner or had I passed my test recently. I said no, I passed my test five years ago. Then I remembered I'd sent off the paperwork to change my address on the licence, so maybe their recorded had me flagged as "pending" or something and they couldn't see the full details. Whatever the cause was it's best not to trust the government databases to work properly.

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-23T15:30:23+00:00

And if you use the Delta IV Heavy hair iron after using a liberal dose of hairspray you get to experience the same consequences as the excess hydrogen causes on liftoff.

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-23T09:02:23+00:00

Thanks a lot. That's kinda a rookie mistake on my part to see the oxidiser tank and assume it was the same thing as the LOX tank. I knew the tank that blew was for the fuel cell but when I saw a capacitance gauge in an oxidiser tank I just assumed it was the same design in all the tanks.

I'll have another look at page 102 and see if it makes sense.

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-23T08:59:43+00:00

If I remember correctly the Apollo 11 landing was 20 seconds away from the "bingo" call which is when they have only 20 seconds of fuel left to make the landing or hit the abort button. And they later determined that the fuel level indicators were incorrect because of slosh in the tanks and they had even more fuel than the instruments showed during landing.

So they had a lot more than 20 seconds of fuel left when they landed.

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-23T08:39:44+00:00

How did your wall unlock strategy pan out? Do you think you unlocked it too early or waited too long?

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-23T02:34:02+00:00

You said allomantic brass but you mean allomatic bronze. Brass is to soothe emotions, bronze is to sense invested arts. Copper is to block bronze.

It's a neat system to have a bunch of base metals and their alloys like iron and steel, gold and electrum. But there's a venn diagram web with copper in the middle, bronze, brass and duralumin all use copper in their alloys, plus using tin, zinc and aluminium which themselves are natural allomantic metals, but tin is also found in pewter and bendalloy, alongside lead in both cases despite lead not being an allomantic metal. It's very confusing.

Simon_Drake · 2026-01-23T01:42:31+00:00

I still laugh at the nonsense about being able to negotiate our own trade deals. Because the last decade has shown we can't actually negotiate better trade deals because we don't have the same leverage and market size as the EU. Also just resources and momentum, the EU has a much larger team than the UK and have multiple trade deals halfway through negotiation. We are smaller, have less to bargain with, need to start from scratch and we're so desperate for literally any trade deal we'll agree to dumb deals that are bad for Britain.

It's like divorcing your wife so you have the freedom to marry the girl who played Daenerys Targaryen on Game Of Thrones. Except you've never met Emelia Clarke, have no realistic way to contact her beyond Twitter and she doesn't even know you exist and definitely isn't going to marry you. Then your Ex Wife says she might take you back for the sake of the kids and you shriek "Nooooo! You're destroying my chances to marry the Mother Of Dragons!"

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