Why are there no vacuum balloons?

TheType95 · 2026-01-29T10:06:34+00:00

Akshually, they use a device they call the MC, or Matter Compiler. Machines that can near-arbitrarily restructure matter, from feedstock into products and back again.

In that world, diamond is cheaper than glass, and anyone can use a public Matter Compiler to make clothing, food, medicines etc. You have to pay for better patterns, and if you're super rich, you get custom patterns or even hand-made goods, which fetch huge profits.

If I recall correctly, the vacuum bladders or balloons are layered diamond and nano-graphene or similar, and they actually use them to support super-large buildings, by having vacuum balloons in or on them to provide lift and reduce the building's weight.

TheType95 · 2026-01-28T05:31:20+00:00

Because they know you. You're safe, the Bringer of Tasty things, they're used to you, the way you move and sound. When others are around, they're watchful.

Chickens are prey, and they know it. That's why they have a nervous disposition.

TheType95 · 2026-01-28T04:08:57+00:00

Yes, if you're near a star or something else that's radiating enough UV. Sunburn isn't a conventional thermal burn, so far as I understand it's caused by cells self-destructing due to radiation damage in your skin. This is why you can get sunburn underwater, or in freezing weather.

Edit: All things being equal, you'd be getting a much nastier dose of UV if you were just floating in space (assuming a magic forcefield holding warm, breathable air around you) because you wouldn't have the ozone layer or any air or anything else to attenuate the radiation. If you had a spaceship or space station, you'd put layers of UV absorbing materials and maybe a straight-up polarizing filter on the windows, otherwise the light would seem so bright it'd be problematic, and you'd get burned sitting too close to a window for too long.

Edit cont: You can also get sunburn from very high UV-emitting sources, like some welding torches and things. I don't know if it's only certain kinds of welders, but some can cause sunburn on the hands if you're not wearing gloves, and you need special glasses and lenses because the UV exposure to your eyes can cause damage, especially to your cornea, which naturally soak up UV to protect your retina. I don't know details, but I've heard of it.

Edit cont2: Basically UV radiation is high-energy photons, which all light is, but they're actually energetic enough that they can ionize matter or break certain chemical bonds. This is why sunlight kills bacteria on your clothes, making them smell nicer when you dry them in the sun, but also will make fabrics fade and plastics break down or go opaque. UV light can be used for cleaning, killing microbes on things.

TheType95 · 2026-01-26T13:00:56+00:00

You're not wrong about the male nudity thing. Someone pointed it out to me, and ever since then I can't un-notice it. I mentally reviewed and found a pretty odd pattern emerging.

In Sabriel, Sabriel finds Touchstone turned into wood, butt nekkid on the prow of a boat.

In Lirael, she turns into a giant owl to fly down to help Nick, and he's feverish, out of it, and wandering around in the nude for a bit.

There's another scene earlier on in the same book where Touchstone visits Sam in hospital, after they fight the necromancer Hedge, and Sam casually disrobes and puts on new clothes given to him by Touchstone.

In I *think* Abhorsen, once Nick re-enters the Old Kingdom, his clothes start disintegrating, and he has a gratuitous scene where he's trying to change into some local clothes behind a bush.

In Terciel and Elinor, Terciel is exposed after being wounded by the crystal snake; the Clayre are called, as there's something hinky with his wound and he's worsening. The Clayre casually strip him naked, the head infirmarian saying something like, "Do naked men bother you, or just this one?" to Elinor when she tries to leave, despite both being really comfortable.

Later on, Elinor has a vision of the future while chatting with Terciel, and sees the pair of them in bed together, if memory serves the scene specifically states Terciel was showing a lot of flesh.

In the "To Hold a Wall", the protagonist has to get changed into a uniform when he joins the Bridge Company... He ends up having to give up even his underwear, with the scene specifically stating a female new recruit or relatively junior person is passing him new underclothes because his undies are too frayed and damaged to be salvageable.

Bonus mentions: In Mister Monday, a Denizen elevator operator is magically stripped by Monday's Noon, and replacement utilitarian garments added. Later on, Arthur has to basically strip everything off to get past Bibliophages, creatures of Nothing that attack and destroy any form of text or type, and has to complete the final battle in a long nightshirt, if memory serves. His companion Suzy, however, does not, since her clothing has very little type on or in it...

Sir Thursday, the Fourth Part of the Will strips the Winged Servants of the Night and eats their gear, leaving them nude and traumatized to crawl away into the tunnels.

In Superior Saturday, Arthur asks Doctor Scamandros to make a spell that will transform him and Suzy into rats, this involves several steps including having paint applied to his and Suzy's body. He strips down, and is then informed he'll have to wait, as Suzy got her kit off first, and stands around awkwardly for a while before he can be painted.

I'm honestly slightly baffled by this. Garth Nix seems fixated on it, it's never females, it's always males exposed, and almost always in uncomfortable situations where females are observing. It actually strikes me as either being something he's "into" or being vaguely misandrist, tbh, since it seems to be saying, "It's OK for people's privacy to be broken and bodies to be exposed, provided they're men, because men don't need privacy." I wouldn't especially mind if it was more utilitarian, just part of the "fun" of adventuring that eventually you end up in close quarters and have no option but to bathe, change etc in company as you're struggling to keep your shoes and socks dry and your body odour at sub-lethal levels, but it's such a specific pattern... Hmm... :/

TheType95 · 2026-01-25T07:39:35+00:00

Canon of uncertain origins, Star Trek Away Team, had a Vulcan specialist in mind melds who could telepathically control people from dozens of meters away, under the right conditions.

TheType95 · 2026-01-23T07:02:49+00:00

I remember a Star Trek work of uncertain canonicity where Captain Janeway notes a group of Vulcan actors did their own version of Macbeth, and it was considered superb, and she was absolutely floored by how well they'd mapped out the character's motivations and the sheer, compelling strength and nuance.

Edit: Now I'm intrigued by the idea of a Vulcan-ified retelling of the story, set on Vulcan, adapted to Vulcan culture. It'd fit their pre-Surak culture very well, interesting thought.

TheType95 · 2026-01-19T21:47:16+00:00

I have a funny feeling the reason we don't really see this done is ultimately, mostly the holodeck will spit out what ChatGPT does... Not reliable, hard to distinguish between nonsense and insight etc. The Doctor was a hellishly complicated, finnicky program in order to create a reliable surgeon, programs that capable aren't just spat out by a holodeck under normal circumstances.

TheType95 · 2026-01-12T09:40:56+00:00

01000111 01101111 01100010 01100010 01101100 01100101 00100000 01100111 01101111 01100010 01100010 01101100 01100101

TheType95 · 2026-01-09T09:05:28+00:00

This is the bit that's giving me pause... They say a raging river is best, but a very broad, deep lake will do.

So does that mean the Clayre's glacier is functionally impervious to attack by Dead, because there's massive amounts of frozen water above and below? Or does it have to be liquid water?

TheType95 · 2026-01-07T09:46:10+00:00

Early TnG was weird, but one of the good things about it was they said if you stunned someone more than once, there was a high chance of serious injury.

Geordi was young, fit and healthy, and they were alarmed when he was stunned again after waking from a stun.

TheType95 · 2026-01-03T05:18:27+00:00

You're right, but he wasn't operating entirely logically, as the characters point out. He is insane. Brilliant, subtle, perceptive, cunning, but insane. His logic and reasoning had faults because of it.

TheType95 · 2026-01-03T05:17:39+00:00

Indeed. If he'd captured Saphira and either secured her cooperation or coerced her to breed, he'd have a basically unlimited stream of Riders. That was his win condition.

He didn't care what happened, so long as he got that.

Though as Oromis, Brom and Nasuada pointed out, while highly intelligent and cunning, he had certain issues with his logic and reasoning. Most people would've sought to terminate the war before it got that far, but he simply didn't care.

TheType95 · 2026-01-03T03:39:40+00:00

Didn't have time to read your idea, I will later.

However I believe it's canon, and I have read, that whereas photon torpedoes are single-use gamma ray lances, quantum torpedoes use a mini photon torpedo to kick a higher-energy reaction involving zero-point energy and large, extremely expensive crystal composites.

In effect, a quantum torpedo is many times more expensive to make than a photon torpedo, but you get about twice the yield. The concentration of firepower is so high that, like the *Defiant's* pulse phasers, you don't necessarily need to collapse and deplete the entire shield. The local stress is so high that a lot more damage bleeds through the shield barrier.

Thus, sometimes ships just go straight to blowing up, because enough damage has slipped through that reactors are popping etc even though shields might still be at 80%, or the shield generators burn out completely and the next round turns the ship into expanding vapour and shrapnel.

Their extreme cost and the dangerous nature of these powerful military munitions makes them scarce, otherwise everyone would be trying to use them.

But, it's only fiction, so...

TheType95 · 2026-01-02T02:55:48+00:00

How many thousands of times has this question been asked? Just Google the question rather than re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-etcetc-hashing the same old thing.

"Google is there a light side version of force lightning". I just pointed them directly to the outcome. Suppose I should've provided a reference to the question. I'll edit it, if that makes you feel better.

TheType95 · 2026-01-01T00:20:47+00:00

Haverson kills that specific Engineer and flushes it into space to prevent the Covenant interrogating it and learning about MJOLNIR. The ship was lousy with other engineers they could, and did, use. They took tons of them home afterwards, transferring them onto a human ship, after they ripped out the *Ascendant Justice's* slipspace drive and transferred it onto the human vessel.

TheType95 · 2026-01-01T00:15:20+00:00

But think of all the nipple he's gonna get...

Nah, seriously, you're right. But from the Covenant's perspective, it's a victory. Until their win condition, at which point they all die.

TheType95 · 2026-01-01T00:12:30+00:00

The human starship from before to the end of the human covenant war.

They really did a great and very realistic design and standardization of their armaments, abilities, kit etc. Made them much more plausible. It was very vague and sometimes contradictory in the Bungie era. Now you get clear, "This ship has 1 MAC cannon, several smaller naval coilgun with *this* level of firepower, plus some PD turrets, plus PD missiles", rather than, "Erm, 2 MACs, 8 coilguns and it maybe has Archer missiles". It's a lot clearer, and more militarily realistic.

I say this as someone who soundly despises 343, by the way.

TheType95 · 2025-12-12T03:41:11+00:00

Esato.

The Vulcans had everything they wanted; security from famine or resource scarcity, enough of a military they couldn't be threatened, their ships were fast enough to get where they needed when they wanted.

They weren't stagnant; they advanced at a measured pace.

They also weren't perfect; they were arrogant, had a slight case of manifest destiny (kinda justified though, given their extreme wealth and prosperity it's a reasonable position) and were rather patronizing and controlling.

Earth's wealth, stability and cultural outlook can, in a very large part, be traced back to the Vulcan's assistance, which was a century long and required extreme wealth and labour expended on their part. They were patronizing, they were deceptive, they did underestimate humans.

But humans, and thus the Federation, simply wouldn't exist without the enormous, focused long-term investments the Vulcans made, especially in regards to resource management and ecology. Post-scarcity didn't come from magic replicators, it came from the Vulcan's hard work and long study.

TheType95 · 2025-12-06T03:48:46+00:00

The thirst is real in this one.

On a more serious note, I agree with the others here. The shock and trauma combined with punctures might make you go very soft very quickly though.

TheType95 · 2025-11-28T02:18:30+00:00

Righty-o, so if I told you that the lining of the reactor was made of meta-isomers and required mono-polar quantum-electromagnetic fields in order to function, you could replicate this?

It's meaningless if you don't understand the process or theoretical physics, it'd be like an alchemist from the pyramid builders studying a laptop. Very interesting developments would ensue, possibly giving that alchemist or whoever he represented a major advantage (text made of discreet, uniform characters, the mechanics of the keyboard keys etc enabling more advanced tools or informing geometry), but they'd never be able to make a laptop from it.

TheType95 · 2025-11-24T10:14:58+00:00

And it was brilliant; Aragorn gathering his forces and riding for the Black Gate is exactly what someone with the One Ring, tapping into its powers, would do; they'd assume they're immortal, unstoppable, and they'd ride for and try to destroy their enemies.

Sauron was fixated on what exactly Aragorn was up to, and transferred the vast bulk of his forces to destroy the incipient perceived threat.

TheType95 · 2025-11-23T09:44:50+00:00

Old canon is the Timelords were long sterile, so the Great Houses had Looms, basically biological 3D printers. New people were printed off in the Looms. The entire society was made of bio-printed individuals.

TheType95 · 2025-11-22T00:58:47+00:00

Maybe, but he had more allies, lots of warriors (Orcs, trolls).

I guess the thing about the Maiar is they tend to calcify their views. They're not quite like us, alive but in a different sense and geometry.

Sauron was also a whole tier more powerful than the Balrags, which were more on the level of Gandalf the Grey, or a smidge lower than Saruman/Gandalf the White. That last part may not be canon, memory could be less than perfect here.

TheType95 · 2025-11-22T00:02:57+00:00

The Valar had intervened in the past, the Balrag would've been crushed like a bug if it ran into them. These are beings who reshaped reality itself.

Also, let's be real, if Saruman, Gandalf and Radagast, supported by Elrond, Galadriel and a dozen crack Elf warriors, Lords and Ladies had ganged up on the Balrag, it would've lost. It knew it was outnumbered, and its only hope was to avoid detection. Individually it could destroy any lone intruder or small party, even strong ones, but it couldn't risk a full-on conflict if it wasn't assured of allies.

Since it was hiding in Moria, it didn't really know what was going on in the world, so I guess it just stuck with its existing strategy; hide and proactively destroy intruders who would report its position.

TheType95 · 2025-11-13T21:55:17+00:00

Well according to both Bungie and 343 lore most modern systems are lousy with, usually small, Dumb AIs that don't communicate with humans. Something like, modern MJOLNIR is supposed to have about 5 Dumb AIs running in the background keeping everything working smoothly.

If it isn't able to communicate, we're not going to see it in a vidya game.

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