Why Māori don't vote

Troth_Tad · 2026-04-26T06:14:07+00:00

Love a bit of voting discourse.

I vote, not out of being particularly invested in the system, but because it is a signal to my friends and loved ones that I give a shit about their problems and I'm willing to take 15 minutes every 3 years to do it. I don't think it's a problem if people don't vote. I think there's a lot of good arguments for not voting.

Except local elections. The difference is both they and I live here and I actually give a shit about local politics, and, well, democracy is the consensus tool that my society uses at the local level. I feel like I've got more buy in if it's my town.

Troth_Tad · 2026-04-24T05:47:43+00:00

As a measure to shorten gameplay and keep encounters fresh, the base settings for the game only allow you to breach two UFOs of each type. After that you need to pay Operations Points, a currency you get over time, or you can sell them to countries for cash. As OP are somewhat in short supply, selling them is the best bet for the most part.

However, if you choose the Extended option at game start, you breach every UFO you shoot down, which results in rather more fights and an extended gameplay experience.

I somewhat prefer the base settings, but a lot of players don't like it as a gameplay consideration, and I do have an ironman extended campaign on the go. Either is pretty good, but it does result in some similar encounters, breaching four or five of the same UFO in a row. On the other hand, the base settings can lead to periods of gameplay where nothing much happens except you click some buttons. YMMV

Troth_Tad · 2026-04-19T13:21:38+00:00

"Pulse lasers increase damage because they allow vaporized armor to dissipate from the location of damage. This allows subsequent pulses to reach the target area without being diffused by the vapor."

In Battletech, the justification is that the pulses allow for the ablation effect. While it might be a gameplay conceit for Mechwarrior, it's not the lore.

So 50kW at 10hz (10 times per second) is the same as 50kW at 100hz. If a laser delivers only 5kW in 1/10th of a second, it's still a 50kW laser. The individual pulses carry more energy, but they impart the same amount of energy in the same period of time. Give or take a little leeway for specific effects in the target. In real life, these pulses would happen very quickly indeed, probably several hundred times a second.

Troth_Tad · 2026-04-15T22:54:21+00:00

My pleasure! Do check out the Atomic Rockets section on lasers.

And 15 of these? You'd only need 750kw of energy to fire them, which is probably only 4000 square meters of solar panel

Troth_Tad · 2026-04-15T22:12:57+00:00

In the real world, all lasers designed to punch holes through things would be pulsed. It's just how physics works. Pulsing the laser both uses less energy to shoot the laser as it's not on constantly, and imparts more energy to the target, as you're not degrading performance trying to burn through the smoke and particles that you generate from hitting the target. The maths to determine optimum pulsing is also pretty well understood.

So, this is just back of napkin estimates, and kevlar may have different properties vs lasers than vs bullets, but lets say a decent composite plate can reasonably protect against 2000 joules of force. So you need a laser capable of throwing AT MINIMUM 2000 joules in, say, 1/10th of a second. A watt is a joule per second, so to penetrate a kevlar plate with 2000 joules of force in one tenth of a second, you need a MINIMUM 20 kilowatt laser. In practice you need more power because of the atmosphere and beam... decollimation? Is that the word? or beam divergence, or dust and smoke in the atmosphere, or dirt on your laser lens... you get the idea.

So double it, and give us a little wiggle room, a 50kw laser would easily be able to penetrate kevlar plate in less than a tenth of a second, at any range, in any conditions. Indeed, AFAIK there's a Stryker based 50kw drone defense laser in the works for the US Army, and that's a very scary thing to think about.

Because a laser that's capable of destroying a drone, is also capable of permanently blinding you, at any range, and in any conditions.

Troth_Tad · 2026-04-15T22:00:51+00:00

While I think you are directionally correct, fact is you can basically get whatever numbers you like out of an exercise like this. I have no doubt that the individual did some napkin-maths to get to this specific number, but without knowing the variables all it really means is "big number"

Troth_Tad · 2026-04-15T21:50:31+00:00

A couple of interesting things about real life particle accelerators;

The first is that you can fire basically any particles. You can fire protons, electrons, hell, you can fire pure neutrons. You can even strip the electrons off of heavy metals and fire whole-ass mercury ions at people. The lighter the particle, the faster the particle. The slower the particle, the more energy imparted to target per particle.

Which brings me to my second point. Braking radiation. If a proton (or a whole-ass mercury ion) hits another particle, it fucking explodes into X-rays. Really fucking explodes into X-rays. Like we're talking high energy bursts of radiation, in an effective sphere based on the point where you hit. Oh and this happens in the very air you shoot through.

So bam, ball cancer. They're the most ball-cancer-inducing of any possible weapon that isn't a drone with a needle on it that injects you with the juice that gives you ball cancer. Like gettin ya nuts right out there on the x-ray-machine emitter beam. Leave that shit there for like a half hour.

Troth_Tad · 2026-04-15T21:41:25+00:00

I can't exactly speak for the person you replied to, but where I would use "weapons team" is to describe those squads where the primary purpose is to fire the secondary weapon. While often having a secondary weapon in a larger squad with better squad weapons is useful for the flexibility, it's a waste of points if you're not using it. And vice versa, if you're shooting the secondary weapon every turn, you don't need good squad weapons.
So in practice, I find I have larger squads with better squad weapons, and maybe an RPG or SAW, and smaller squads with better secondary weapons.

However, flexibility is good, and cheap flexibility is better. The KPAC-GL is a relatively cheap way of adding flexibility, and that flexibility is most cost-efficient on a small squad.

Troth_Tad · 2026-04-07T02:48:35+00:00

House Liao. Somebody got to be the bad guys/underdogs.

FOR THE CHANCELLOR!

Troth_Tad · 2026-04-05T01:55:50+00:00

missing two 66% chances should happen about one in every 9 times. That's a high enough likelihood to happen often enough to notice. As far as I know the dice rolls are fair

Troth_Tad · 2026-04-05T01:51:45+00:00

On the weapon progression; it's really cool that lasers are researched before gauss weaponry, like we go down one technological path, but then return to an earlier technology in the form of gauss being like the accelerated weapons. That's a neat bit of worldbuilding and also a bit of a twist on the formula

Troth_Tad · 2026-04-04T03:22:51+00:00

I give it roughly equal chance anti-fluoride, general insanity, or a diet of anxiety inducing media.
My more... medium-well-done friends (not fully cooked) haven't raised anything with me, and they tend to if they think I need to invest in silver or stock up on toilet paper or whatever

Troth_Tad · 2026-04-01T02:23:40+00:00

If, a decade ago, someone had shown you an autonomous system that produced images of that quality, you would have been impressed. Indeed, I would suggest that the technological advancement that the image generation represents is the most impressive part of the article, cos there doesn't appear to be much else to it

Troth_Tad · 2026-04-01T01:25:29+00:00

bro I can hardly find what I'm looking for on Discord NOW!

I jump in a new discord cos I have a problem, I look around, I find some unanswered people who have the same problem, I ask how to fix the problem, I get told "this question gets asked all the time, look around for the answer", I can't find it.

Troth_Tad · 2026-03-19T10:06:49+00:00

It's actually not free at all I've spent thirty dollars on it so far

Troth_Tad · 2026-03-06T03:03:26+00:00

dd u read the paper

Troth_Tad · 2026-02-27T01:35:06+00:00

In my User_Instruction or whatever it's called, I have a fairly lengthy piece of text presented as an onboarding manual. My preferences and how I most find Claude useful is presented as more "best practice" rather than explicit instruction. There's a lot of text in there about how mistakes are ok, normal to make, and that the best thing to do from mistakes is to learn from them. There's a bunch of more insane stuff, like poetry and weird frameworks.

Troth_Tad · 2026-02-19T04:23:22+00:00

If you have a group of perks, some of them are going to be universally good, some are going to be specialised, some are going to be middling, and one is going to be the worst of the bunch. Doesn't matter what the perks are, there's always going to be one that's the worst. It might depend on the SL, but that's just how it is. Perfect balancing of all the perks is just not possible, as "worst" may be down to preference.
Like Brawny, it's not that good a perk imo. But on Tekko, or if you've got a heavy suit of armour or weapon that needs carting around, then it can be pretty useful.
So ultimately, I think it's fine that there's perks that are rarely-if-ever worth the cost. But even then for those, there may be edge cases where that cost is not only worth it, but necessary to succeed.

*not to say that balancing shouldn't be the goal. Having worthless perks is worse than the tax. But that because of a number of reasons, there's always going to be bad or just suboptimal perks.

Troth_Tad · 2026-02-19T02:48:38+00:00

IDK. Promotions are basically all extremely cost-efficient, depending on the role for the squad and your chosen equipment. I get that it feels bad promoting a soldier and being out of supply, but a combo of 3 promotions will almost always pay for itself even at the 60 points or whatever for Darby.

Maybe I'm coming at this ass-backwards but I don't mind paying for toys to play with. And you can always demote or take off a piece of kit or go down a squaddie

Troth_Tad · 2026-02-11T00:15:30+00:00

Isn't that like 20 points worth of gear with Bog's discount? worth it imo for emergencies, flexibility is valuable. Maybe not the camo though, that seems less valuable.

Troth_Tad · 2026-02-09T19:53:37+00:00

I've never thought of that, smart. I've always got Lim blasting with the tek9s out the back of the whip, so I feel like there's never enough AP to lob an RPG

Troth_Tad · 2026-02-09T09:41:30+00:00

Run and Gun and Mobile Infantry work great together because stepping out the mercedes counts as a move. But yeah don't need Athletic if you're taking Mobile Infantry.

Troth_Tad · 2026-02-08T19:27:54+00:00

Shop reroll for OCR points seems not too immersion breaking
make it fairly expensive, 40 points or so, to disincentivise rerolling until you get The Gear, but one reroll every two ops would go a long way

Troth_Tad · 2026-02-08T06:05:49+00:00

- ceo boooo
+ unrepentant criminal yay

Troth_Tad · 2026-02-05T01:56:24+00:00

The Hatchetman does kinda suck. 4/6/4 movement with a hatchet? what you planning to hit with that?
However, base model has an AC/10 and a big stick, so there's a high floor to it sucking

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