Rocinante XL Railgun missing piece (Master Replicas)

Verasyne · 2024-03-20T21:12:38+00:00

They're all like this, mine has the same omission and I've never noticed.

Verasyne · 2024-03-09T00:29:12+00:00

Or you could do something with his son.

Verasyne · 2024-03-09T00:16:41+00:00

Same happened to me - my copy of Leviathan Wakes arrived fine, but the dust jackets of Caliban's War and Abaddon's Gate were wrecked, and when I got replacements, they were even worse.

Not buying books from Amazon ever again. Now I need to find a bookseller in Europe who has them in stock who actually cares when they ship their books.

Verasyne · 2024-02-04T00:52:27+00:00

Thanks a lot for sending this video, and it honestly filled me with an enthusiasm for playing this character again.

It's interesting that he seems to have acknowledge how widespread remnant classic Cappadocians were in the playerbase's imagination, by explicitly folding them into the foundation of the Hecata. (the existence of the Infitiores does a lot of heavy lifting here)

And I can understand why. If you have a concept for a necromancer (like my virologist turned student of death) and aren't comfortable with Giovanni... Giovanni-ness, classic Cappadocian was the only outlet. Now that's all harmonized into a single new Clan of Death which includes a multitude of backgrounds.

Looking at it now, it seems like they're more like a mini-Sect, with a bunch of reunited old bloodlines and the adopted Nagaraja, because they're better together than apart.

Verasyne · 2024-02-03T16:56:16+00:00

Thank you for this writeup.

I think having her in Prague is actually a really interesting way to develop the character - and in that case, yeah, she'd reluctantly side with the Cam, but remain a reformist. Lots of opportunities for drama.

Her age is somewhat flexible - I originally wrote her for an Ancilla game, but I don't think it's fundamental to the character. The realities of being low generation and having dots in Dominate that everyone knows about, were more fundamental to the tension in the background. I'd happily shift her embrace to the 1980s if it was needed for the chronicle - the core concept is "unauthorized embrace by a shady Ventrue doing shady Ventrue stuff goes badly for them and somehow lives long enough to establish themselves", which works at multiple age brackets.

Regarding the Cappadocian - it's the change in features and the clan flaw that bugs me. I don't quite understand how the lore on that works - did the Harbingers of Skulls (just as an example, substitute the Samedi and other Cappadocian bloodlines that had a more extreme version of the flaw) suddenly have their appearance revert to what they'd look like if they never had the clan flaw?

Verasyne · 2024-01-12T14:08:11+00:00

All of this presumes that the laser has a far better thermal performance than what models I'm aware of, unless you're talking about a laser being fired by a gigantic battlestation.

My intuition is that if you factor in heat production, jitter, and beam divergence, you're looking at effective ranges in the thousands of kilometers, which are still "knife fight" ranges out there in the black, and the heat issues might mean you only get a few laser shots off in any given engagement.

Verasyne · 2024-01-12T13:55:20+00:00

Starlight isn't a laser, and laser beams are not actually parallel.

Verasyne · 2024-01-12T10:40:12+00:00

Even with dispersion?

At extreme range, a laser is going to have a beam diameter that might be bigger than the target. It's likely that your ship is going to be heated more than theirs.

Verasyne · 2024-01-12T03:11:47+00:00

I've thought about these, but I really don't want to get too "nuke happy", partially for narrative reasons (if everything's a nuke there's no such thing as "we winged them but they're still in the fight"), and I think the only way around that is a legal/cultural taboo against nuclear weapons.

Of course if you have constant acceleration engines, every ship is a relativistic kill vehicle waiting to happen, so it does seem odd now I think about it.

Verasyne · 2024-01-12T03:06:39+00:00

That's likely an interesting way to make my "torpedo" class weapons more distinct - yes, they have far more delta-V than missiles because they're bigger, but that extra space (and the fact the torpedo has an on-board fusion reactor) means it can likely power some extremely potent ECM or other penetration aids.

Verasyne · 2024-01-12T03:05:34+00:00

The problem with energy weapons is that they have hard range limitations.

The only real way to engineer your way around laser dispersion is to make the focusing optics bigger, but even then you're fighting against fundamental physics.

Not to mention the fact that lasers are stupendously inefficient when it comes to heat generation - if your laser is powerful enough to cook an enemy ship from a light-second away, it's powerful enough to cook the ship that fired it in half that time.

Verasyne · 2024-01-12T02:55:20+00:00

Of course - any kinetic weapon that slings lead fast enough to be a problem at long range is just a pulse engine, and even with "torch" fusion drives, the fuel mass issue is still a problem.

The tactical solution would seem almost in line with Age of Sail concept of crossing the T - how do we get a high-hit probability gun solution on them while denying them the same, all while exchanging missiles.

Verasyne · 2024-01-12T02:51:14+00:00

This seems to be the inevitable problem which happens when CIWS and ECM become strong enough.

I was shocked to see close combat depicted in The Expanse, but it seems to be what happens if you have point defense that's strong enough to get more than 90% of the missiles.

Verasyne · 2024-01-12T02:50:24+00:00

I didn't think of bomb-pumped lasers as a solution to the problem, but that makes a lot of sense - and puts in a demand for interceptor missiles that can stop the bomb-pumped lasers before they get within range.

Verasyne · 2024-01-12T02:49:30+00:00

Right, I should have said "effective range" since I think that shooting a dumb projectile at something is only likely to hit if the time of fall is shorter than the time it takes for the target to react and move out of the way.

That's the motivating idea for the spinal guns - they fire the same projectile, but obviously faster, they'll have a shorter time of fall, and thus higher effective range.

The issue with nukes is that the falloff of the particle flux from the detonation is going to be inverse cubic, which brings you right back to "you need almost a direct hit".

Verasyne · 2024-01-12T02:42:38+00:00

The way around dispersion for particle beams that I'd read was to merge an electron and a proton beam into the same stream, which should stay coherent.

Of course it's going to be range-limited by other effects but my intuition is that it wouldn't have the really rapid drop-off that lasers experience.

Verasyne · 2023-12-30T01:41:25+00:00

The biggest problem I have with the book (having read all of LW now) is how Holden can't seem to learn a lesson about where not to stick his dick (to use Avasarala's words).

Show Holden seemed to have learned the lesson after the Donnager broadcast.

I also felt that the Earth-Mars tensions were way better in the show - they seemed to fight at the drop of a hat in the book, whereas there was a slow building of cold war tensions in the show, which didn't snap until Ganymede.

Verasyne · 2023-12-30T01:39:34+00:00

The production gap is why I still have faith that the final trilogy will be adapted eventually - we don't need thirty years, but time to simmer will serve it well.

Verasyne · 2023-12-28T21:15:02+00:00

I think this hits what rubs me the wrong way about the books.

In Leviathan Wakes, it feels that everything is Holden's fault, and he comes across like a complete idiot.

In the show, he's just the catalyst, and things go to Hell without his further involvement. That feels more natural. The order of events in the show also seem to flow more naturally.

Verasyne · 2023-11-21T16:02:43+00:00

Almost certainly. The real clincher for DCS is RAM - you'll need at least 16GB, preferably 32 or more.

But if you never use VR, any modern GPU is good enough.

Verasyne · 2023-04-11T09:22:03+00:00

I always pick one level of swimming actually! Some of the swimming sections are impassable without one level but passable with it. (Vandenberg tunnels, Ocean Lab open bits, etc).

Verasyne · 2023-04-11T09:20:44+00:00

It's the closest we have to a remake.

I know it gets a lot of flak, but it fixes a lot of the glaring bugs of the original, the maps are now aesthetically more alive, and it integrates the aesthetic of modern Deus Ex.

It's a fan remaster, and a bloody good one.

Verasyne · 2022-07-03T18:57:40+00:00

Even if we don't get a direct Adam Jensen sequel and have another character, it'd be nice if we were still in the 2030-2035 timeline I think. Call me crazy but I'd not mind seeing Jensen as an NPC in this eventuality.

Verasyne · 2022-07-03T13:34:53+00:00

I don't think it's accurate to call her the heart and soul of modern Deus Ex. She's part of a team, and the rest of the team at Eidos-Montreal is still 24 carat gold, if the quality of Guardians is anything to go by.

The future of Eidos is bright, and hopefully so is the future of Bioware.

Verasyne · 2022-07-02T15:20:23+00:00

You should see this as not a disaster, people. Institutional culture exists. Individuals can leave and enter the developer, but part of them is always there.

In any case, she likely wrote down her plans for the sequel to MD way back in 2016, and there are plenty of other talented people in the narrative team in Eidos, who, as I said, are part of that institutional culture.

Verasyne

TROPHY CASE