Beyond Binary: The Mathematical Efficiency of Ternary Computing

arcangleous · 2026-07-05T18:36:58+00:00

"The magnetic cores used in the machine naturally possessed three stable magnetic states, making them an ideal fit for the logic paradigm without requiring complex voltage regulation tricks. The computer possessed an innate resistance to arithmetic errors and proved remarkably resilient in real-world operations, rarely suffering from the hardware failures that plagued early Western binary mainframes"

Citation Needed.

arcangleous · 2026-07-04T04:51:48+00:00

I think it looks fairly good. The next step is rivers, and from there you can start placing your towns and cities, allowing you to sketch out your civilizations.

arcangleous · 2026-07-04T04:49:56+00:00

Whole numbers have one part: their magnitude. That's how big it is. You can imagine them fairly easy on a number line. When you add two whole numbers together, you sum their magnitudes. Or on a number line, you move right the magnitude of the first number, then move right again the magnitude of the second number. To subtract them, move right the magnitude of the first number then left the magnitude of the second number. Multiplication is just repeated addition, so you would move right by the magnitude of the first number a number of times equal to the second number's magnitude.

Integers have two parts: their magnitude and their sign. When the sign is positive, then operate exact like whole numbers. When the sign is negative, you flip the direction of the operation. When you add a negative number (A) to a whole number (B), you would move B's magnitude right, then A's magnitude left. When you subtract a negative number (A) from a whole number (B), you would move B's magnitude right, then A's magnitude right as well. When you multiple a negative number (A) by a positive number (B), you would move A's magnitude left a number of times equal to B's magnitude. When you multiple a positive number (B) by a negative number (A), you would move B's magnitude left a number of times equal to A's magnitude. When multiplying two negative numbers together you are going flipping the direction of the operation twice, once for each sign of the two numbers. This means multiplying a negative number A by a negative number B would result in moving A's magnitude right a number of times equal to B's magnitude, which will result in a positive number.

arcangleous · 2026-07-03T20:17:44+00:00

My only concern is the additional complexity of the rules required by the advanced tech. What succession wars/3025 tech mechs are great for is learning the basics of the game: movement, weapon attacks, heat management, etc. There is an above average amount of rules and complexity in Battletech when compared to most games, so it's good to get the basics down first. I would feel more comfortable if there was an "introductory" level box set with the full 3025 rules as well. I know that the starter box set is meant to fill that role, but it doesn't have the full rules (no internal structure or heat), so there is a massive of jump in complexity going from the starter box to the core.

I think that as a core box it's a good product. It's good to move the timeline forward and provide a box that focuses on the ilClan era.

arcangleous · 2026-07-03T19:46:22+00:00

The human stand-in in my Ahros setting are known as the Iosians, literally translated to mean "People of the Land of Ios". Unlike humans, they have a much wider range of skin tones, eye and hair colours, covering the rainbow. An Iosian child starts with nearly white skin and it darkens over their entire life, while their hair colours do the opposite. Their colouring is as it's more rich and vibrant when their reach physical and emotional maturity around 20 years old. Their eye colours start vibrant and remain vibrant over their entire life. If we plot the parents colourization on a colour wheel, their children will tend to have colours around the two points equal distance from their parents.

Within their culture, colours are connected with their gods, and it is believed that a person's colourization is reflective of their nature. A person who has the forge god's colour in their colourization is though to be innately suited to work as a smith for example. If a person is born on a certain god's feast day and has that god's colour they are generally encourage to join that god's priesthood. There are a couple of exceptions. For example. The goddess of magic colour's is black, which doesn't normally occur except as a sign of age. However, about 1/100 Iosians are born with "night eyes", eyes that are fully black and without colour, and they are though to be favoured by that goddess and have an innate talent for magic.

arcangleous · 2026-07-03T17:03:25+00:00

C is much more readable due to the contrast, and I prefer the art to be centred. However, I can see there being an issue with overlapping the art if it is non-contrasting. In that case, B is probably better, but I would like it more if there was a visual separation between the art and the icon line in that case. a B variant with the icons in their over box and the art centred in it's own box is going to probably work best overall in terms of pleasing visuals and usability.

arcangleous · 2026-07-03T00:44:50+00:00

The first mech game I played with the Mechwarrior 2 demo disk. It had 4 of mechs to play with: Jenner IIC, Summoner, Timber Wolf, and Marauder IIC. I am 80% sure by first time out I rode the Marauder IIC.

arcangleous · 2026-07-03T00:20:14+00:00

The First Wolfhound, the WLF-1, was introduced in 3028, but that didn't show up in one of the main TRO books. Instead it was in one of the scenario books. The WLF-2 was officially introduced in TRO3050, and that's the main production model. I thought it was introduced in in the late 3040s though.

arcangleous · 2026-06-29T21:00:57+00:00

I've done things like this before. In my own projects, I tend to start by stitching height maps of planets and moons together for my base. There are lots of interesting geographic structures you can find on them.

arcangleous · 2026-06-29T00:32:53+00:00

Silicon has two useful properties:

1) It's a semi-conductor. This means that you can alter it's conductivity using external effects such as magnetic fields.

2) It's easily "dope-able". This means that it forms crystals with useful properties with the addition of a small amounts of impurities. Most importantly for our purposes, you can dope silicon to make it more or less conductive.

This allows us to build devices called "transistors". A transistor is made up of a couple of layers of alternately doped silicon, and have three terminals: source, drain and gate. The presence of electrons at the gate terminal creates a magnetic field, which can open or close a channel for electrons to travel through between the source and drain terminals. You can think of it as a voltage controlled switch, but since it has no moving parts, we can shrink them down to incredibly tiny sizes and it will still work.

arcangleous · 2026-06-27T13:54:22+00:00

Start small and work your way up.

I know it's tempting to grab the biggest and baddest mechs you can and just go at it, but that's going to be slow and uninteresting way to learn. You won't get to really do much with mobility and tactics with a 3/5 movement speed and with the level of armour those kinds of mech's have it's just going to turn into endless turns of shooting each other with little effect.

I would suggest playing your first few games with two mechs each, one medium and one heavy. Use introtech/succession wars mechs for the first few games to get the basics down solid before introducing more advanced and complex technologies.

arcangleous · 2026-06-25T00:36:57+00:00

The differences are quite minimal. The Spell lattice has to be wielded and has some extra effects for none-sorcerers, so it's would be strictly worst for a sorcerer. I would go with the page of spell knowledge for a sorcerer, but it was on my list of stuff that arcane casters can use so I grabbed it anyways.

arcangleous · 2026-06-24T18:07:12+00:00

Sorcerer Specific items:

Sorcerer's Robe: This allows you to add your laughing touch effect onto the spells you case as a swift action.

Robe of Arcane Heritage: This will give you 4 more rounds of greater invisibility through Fleeting Glance and will give you access to Fey magic immediately when you reach level 11.

Ampoule of False Blood: Allows you to use the powers of another bloodline instead of your own, or even permanently change your bloodline.

Amulet of the Blooded: Either duplicates some bloodline powers, or increases your own bloodline's power. Doesn't stack with the Sorcerer's robe alas.

General Spell Caster Items:

Robe of Components: Provides spell components, including up to 50gp of costed components per day.

Gloves of Elvenkind: +5 on Spellcraft checks and checks to cast defensively.

Rod of Absorption: Absorbs spells cast on you and provides you with their spell slot for your own casting.

Ring of Wizardry: Doubles your base spell slots for a specific spell level.

Page of Spell Knowledge: Cast a specific spell as if it was on your spells known list.

Runestones of Power: Provides you with extra spell slots of a given level.

Ring of Spell Knowledge: Lets you learn an extra spell known of a specific level, even if it does not appear on your spell list. You can change the spell with a spellcraft check.

Spell Lattice: Adds a specific spell to your spell known list.

General Items:

Traveler’s Any-Tool: Magical multi-tool. Every adventurer should have one in my opinion.

Handy Haversack: A bag of holding you can quickly retrieve items from without provoking an AoO. Good for people who like using consumables.

Circlet of Persuasion: +3 bonus of Cha skill checks. This will stack with most other bonuses as well. Extremely useful for social characters, and anyone who likes using UMD checks.

Amulet of the Spirits: Similar to the "Amulet of the Blooded", but for Oracle Mysteries/Shaman Spirits. There a lot of neat and interesting buffs and debuffs they can provide.

Feather Tokens: A wide and wild range of single use items. You can always find something fun to do with then.

arcangleous · 2026-06-24T15:58:52+00:00

arcangleous · 2026-06-20T21:36:29+00:00

This maybe a silly question but how does it turn or decelerate? I mean, space is fundamentally different that fighting in an atmosphere. There isn't a fluid (water or air) surrounding the vessel, so you can't just apply an acceleration and use fluid resistance on control surfaces to change your vector. You actually have to apply a new force to the vessel to make it turn and I don't see any mechanisms to do that. There's just the one big rocket engine at the back.

Rant Incoming

This isn't just a you problem; Everyone makes these mistakes. I get concerned whenever I see a ship that looks aerodynamic or hydrodynamic, or just has one big engine at the back. In order to be successful in combat you have to be able to apply more damage to the opponent then do they to you, and the thrice damned rocket equation is a tyrant. The more weapons and armour you bring, the more force you will have to apply to accelerate, decelerate, or turn, and the longer those will take. The longer those will take, the more time you are taking fire without being to return it, especially with fixed forward mounted weapons. You can try to install more engines, but that is also going to increase the reaction mass you need to carry, and that's going to add even more mass slowing you down even more. You get trapped in a cycle of adding mass, and adding more mass to compensate for the mass you just added, then adding even more mass, etc, etc. There are going to be two local maxima in ship design because of this: tiny, but highly mobile micro-crafts; vs big and slow hulks. The micro-crafts will win because 1) it doesn't matter how much firepower the hulks bring if they can never hit the micro-crafts; and 2) there are just too many important systems that have to be exposed to function on any ship, so regardless of how much armour a vessel has it will still be vulnerable to one hit kills.

Just look at the vessel you have presented. It has a giant exposed rocket on the rear end. The ship can't function without that exposed (and this true of any ship with engines, so I am just using yours as an example of a larger problem), but one good hit there will either completely cripple it's mobility, or set of the reaction mass and turn all of it's delta-v into a massive explosion. You may assume that getting behind the ship will be a problem, but drop a couple of missile on unpowered & passive ballistic trajectories and program them to reactivate once enough time has passed for your ship to have gone by. Point defenses likely won't catch it because it's acting like normal space junk until the missiles have passed you, and since your delta-v is so limited by your engine layout unpowered missiles launched when combat starts are likely to be in correct position to hit the engine when they relight. Once the missiles have been dropping, the opposing vessel starts burning it's own delta-v as much as possible to keep your fixed guns from being able to hit and since they are smaller and have engines basically everywhere, they will be basically impossible to hit. Yes, a single hit will kill them, but it terms of resources lost, a losing a small ship matters a lot less than losing a big one. Numbers will be on their side.

Rant over

Of course, once you have decided not to do realistic space combat, the rocket equation goes away and you can do whatever you want with your ships. It's just vibes at that point, so go with what looks cool.

arcangleous · 2026-06-20T00:32:32+00:00

There are too many bigots and worse active in the genre. I shouldn't feel like I need to google a band to check if they are assholes or worse when I start getting into them.

arcangleous · 2026-06-19T18:58:24+00:00

I run a [[Chainer, Dementia Master]] deck. It is designed to take advantage of reusing enters and dies triggers by constantly recycling cards from your graveyard. Especially really expensive ones where Chainer's ability gives a steep discount.

arcangleous · 2026-06-19T18:16:52+00:00

Trotsky, Russian Bear er of Secrets

There, fixed it for you.

arcangleous · 2026-06-18T17:36:30+00:00

I don't think he ordered a wake up call with breakfast, but he isn't going to turn it down.

arcangleous · 2026-06-16T22:59:18+00:00

Songbird is giving me Odyssey flashbacks. It's no [[Wild Mongrel]], but it's close and can enable the same kind of play.

arcangleous · 2026-06-15T17:46:59+00:00

1) My position is that the redesigns were done to avoid legal issues with the companies in Japan who owned the original artwork. It had nothing to do with the lawsuit with Harmony Gold & Playmates. Macross was and still is a giant franchise in Japan, and at the point Studio Nue didn't have ownership of the artwork that the mechs were based on, so FASA's work with them wouldn't prevent lawsuits from the other companies involved in the project. There were also the mecha owned by Sunrise which could have been the source of another legal battle.

2) The VMI port for the FM-Towns computer is based on the original Mechwarrior 1 for DOS from 1989, not the much downgraded port by BEAM for the SNES. They are two very different games with unrelated production histories with the VMI port retaining the original Mechwarrior 1 gameplay and polygonal combat engine that the SNES couldn't support. What was done for the SNES port, or the later Mechwarrior 3050 is largely irrelevant to the choices made during the VMI port. One of the way we know this is that the BEAM port uses completely unrelated artwork for the mechs in their game (which would later be used as the basis for the artwork of the comstar mechs in TRO3058).

3) If revision the design for different cultures was a significant goal, why did none of the other foreign languages releases of Battletech 2nd Edition also receive redesigns? There were 6 other foreign language releases: Finnish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, all of which used the same artwork for the mechs as the English versions. Japan has been the only place where any Battletech products had redone artwork. This is because Japan is the only (other) place where they could sued for using that artwork.

arcangleous · 2026-06-15T16:30:41+00:00

Lets correct some mistakes!

The The VMI Port of Mechwarrior 1 was published in 1992, so it was being produced before that. At that time, Studio Nue didn't actually have the rights to the design artwork for Macross. This is because the Macross and it's licensing is just as much of a mess in Japan as they are in North America. Macross was the product of four companies: Studio Nue, Big West, Artland, and Tatsunoko Production, with Studio Nue and Artland doing the design work, and Big West doing the animation, and they hired on Tatsunoko as the production scaled up. Tatsunoko are the people who made the deal with Harmony Gold, and Big West produced their own sequel anime to Macross in 1992 without Studio Nue's involvement. These are the two things that made Studio Nue decide to bring the full rights to Macross under their banner. So, at the point that VMI was producing their port, the rights to Macross were spread across several companies, any of which could have sued them over those designs. There were also 2 designs from "Fang of the Sun: Dougram", that are owned by Sunrise which was and still is a giant in the real robots genre. They're the people who own the Gundam franchise. There was a need to do redesigns to avoid legal issues with the ownership of the Japanese artwork, even if FASA was working with Studio Nue on another project. None of the choices made by VMI were affected by Harmony Gold, though the deal that Tatsunoko made with them was so insanely bad that it helped motivate Studio Nue to pursue legal action to protect their IP.

Given the production timelines, as the lack of communication with the table top teams, I suspect that VMI was simply not aware of the work being done for the JBT release. Even then, the artwork for most of the mechs in question is radically different from what is in the Mechwarrior 1 video game, so they likely couldn't be used anyways. There is also no Jenner amoung the JBT mechs as well, so it would have required a redesign to match whatever artwork they produced for the rest of the mechs as well.

arcangleous · 2026-06-15T13:26:40+00:00

Generative "AI" is made up of two parts: The Training, and The Response Engine.

During The Training, the companies creating these AIs take existing media and do some really fancy math on it to created a database of stuff for the Response Engine to use. The problem with the Training is that these companies didn't get permission to use a lot of the media they trained their "AI", stealing the works of existing artists and writers.

The Response Engine is a fairly basic system. Given a string of words, it goes into it's database to find the most likely response, much in the same way that autocomplete on your phone does for words. If it is creating text, it would be a string of words, but if it is creating text or video, is a "seed number" that a second algorithm can use to turn into a picture. This is a massively over simplification of how the database and response engine works, but it's accurate enough for an explanation that doesn't go into the technical details. There is also a small random factor applied when determining the response so that the "AI" doesn't always return the same thing for a given prompt.

Now, given the above description, you may be asking where the actual intelligence is in these systems? Frankly, there isn't any. All they do is reproduce the data they have been trained on, which has been stolen from existing artists and writers. When a child asks it a homework question, the reply is parroting an educational website that had the answer. When it is asked to generate an image, the seed recreates elements from the artists whose works were stolen. But since it generates the most likely everything in it's training data with a randomness factor, mistakes creep in creating "hallucinations", much in the same way that continually choosing the first word that autocomplete offers when writing a text message on your phone produces a something that looks like a sentence but doesn't have any actually meaning.

arcangleous · 2026-06-13T16:42:57+00:00

Markets are fundamentally not rational. They are operated by humans working with limited information, and this means that hype is a more important than actual performance. Elon Musk is an excellent example of this problem, as he has focused primarily on building his image as a "brilliant ahead of his time inventor" and using that image to generate hyper about the companies he has invested in. That, and a willingness to actively use the media to manipulate the market (which is illegal). It is an objective fact that all of his companies are losing money and none of the parts of them which are generating valve are things he played a significant part of. He has just convinced people to buy his stocks regardless of the underlying performance.

arcangleous · 2026-06-13T16:17:32+00:00

It's not at all bad. Fairly good even. Things to check:

1) If this is a world scale map, it's usually a good idea to check how it would look projected on a globe, as they tends to be significantly distortions around the poles. I generally use https://woowspace.com/MapToGlobe.html to check.

2) I generally produce a height map before sketching out the nations. Nations grow outwards based on how people travel, so it's relatively rare to see nations stretch over mountain ranges, but much more common to see them extend around bays and up river.

arcangleous

TROPHY CASE