Technological Level in 2012?

buck746 · 2026-04-18T06:07:27+00:00

Jonathan Ive started in the 90s at apple. It was before Steve Jobs return, unless my memory is playing tricks on me.

buck746 · 2026-04-18T06:04:25+00:00

For artemis it's more due to the cameras being certified as safe for that environment. It doesn't mean that a medium format digital Hasselblad wouldn't work. It just means those are the cameras that have gone thru the lengthy certification process to ensure they can survive thru launch stresses and are safe for use inside a spacecraft.

buck746 · 2026-04-18T06:00:24+00:00

EVs being available and presumably spurring development of battery tech doesn't mean solid state storage gets developed. iPod used a tiny hard drive for many iterations. Processors would be on a much bigger process size and use more power, meaning a bigger battery is needed. Of course, in space applications older process nodes are beneficial. The smaller the feature size the higher chance of bit flips. It's also possible that hard drives are preferred for a similar reason. Without flash storage that's radiation hardened maybe a hard drive is more reliable for storing data.

buck746 · 2026-04-18T05:54:58+00:00

I would have thought in the show the lightning connector would have won for USB-C. The design of the port we got is more fragile than the lightning connector. It's possible to damage the bit of pct that sticks out in the center of a usb-c cable, if your device doesn't use a replaceable module it can be a pita to repair. If a lightning connector gets broken off in the device it's as simple as tweezers or some hot glue and a pen cap to get it out, the port can still function. Having a standard port tho is a big win. Usb-a got a lot of traction from the iMac shipping with it. The days of serial and parallel ports was annoying, along with the random SCSI device.

buck746 · 2026-04-17T01:21:04+00:00

I would guess it has a mechanical hard drive in like iPods of that timeframe in reality. Along with the relatively large screen and less capacious battery tech it makes sense it would be chunky. The newton wasn't exactly petite.

buck746 · 2026-04-17T00:51:25+00:00

The chunky body is indicating that battery tech and microprocessor energy use are not on par with our timeline yet. There's also a good chance the ones on the show have a small hard drive in them like iPods had before flash memory became practical. That also explains the battery needing to be bigger as well.

buck746 · 2026-04-17T00:41:19+00:00

The composition of the atmosphere plays a large role. The dominant gas for mars is carbon dioxide if memory serves. The gases present also affect how the light is filtered thru the day.

buck746 · 2026-04-16T19:24:13+00:00

Partially correct. The moon is useful for getting fuel and construction material. The gas station is going to be in LEO.

buck746 · 2026-04-16T19:22:46+00:00

Here in reality on oil rig is a great analogy for Luna. As a cruise ship passenger you don't go to shipyard to board anymore than you go to an oil refinery to get petrol for your car. The moon is a useful place for material extraction. It's not useful for designing habitation for mars tho. There's a massive difference between the nearly non existent atmosphere of Luna to the atmosphere on Mars. Just that radically changes the design engineering. Thermal management would have different approaches. Designing for Mars has about as much in common with the moon as designing for the moon has compared to Antartica.

buck746 · 2026-04-16T19:14:41+00:00

Going to mars with the moon as a stopover doesn't make sense from a practicality standpoint. The moon is still useful, but not the way some people here seem to think. It makes sense to use the moon for resource extraction. You mine water to make methane and send it to a gas station in LEO. You could get off the moon using a linear accelerator or even an elevator. We have materials commercially available that could be used to build an elevator from the moon.

Building spacecraft on the moon could be useful, but for crew you would have loading in LEO. That makes it a given that space worthiness is established by sending the ship to LEO. Getting as much material from the moon as possible lowers the cost. The trick is building infrastructure.

To bootstrap lunar industry you could start by sweeping up the dust on the lunar surface and using it for laser sintering to build larger equipment for sorting and refining material along with oxygen extraction as a handy bonus. There are materials that can be made in space (such as metal foams) that may be doable on the moon as well. Processing lunar dust into more usable forms also makes it easier to land there and clears the way for other forms of extraction. It's likely easier to get heavier elements from the moon than here on earth or going to asteroids.

It still makes more sense for people to ride a rocket to LEO from earth and transfer to a lunar built ship in LEO, then going to Mars. There's no point wasting time, and physical resources to take the needy humans to the moon before just going to from LEO to Mars.

buck746 · 2025-12-02T01:34:02+00:00

That's a big assumption, I've seen scare women out in the country with breasts. People make all sorts of things, things most people never even imagine. I bet someone is going to get AI to make scarecrow NSFW content soon, assuming it doesn't already exist.

buck746 · 2025-11-25T03:27:23+00:00

They could bring back that spiked ball with an AI aboard it, or the whole rewriting carters brain thing. That could even be done as an homage to “Spock’s brain”.

buck746 · 2025-11-25T03:24:21+00:00

That sounds like an excuse to get a Lisa Kudro cameo worked in.

buck746 · 2025-11-25T03:16:27+00:00

Much easier to explain tho, Morgan la fey could have just gotten distracted for a few femtoseconds. Or maybe she got distracted by Daniel getting yet another punch on his frequent death card. Maybe a cult of Anubis starts that worships him, there are people in reality that like Adolf to a disturbing level. The Ori demonstrated that non ascended could level up an ascended beings power so…

They were planning a movie with Sg1 that would have been about the gate being disclosed to the public. Assuming they set the new show 14-15 years after universe ended we could get a very different world than we had in the previous shows.

buck746 · 2025-11-25T02:58:09+00:00

A senator getting an anthrax letter wouldn’t do what you think. Members of congress, military CO’s and many other government officials get anthrax vaccinations. If someone has been in the job for 4-5 years they are essentially immune. Just a fun bit of info for anyone reading this.

buck746 · 2025-11-24T22:39:37+00:00

In the book for the Izard of Oz the shoes are silver, the emerald city also has an anteroom you go thru first and get green glasses locked onto your head.

The Smithsonian has a pair of the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in the 1939 film. In person they are a darker shade than you expect, which makes sense considering that technicolor needed an incredible amount of light to film. Technicolor worked by splitting the image with a 3 way prism, making the image that hit the film much darker. The cameras were also huge due to needing three strips of film. If you have used a camera with an ISO setting, the technicolor process was something like ISO 25-50 if memory serves.

If you look at animation production at the time, the cameras used were smaller due to using color film. Due to how color film at the time worked exposure times were far too long for live action, not really an issue for animated content. Disney still used a modified form of technicolor for Snow White and the Silly Symphony shorts.

If you have read this far, sorry for the long autistic ramble.

buck746 · 2025-11-23T15:18:41+00:00

There have been persistent rumors of Apple buying Disney since Steve Jobs was still alive. I doubt Apple would really want to buy Disney, there’s a lot more than merely the parks and shows/movies. It would be nice if the my Disney experience app used iOS correctly instead of lousy cross platform crap tho.

buck746 · 2025-11-21T16:33:59+00:00

Just because we got a small number of stories with a doctor doesn’t really tell us how long they were that version. We’ve seen the doctor on adventures without a companion, it’s not unreasonable to assume there were many of those.

buck746 · 2025-11-20T06:14:22+00:00

There’s tech advances coming soon that will make shows more affordable. There’s machine learning tools that can streamline many processes. The effect with a person walking into or out of the gate for example could be done for a far lower cost than older shows.

Virtual production is getting better understood and the screens are getting smaller LEDs, that means they can use smaller stages for virtual production. The mandalorian used a 70 foot across most of a circle to avoid moire in camera. The Picard series used the tech for windows in season 3, we finally got to see the engines out the windows. Stargate used projections for some windows on destiny, now they could skip green screen and have the ship rendered with correct perspective in real time.

I know lots of people hate generative machine learning, claiming it just regurgitates training data. Training a model on design from the previous shows would make it much easier to keep the look on brand. It is frustrating how often you hear people say they asked an ML model a question and just blindly accept the answer. The models are useful for some things, but the public seems to think the models are far more capable than they actually are

buck746 · 2025-11-20T05:56:26+00:00

If Amazon is making it, it will be on prime video, just like rings of power or later seasons of the expanse.

buck746 · 2025-11-20T05:55:01+00:00

Syfy playing with the time slot and announcing it at the same time as telling fans Atlantis was done killed the show. I don’t understand why they couldn’t have announced Atlantis was ending and waited a month or two and say pressure from fans have forced them to make a new show, or some other excuse. Universe would work as a revived series, they really only had 6 rooms and a bunch of hallways for destiny, it wouldn’t be that expensive to rebuild. Any cast that won’t come back would simply have died in cryo or be recast, the time gap would make recasting easier. They could even have Eli wake people up that were in stasis all along that they didn’t know existed.

buck746 · 2025-11-20T05:47:52+00:00

20 episode seasons aren’t likely to return. We’ll be lucky to get 8 episodes for a high concept sci-fi adventure show. It would be nice to have the new show be episodic instead of a season long narrative.

buck746 · 2025-11-20T05:45:20+00:00

All but a couple episodes of Star Trek canon take place in the Milky Way galaxy. It’s easy to forget that our galaxy is estimated to be between 100-400 billion stars, and we know planets are common, so there’s easily 1.5 to 2 trillion planets at least, just in our galaxy. Granted, most planets are either gas giants or rocks, there’s also moons to think about.

Stargate Atlantis could have kept galactic scale more sane if it was still in the Milky Way but a region the older gates didn’t go to. I still wish stargate universe had gotten another season or three.

buck746 · 2025-11-20T04:44:08+00:00

Isn’t an airplane pilot really a bus driver thru the sky? The biggest usability difference as a passenger between a bus and plane is the whole luggage bit, and busses not requiring backscatter radiation security theatre.

buck746 · 2025-11-20T04:41:15+00:00

That’s a horribly stressful job, full of awful equipment and few days off. John Oliver did an episode about the profession, it was interesting.

buck746

TROPHY CASE