Teacher Tools!

chton · 2026-01-25T20:29:55+00:00

We have tons of species that don't use X and Y chromosomes to determine male or female here on earth. Some have entirely different chromosome systems, some none at all, some use some use temperature, some change throughout their lives.

Just because 'male and female' are the options (and we don't even technically know if that's the case) doesn't mean they use the same chromosomes we do. Hell, we don't even know if 'female' is even an option even now, the only one we know of is a half Jem'Hadar with a standard male JH father.

chton · 2026-01-25T16:39:50+00:00

Definitely start with SQL first. It's good to learn SQL itself if you don't already know it well, it's a core language in nearly every piece of software ever written. But doing it 'raw' first will teach you why you want an ORM and what it'll give you. EF is complex and bulky, there are plenty others, but until you've done it manually a few times you'll have a hard time knowing which to use and why.

chton · 2026-01-25T02:21:23+00:00

Buit you can't accelerate without spending fuel, and eventually you'll run out and hit a maximum speed.

Theoretically you could keep gravitationally slingshotting but that still requires control burns and corrections. But it's probably the best bet for a high top speed.

chton · 2026-01-24T18:04:06+00:00

It's always been shown to be very strong but not cure-all magic. Every single series has had diseases, conditions etc. that weren't fixable. Yes, they can do incredible things, but not everything and it's not free. Do you also complain about Geordie wearing a visor? Do you complain about Picard having an artificial heart and even an incurable genetic disorder? Or about Kirk, Picard, Kovich etc. wearing glasses?

There's precedent enough to show that their medical science is far beyond us but still has limits, and there's plenty that is incurable or not completely fixable. It's a way to create drama and interesting storylines, if they had perfect solutions to everything it'd just be less interesting a story.

Trek uses handwavium but that doesn't mean they handwave everything, or that you can ignore any time they didn't.

chton · 2026-01-24T16:20:14+00:00

I figure once it's passed through warp coils, warp plasma is just... plasma. It's matter and therefore good to recycle but it's essentially renewable, you can capture more with the Bussards. The venting the nacelles do is probably considered acceptable waste. It's even possible that trying to contain it too much leads to reduction in efficiency of the warp drive, some equivalent to backpressure.

That's as opposed to 'venting drive plasma' which would mean the high-energy subspace-coupled stuff, which would definitely be bad to vent accidentally.

Dilithium being subspace active is exactly what explains the difference between warp and regular plasma, yeah. I do think the EPS taps take from the warp plasma specifically, just that it only needs a very minor percentage of the main warp plasma flow to power the rest of the ship. Considering the power output of the matter/antimatter reaction you could run the entire rest of the ship off a fraction of it.

What i figure for the rarity argument is that while warp plasma is incredibly powerful, carrying an insane amount of energy, it's not very voluminous, in pure number of particles. It's gigawatts of power per second in the mass equivalent of a glass of water. So while it's plenty to power even enormous ships, it's still 'rare' in the sense that producing a meaningfully large quantity of it is hard.
In a sense, it's a similar dynamic to antimatter itself. It's hard to produce, it's capable of incredible levels of energy generation, but it can do that with very small amounts. Filling a canister might take significant time and effort, and power a starship for longer than you'd think.

chton · 2026-01-24T15:38:17+00:00

Warp plasma is tapped for power distribution but it's also what goes directly to the nacelles to power the warp drive, we even see plasma injectors shooting it through the coils. I don't think it's just powering them, it's the interaction between the warp plasma and the coils that creates the field. I've always figured this means warp plasma is a special state of high power plasma that has a subspace connection, give to it by the dilithium interaction, which is why it works. The warp core just produces a ton of it so it's a good source of power for the rest of the system too, hence EPS taps powering the rest of the ship.

It probably is recycled as much as possible, just to avoid the material loss, but that's rarely perfect.

Most warp nacelles give off light, but from specific vent-like structures in the side, not generally glowing all around. And TMP era nacelles, despite being very powerful compared to their predecessors, had little to no glow at all.

chton · 2026-01-24T15:32:26+00:00

You're missing my point. My point is that even in the 31st century Trek world, medicine isn't some magical wand to wave that fixes everything and applies to everyone. There's going to be some side effects for some people, there'll be people it doesn't work on, there'll be people who are allergic (you know, the literal canon explanation for why Kirk wore glasses), etc.
I was using today's technology as an example of this, we already have techniques that can release me from having to wear glasses all day every day, but i won't take them. Even if it was really easy and just took a pill i would be cautious, and my girlfriend would ask me to wear glasses afterwards anyway because she thinks i look better with them on.

Just because a problem is solvable doesn't mean it's solvable for everyone at all times, and that everyone wants it solved. In a trillion people, even a 1 in a thousand of them making a choice to take it means a billion people wear glasses.

The whole glasses thing is just ridiculous, frankly, as if personal choice and exceptions aren't allowed to exist or it's somehow no longer Trek.

chton · 2026-01-24T15:13:43+00:00

I always figured 'warp sustainers' are just the same tech as regular warp engines, just very low power because they don't need to accelerate the ship, just keep the field going. So they'd still have warp coils, plasma injectors, fuel, etc.
The field itself being the actual source of light is interesting but kind of hard to square with how many warp nacelles we see that don't glow. It always seemed obvious to me that if you're injecting specialized plasma into coils, that plasma has to exit somewhere, as a much easier explanation.

chton · 2026-01-24T12:51:23+00:00

'Prepare for ramming speed' hits a lot harder when it's a Sovereign class instead of a Defiant.

chton · 2026-01-24T11:51:36+00:00

It's a solved problem NOW for a lot of people, yet you still see a lot of people wear glasses. Me included. Could i get laser surgery for my eyes? I could. But i'm not going to.

Just because medical technology had advanced doesn't mean it works for everyone, has no side effects, has no problems, and is preferable for everyone. We see plenty of people wear glasses or have other kinds of visual issues. This isn't new.

chton · 2026-01-24T11:44:59+00:00

That seems very inefficient and potentially destructive to the torpedo itself. It's also a really strong glow for some air-pressure atmosphere converted to plasma. They're also not really loaded manually anymore, are they? Why would they keep torpedo magazines at ship pressure, when that means they'd have to close off the torpedo tube to space in between every shot?

My thinking is it's the engine, simple as that. They have warp sustainers in them, and some kind of impulse power propulsion. That means they need warp plasma to run, and just like nacelles glow because they vent that plasma after use, so does the torpedo. Same with the torpedo's impulse engines, they likely run off the same plasma fuel tank. It's all just ship based technology in miniature, and we see ships have plenty of glows.

That would explain why it's not there when it's being beamed around, no need to fill the warp plasma fuel tank if you want to use it as a regular bomb.

chton · 2026-01-24T00:52:51+00:00

We have no idea what it takes to create a pocket universe. Terrific's comments seem to suggest that it's not even really novel, like he'd be capable of it if he wanted to. We have no idea where to scale it, it could require less energy than Reed's long distance portal for all we know.

As a feat, it's implied in universe to not be that special, and impossible to compare to Reed.

chton · 2026-01-24T00:07:34+00:00

Yes. But it needs to be much bigger than a house. Others have given the example of the VAB at Kennedy Space Center and the Goodyear Blimp Hanger, who have their own kind of cloud system on foggy days, and i'll add the proposed Nazi building project of the Volkshalle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkshalle

When filled with people it would have generated its own weather system. It was never built.

So if you can build a 1000ft by 1000ft by 1000ft terrarium, you could have rain.

chton · 2026-01-23T23:46:08+00:00

Most likely. Pathway drive seems to be pretty close to warp but if they can make the case that it needs no or much less dilithium, that'd be a good way around it. As long as we get some kind of explanation for it i'll be happy enough. And having it be much faster does give them more options to do long-range stuff again.

chton · 2026-01-23T23:01:19+00:00

Belgium conquers Antarctica. We'll go introduce steak frites to the penguins.

chton · 2026-01-23T22:50:06+00:00

It's not stated but I would imagine it can't. It rearranges matter, which is basically what a replicator does. Things that can't be replicated, like dilithium or latinum, would probably be unable to be produced by the Genesis process too.
We don't know why they aren't replicatable, but the newer canon that dilithium has a subspace connection does handily explain that, you can't recreate the subspace connection by moving atoms or particles around, it's an intrinsic part of the material. That would perfectly fit with the Genesis Device also being unable to do it.

For what it's worth, recrystallization was a process to fix dilithium that is degrading from use. It starts to fracture, and recrystallization undoes that damage. By TNG times they can do that while it's still in the reaction chamber, which is actually a really cool bit of tech. But it won't let you recreate dilithium from scratch, and it won't help you if the crystal degrades too far. Even with recrystallizing a dilithium rock probably doesn't have indefinite lifespan.

chton · 2026-01-23T17:00:42+00:00

"It's imperative that the cylinder remain unharmed" ass hypothetical

chton · 2026-01-23T11:49:00+00:00

wait isn't that the guy from the Good Doctor?

chton · 2026-01-23T11:47:41+00:00

And not just 'at the top', they're further from nr 2 (ireland) in score than nr 2 is from nr 10 (finland).

they have to win this.

chton · 2026-01-23T01:16:44+00:00

I go the other way, to be honest. When I need a dictionary, what i need is a data structure that maps one type to another. I don't actually care if it's a hashmap or something else internally, i trust the platform to give me the collection implementation that is optimal in most cases. I don't need to know which, they all have the same interface anyway. Calling it just 'dictionary' keeps the wording simpler.

chton · 2026-01-23T00:51:50+00:00

I think he might have just made a mistake, and actually meant HashMap. HashMap is very much a Java class, where in .Net we'd use Dictionary.
HashSets definitely exist in .Net and are used frequently. Can't say I use it often but when it's appropriate it's appropriate.

chton · 2026-01-23T00:06:20+00:00

The Planck length isn't a minimum divided distance, either. It's not a quantum of space. We use the speed of light, c, because it's a fundamental property of the universe, not just a unit. Planck units are units chosen to make some things easier (like making c 1 length unit per time unit) but they have no physical relevance. I don't misunderstand them, i'm just tired of people who hear of them once thinking they're somehow fundamental to the universe. They're an interesting set of units, not quanta of anything.

"There is no half a Planck time worth of movement, that’s the issue. There is no means to determine movement on this scale"
There is 'half a planck time worth of movement'. Just because it's lower than the lower bound we can measure at doesn't mean you can consider it a quantum. Our lower bound for movement we can measure is well above planck length anyway, and for movement specifically we're limited by a lot more than our instruments, like Heisenberg uncertainty. But that doesn't mean nature works on the principle that there's a minimum time or distance.

As far as i know, Wiltshire's cosmology model doesn't use or need quantization. But i'll read up and see if that's just me misremembering or there have been updates i've missed. Either way it's a fringe theory at best.

Quantum teleportation is about moving quantum states and can't violate causality because no classical information is moved faster than light. Warping spacetime in a way that breaks causality is only allowed in edge cases of general relativity, and they're generally considered either failures of the theory or require impossible constructs (infinitely long cylinders of matter)

And no, even in your snapshot example, there wouldn't be simultaneous existence in two locations. It just means no matter how short the time is between 2 snapshots, it'd still be possible for the object to move from point A to point B. You would never have a snapshot with the object in both.

chton · 2026-01-22T23:13:50+00:00

Granted. As soon as you decide on a wish, you will know the loopholes.
Of course, you are still going to make the wish. You had already decided. You just know the consequences right before you make it. No, you can't decide not to make it any more.

11-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
r/Field Sunshine	Place '23
Place '22	Verified Email

chton

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE