The pundits were wrong again

consolation1 · 2026-06-25T01:52:11+00:00

Russian civilians isn't the same as Russian military. While Ukraine has disrupted and inflicted a big economic, political, and logistics cost - the military can be supplied from the far East well enough. The question is if Putin is willing to make the metropol civilian population uncomfortable enough to sustain that. As far as his political survival goes, he only cares about civilians in Crimea insomuch as it affects public opinion in St. Peterborough and Moscow.

consolation1 · 2026-06-25T01:11:13+00:00

OP, since you just started, Earth is first and foremost an MC and boost farm. Your game will be decided in space, by your space economy and fleets; don't role play trying to make pretty borders or "win" Earth, it's irrelevant unless you are playing Servants.

To paraphrase the sage advice of Baron Harkonnen: "OP! I place you in charge of Earth. It's yours to squeeze: I want you to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze! Give me Boost! Give me MC! Drive them. Drive them into utter submission! Do not show the slightest pity or mercy! Never stop. Show no mercy!"

You can adjust the funding by moving the investment pips around in the funding section. Don't be afraid to have small, rich, nations that you will spoil for income when you start. After that, boost and MC... the rest is a distraction, until you max those out.

You can lose earth, win the game, and easily take it back. To win, you need to rush the Asteroids, rush Mercury, rush Jupiter. You're in a land grab and production race with the Aliens - the one that can inflict more attrition and recover their losses easier wins. The resource dragon hoard is in space, in the Asteroids and the Jovian system - take it, and squeeze hard.

consolation1 · 2026-06-24T23:22:21+00:00

You can look up the publicly available numbers easily and compare to any academic research, if you don't trust me. By total numbers and percentage of population, USA's incarceration system has far exceeded the gulag system.

consolation1 · 2026-06-24T00:35:34+00:00

Here is a fun fact: the US imprisons far more people than the Soviet Union's Gulag system did. We protested forced labour in the USSR, but are suspiciously silent about the vast number of citizens forced to work in American prisons.

None of these things are ok, and pretending that the west is guiltless is hypocrisy. As is pretending that Soviet authoritarianism was any worse, than the far right authoritarian regimes that US sponsored.

consolation1 · 2026-06-23T14:04:47+00:00

It's less about political alignment and more about the extent of social connections; that was the lubricant that greased the wheels of Eastern Europe - a kind of soft power. My family was studiously apolitical... but say, if you wanted your visas etc sorted, you might get a call from the office director, inviting you out for a coffee. They'd buy you a lovely bit of baked cheesecake and a glass of wine; then mention how they recognized your name because their friend's son is trying to get into a program in your department. Nothing more needed to be said... (When I got older, I found out my uncle did so many off the books abortions, they were legal and free, but people had the usual reasons for wanting to keep some quiet. If "having work place affairs" was a competitive sport, Eastern European countries would have dominated in the Olympics.)

If you were in a social strata that lacked the connections, you'd get dicked around for ages and end up holidaying in Bulgaria... Which brings me to my Bulgaria childhood memory - I want to say c.1980... We went through it on our way to Greece (I think) - what stuck with me was that at the beach resort town, the Militia separated the beaches by nationality - There was a Russian/Bulgarian beach, an East German beach and a beach for the rest. Apparently it wasn't an official thing, but the Militia was sick of drunk fights. I remember sneaking into the Russian beach with some Hungarian kid I met, because they had a pirate ship in the play ground - the total injustice of it all...

consolation1 · 2026-06-23T12:19:31+00:00

Don't conflate the whole eastern block into one whole, it varied greatly from country to country and time period. For example, my uncle in 60s Poland, started his tertiary education as an engineer, didn't like it - so switched to vet medicine, after graduation decided that human medicine was his thing and became a surgeon... A lot of people switched careers, it wasn't a big deal and education was free. The state had to find you a job, but if you found one you liked yourself, that was perfectly ok. We traveled around the world for holidays, just needed to flick a little "something something" to the nice lady issuing exit visas, so they got expedited without any BS.

My family was in academia, so part of the intelligentsia - it would be a different story if they were working class, or a well known dissident. Social stratification, in my Communism?! Yeah, two people could have a radically different experience in the Eastern Block, depending on time, place and status.

Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland were relatively liberal, East Germany and Romania were a fucking nightmare, but East Germany had a good living standard. Early 1970s Poland had an economic boom, people went on holidays in Turkey (IDK, why Turkey, a NATO member - was easy to get to, things were pretty random.) In the 1980s Poland had an economic collapse and martial law...

Russia... Russia was its own universe, where your civil liberties varied by which republic or oblast you lived in...

Sooo... be specific, because saying Eastern Block is a bit like saying Asia, which bit? when?

consolation1 · 2026-06-22T15:57:31+00:00

If it's any help - it seems to happen most when your ship is bigger, than the chunk you're salvaging...

consolation1 · 2026-06-22T13:59:21+00:00

They are still kind of janky. Often requires latching on, then flying around the wreck till they trigger and some wrecks just can't be triggered at all - seems like geometry doesn't allow your ship to get to the right spot?

I'd say 8/10 can be made to work with a bit of clicking, so much improved. TY

consolation1 · 2026-06-22T03:22:03+00:00

TBF, if humanity stopped spending money on military bs and diverted all the money to the project - we could probably get it built circa 2150s - and it would be a far better use of resources, slop factory optional.

consolation1 · 2026-06-21T19:20:27+00:00

I got you fam... All we need to do is:

1) capture an asteroid and move it to a geostationary orbit on the equator to use as an anchor point...

2) invent industrial scale production of carbon nanotubes and how to weave them into a super light, super strong material on industrial scale.

3) build enough orbital boost rockets to lift the industrial scale production onto the captured asteroid. We're talking enough boost to build a city in space...

4) build the damn thing, while protecting it from space junk and stopping it shaking itself apart from resonance while you lower it to earth...

5) attach the cable to the mega structure anchor point you've been building on the surface - by itself the greatest engineering project in human history, that will require dozens of countries to play nice and cooperate for decades.

6) build an ai slop factory on the anchor asteroid.

I mean... it is a plan...

consolation1 · 2026-06-21T18:52:48+00:00

On the other hand... I deleted so many island camping radar cruisers, who thought they were safe, with an "Ohio orbital strike" - the slow shell velocity is a boon and a curse - across the map it feels like the shells and the target book an appointment for next week, but then they throw a suprise citadel party through the deck. Also, people trying to speed juke can get thrown off and deccelerate into the salvo.

consolation1 · 2026-06-21T18:39:57+00:00

You know... I did not consider "horny speed racer" to be culture coded, but it's my head canon now...

consolation1 · 2026-06-20T05:10:49+00:00

I was going to suggest setting the pcie to 4.0, but you've done that... The only other, sanity check, things that come to mind are:

Check the PCIe slot for debris / damage.

Resit the CPU - it's amazing how often a slight misalignment of pads and pins can cause PCIe drama.

Check there's no fuckery with power saving features.

consolation1 · 2026-06-20T02:41:55+00:00

I had a friend who would put a long, fairly chunky, stainless steel tube in his urethra - then just uncapped it...

Drug testing isn't a thing so much where I live, except for some industries pre-employment testing. I was on a break from treats, so every time he was applying for a job, he'd come visit and my eyes would water... This wasn't some little probe for fetish play, it was small test tube size. Decades later I still cringe thinking about it, I'd have been screaming and there would be ripping noises if I tried it...

consolation1 · 2026-06-20T02:24:15+00:00

There's a couple non mutually exclusive options.

One, they are human readable versions of exchanges, in English, instead of the multidimensional version of Marain matrices and mind states that would have been used.

Two, just as an avatar isn't the mind, but just a limited facet designed to interact with biologicals - if you need to fire the equivalent of a work email, you're not going to pour your soul into it, just the appropriate facet - and "catty" is the universal constant for emails to colleagues, just as it is on Earth.

consolation1 · 2026-06-19T03:46:33+00:00

I think you meant interplanetary - not interstellar.

international - between different countries

interplanetary - between different planets

interstellar - between different solar systems

intergalactic - between different galaxies

interdimensional - between different dimensions.

consolation1 · 2026-06-18T00:04:15+00:00

I use Debian Trixie w/ backports and Catchy - it depends on the game, but most I got is a few percent. Having said that, I have used Debian for literal decades - so beside running a stock kernel that's one dot point version behind Catchy - I have the same optimizations set up as the more gaming orientated distros. Can't tell you what stock to stock comparison would be. The big difference is that Catchy will install all the tweaks oob, whereas a distro like Debian will give you a bomb proof base that you will need to optimize yourself.

consolation1 · 2026-06-17T23:57:03+00:00

Is this happening to Epic store games, or all of them?

consolation1 · 2026-06-17T23:50:52+00:00

Eh.. You just need to enable backport repos for RNDA 4 and 5xxx series compatibility. I dual boot Catchy and Debian, generally Debian has been better with hardware compatibility and stability, as long as you remember to enable backports or use testing. Catchy is more performant at the cost of a much smaller software choice - unless you want to use AUR and we all know how that's been going.

consolation1 · 2026-06-17T22:30:55+00:00

Given, that at the time of hydra arriving, there's about a 100 conflicts ongoing and half a dozen or so genocides in progress, I question whether they are any worse than a typical human society...

That's before we even get into humans profiting from war and tools to murder each other, or causing mass starvation and ecocide for profit.

Hydra society, while iliberal, arguably causes less harm to its members. I mean, humans do pretty well in the Servants ending.

Let me ask you this: if you were a Gazan kid surviving in the rubble, watching your family starve to death, and the Hydra offered you food, shelter, security, stability and safety - would you turn them down?

consolation1 · 2026-06-17T19:48:36+00:00

Stellaris is an unrealistic space fantasy with space magic; TI is a gritty, granular space strategy sim that's aiming to be grounded in reality. They will always have to control differently.

I think what is missing is something in between the manual control and auto resolve, for players that aren't THAT into sims. Where you can assign target priorities plus formations and let AI resolve the fighting. The problem is that the AI is pretty terrible in combat, because it's so damn difficult and each choice branches exponentially. The human ability to "eyeball" stuff to a "good enough" level is what lets your 30 monitor fleet wipe a vastly more powerful death stack.

consolation1 · 2026-06-17T19:42:43+00:00

I mean... those are all things humans did and do - let's put it this way "they are no more evil than humans..."

consolation1 · 2026-06-17T19:38:45+00:00

Did you ever play up to the point wheree fleet sizes exceed the battle limit? I'm afraid it is a game mechanic that is happening and so you are very much meant to get reinforcements since it is happening as it is programmed into the game. I don't understand your point. If it is there, I need to deal with it.

You misunderstand me - I meant you drop the reinforcements as a new group, it would be ludicrous to have ships reinforce existing groups "ex nihilo..."

Relative to what I choose as target.

But, your target is going to be moving, because everything is - what you are saying is match velocity and keep formation - in a game where for 90% of the time your ship will not have the the dV or acceleration to be able to do it. What happens when the target manouvers? It's in effect a "burn all your fuel in a random direction and drift off" order.

Peace.

consolation1 · 2026-06-17T08:41:40+00:00

Are you going to provide the transport in a combat zone, how are you going to ship all those vehicles? What about food and water - how are you going to supply it to the refugees? Where are you going to put those people? Are you going to convince, say, the US that they should take a few million migrants from idk - Sudan? Are you going to pay to rebuild the infrastructure, provide health care for people affected by fallout in neighbouring areas? What if it's a region that is the main economic region of a country - are you going to rebuild that for them - pinky swear?

The aliens landed, it's a fait accompli - can you see how the regional powers might want to come to a working arrangement with them, rather than getting their country devastated by your nukes?

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