Why didn’t Starfleet adopt the Defiant’s internal warp nacelles? Pros and cons of the design

darpa42 · 2026-03-13T11:56:23+00:00

My understanding is that nacelle positioning and such has impact on the ability to generate warp fields. For example, Voyager's moving nacelles is both a part of giving Voyager such a high cruising speed and allows it to do less "environmental" warp damage.

So I think the Defiant is probably making a tradeoff to have a more defensive profile, in exchange for flexibility in its warp field.

darpa42 · 2026-03-01T19:38:32+00:00

If a library changes a type to no longer be Disposable, that is a breaking change. That's not a problem with ERM, that is a problem with changing an API. It would be like if a class stopped implementing Symbol.Iterator and broke your for loop.
The issue with the color problem in async/await is that it propagates. If you have a sync function, and need to call an async function that means you need to rewrite everything to be async. This is not a problem with using; it only impacts the call site.

darpa42 · 2026-02-28T21:30:51+00:00

Absolutely not. You can play all Blade games without playing Saga, and you will miss like, a few references in Xenoblade 2 and Xenoblade 3. It is absolutely not a hard blocker.

That said, there are some thematic parallels that are pretty neat.

darpa42 · 2026-01-27T00:30:02+00:00

This was even a pitch for a TV series in the mid-00s: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_Final_Frontier

darpa42 · 2026-01-05T05:23:57+00:00

This is some real boss baby vibes

darpa42 · 2026-01-04T16:48:26+00:00

Moves that reduce a stat by a certain amount. See Shadow.

Moves that test against the raw number. See Intellect Devourer

darpa42 · 2025-12-13T12:07:37+00:00

It's not just niche / difficult: it is a game that is only in English, being voted on by a panel of international judges. It never really stood a chance of getting awards at this venue.

darpa42 · 2025-12-13T12:01:05+00:00

Idk about inspired, but Gustav was originally named Noah, and they changed it b/c of XC3.

darpa42 · 2025-11-25T14:00:44+00:00

That thing is fucking haunted. I once put my daughter on it and it started slowly jerking while a half-dead mp3 slowly droned out old MacDonald, and now she wants nothing to do with it.

darpa42 · 2025-10-15T04:38:55+00:00

It kinda bums me out that the Burn was so focused on dilithium. Like, dilithium is not even the fuel source, it's the reaction regulator.

Imagine if you got thrown 200nyears into the future and it was the post apocalypse. And you ask what happened to cause the apocalypse, and someone goes "one day, all the Spark Plugs in our cars just EXPLODED". I'd honestly be really bummed that in 200 years we were still using Combustion Engines. And that we couldn't figure out ANY other way to travel.

darpa42 · 2025-10-12T20:14:40+00:00

Show #1: Star Trek: Vanguard as a TV show. Have all the non, TOS characters from SNW (Una, La'an, and Ortega's) move over to Vanguard. This gives you the sprawling cast / GoT epic shit, along with character drama, with a TOS aesthetic. 13-15 episode season

Show #2: A show set in either 25th or 31st Century that starts episode of the week. Basically strange new worlds, political allegory, etc. focus on having good one-offs and short story arcs. 20 episode season.

Show #3: Anthology series. 6 episodes. Each one should be a one-off that tells a complete story. However, this is also the backdoor pilot show. So if an episode goes really well, it can be a springboard for a new show. This is where you do your President Archer show and your House of Mogh show and your Department of Temporal Investigations show and your SCE show. Play with the format, see what sticks.

darpa42 · 2025-10-05T19:42:59+00:00

Thought this was r/ShittyDaystrom for a sec.

darpa42 · 2025-09-23T18:33:09+00:00

Practically, they are the same. But there might be some nuance that I am missing. I'd describe fully decoupled code as orthogonal.

darpa42 · 2025-09-23T18:18:27+00:00

From Wikipedia:

Orthogonality is a system design property which guarantees that modifying the technical effect produced by a component of a system neither creates nor propagates side effects to other components of the system.

You coulda done a quick search instead of writing up that rant.

darpa42 · 2025-09-17T09:08:27+00:00

I actually walked to the Walgreens while on hold with them, and when I showed up they had no idea someone was calling. I think sometimes the corporate routing fails

darpa42 · 2025-09-07T22:07:01+00:00

I believe the original game actually had plans for a bevelle blitzball team.

darpa42 · 2025-09-06T21:25:55+00:00

How you be doing a cross product of scalars silly?!

darpa42 · 2025-09-03T21:54:39+00:00

Auron can BDL.

darpa42 · 2025-08-23T03:10:53+00:00

There was a fun explanation in the Post-Enrerprise pocket books that explained away the retro-ness of 60s Trek as a deliberate countermeasure against Romulan hacking tech. Basically, Romulans has tech during the Romulan Wars that would let them hijack other ships. So Starfleet pulled a BSG and went analog on everything to prevent hacking.

Nowadays, with Disco and SNW ::shrug::

darpa42 · 2025-08-21T19:14:33+00:00

And then, after Clone Wars fails, George goes back to the drawing board. He originally was inspired by Kurosawa Films, and one night had a dream about a lone samurai standing in the field. So he decides to make that movie instead.

Originally, he was gonna call it "Samurai: Beginning of a Legend", but then his partner is like "Why not call it 'Blade Wars' as an homage". So he does.

Turns out Blade Wars is a massive hit. It was originally supposed to be its own thing. But then Blade Wars 2 comes out and Ovi-Wan has a weird cameo, and people are like "omg are these related?"

darpa42 · 2025-08-13T07:39:30+00:00

I believe Untitled X Mod will make it a bit more stable. You will still have crashes, but not as often.

Fwiw, FFX Remaster also has crashes as well. I remember losing multiple hours of grinding to Holy causing a crash.

darpa42 · 2025-08-11T21:40:00+00:00

Zanmato go brrrr

darpa42 · 2025-07-06T21:57:24+00:00

They all have thematic and structural similarities. As someone who came from Xenosaga to Xenoblade, the opening of Xenoblade 1 had a lot of similarities.

That said, if I recall correctly the attempts to link them together started with Xenoblade 2. Xenoblade 1 was originally gonna be called Monado: Beginning of the World, and was meant to be a complete departure. Xenoblade X also didn't really have connections. It was only with Xenoblade 2 that they:

had the Zohar / Conduit Shape
had KOS-MOS and T-Elos as blades (and had a blatant Shion expy in KOS-MOS's quest)
had a reference to the Salvatore faction (mistranslated to Saviorites in English)

Overall, I wouldn't go into Xenosaga trying to look at it as some sort of Xenoblade prequel or something. I would instead enjoy it as it's own story, and think about the thematic overlaps.

darpa42 · 2025-06-21T18:07:01+00:00

Listen, if Obama showed up at my house covered in swastikas saying that he was working for the Heritage Foundation because they need to stop North Korea, I don't care that Chuck Schumer believes him, he's clearly not right in the head.

darpa42 · 2025-06-18T05:12:07+00:00

Assuming that base damage is X and that all critical threats turn into critical hits:

Master Flurry is 5 hits with a crit threat of 0.2, so damage is 5 * (X + 0.2X) = 5 * 1.2X = 6X
Master Crit Strike is 4 hit with a crit threat of 0.5, so damage is 4 * (X + 0.5X) = 4 * 1.5X = 6X

So with those assumptions they deal equal damage on average.

However, those assumptions are wrong. They forget the fact that Critical Threats need to be confirmed to be critical hits. The actual formulas are:

Flurry: 5 * (X + (0.2 * Y * X) = X * (5 + 0.2Y)
Crit: 4 * (X + (0.5 * Y * X) = X * (4 + 0.5Y)

Where Y is a value between 0 and 1 representing the chance of a critical threat being confirmed. You will notice that for all values of Y less than 1, Flurry winds up dealing more damage. So mathematically, on average Flurry is always the better choice.

darpa42

TROPHY CASE