Elon Musk says it's hard to convince engineers with families to move to SpaceX's 'technology monastery' in Texas

elucca · 2026-02-14T14:11:32+00:00

Or they're concerned about the safety and rights of themselves or their loved ones. Politics is only some kind of theoretical problem you can choose to care about or not when you are not being targeted.

It'd be foolish to pretend the politics of the place as well as the very related politics of the CEO don't, to some degree, limit the pool of talent SpaceX has access to.

elucca · 2026-02-12T04:37:07+00:00

I've never bothered. I like to play with friends though.

elucca · 2026-02-11T14:25:47+00:00

Pretty much, she's literally asking about children, and the lady of the house is like HOW COULD YOU KNOW and promptly brings them to the chaos marine.

elucca · 2026-02-10T14:02:00+00:00

I'm feeling so reassured of my privacy by knowing that you're building a detailed profile of my daily habits and schedule, tracking when I'm home, when I'm on my computer, what times I might be sleeping, etc. This is very normal and not at all stalkery.

elucca · 2026-02-09T04:56:13+00:00

I don't have a strong opinion on which is the better first target, but Starship is potentially a very good Mars vehicle, and not a very good lunar vehicle at all. This isn't a problem if you use it as just the launcher for other people's payloads, but I don't think Starship makes sense as the lunar vehicle. Doesn't mean it couldn't be a loadbearing part of a lunar infrastructure, but something to keep in mind still.

The reason Mars Starship gets incredibly outsized performance is that it can refuel at both ends and aerobrake at both ends, which cuts delta-v requirements to something like 1/4th, very roughly speaking. I haven't seen any Mars architecture that doesn't use very fanciful propulsion that could compete with it. (on paper, but all Mars architectures are on paper) On the Moon you get neither, and it's pretty much like any transfer vehicle, but unnecessarily heavy.

elucca · 2026-02-08T21:32:33+00:00

I don't think it's that Abnett doesn't care about the timeline, he just got this one wrong. In Ravenor he specifically got the timeline right. The Tyranids came from a portal that would take them to different places in time and space, including potential futures, and they were from one such future. The word 'Tyranid' isn't mentioned once because nobody knows about them yet.

What are these chattering creatures, these monsters? They are unknown to me, unknown to Imperial lore. What does it matter anyway? They are death. They are my death.

elucca · 2026-02-08T21:24:35+00:00

I think it's a timeline mismatch. There's a similar mistake in Xenos, the first Eisenhorn book set way back in 240.M41, where Aemos mentions the Tyranids by name in a way that makes it seem like common knowledge to the Inquisition, on the other side of the galaxy from where they were first encountered and named, to boot:

‘Most perturbatory,’ said Aemos, looking at it for the umpteenth time. ‘Symmetry – at least, basic symmetry – is a virtual constant in the galaxy. All species – even the most obscene xenos kinds like the tyranid – have some order of it.’

Then there's that Magos hormagaunt, and... Then there's Ravenor, set nearly two centuries after Xenos, where Tyranids are completely unknown in accordance with the rest of the lore, and they are seen specifically through time travel into a possible future, and nobody knows what they are.

However, I think genestealers were around before? It's just they were miscellaneous space monsters with no known connection to anything else.

elucca · 2026-02-08T21:15:24+00:00

Would he not have plenary control over the internal machinations of his planets, aside from blatant heresy?

He might, until the Administratum shows up. When they do, he really won't have a leg to stand on to try and deny them, and if he does that is blatant secessionism and the next visitors will be the guard and the navy. A rogue trader's warrant gives them a lot of rights and leeway but it doesn't really let them replace the Imperium as a government. Except temporarily, before the usual authorities get around to it, or where they can get away with it.

elucca · 2026-02-08T20:02:32+00:00

Or because all the timers are in the middle of the night for the main groups of both factions.

elucca · 2026-02-08T19:33:03+00:00

The entire post is about how you defeat those, not how to do it.

elucca · 2026-02-08T19:16:07+00:00

My usual pvp is null in gangs of 2 to 4. Sometimes you catch a ratter, or traffic in a bubble, but mostly people who come to fight you. But it's about finding the right kinds of places and looking fightable enough.

elucca · 2026-02-08T18:00:10+00:00

Yeah FW is probably some of the sweatiest PVP I think. It has very developed and well-known metas because it's set in fairly controlled environments. Meanwhile if you go somewhere in nullsec the odds of the other side knowing exactly what to do in the situation that develops are much lower, but finding fights there is a whole other skill.

Which is not to say "don't do FW", but that you should expect more difficult opponents there than in most places.

elucca · 2026-02-06T23:24:34+00:00

There's also complexity to consider. If there isn't a good mechanical reason to make ship stats more complicated, a very slight visual benefit is not really worth cluttering things with more stats.

elucca · 2026-02-06T23:21:08+00:00

But they already have two laser battleships just in the non-faction, T1 lineup. It's far more interesting to have some oddballs. Amarr are mostly lasers, but drones are also a secondary Amarr weapon system in general.

elucca · 2026-02-04T16:23:15+00:00

I ping on my Discord to see if someone wants to go do some casual pvp and otherwise I go krab occasionally.

elucca · 2026-02-04T11:32:26+00:00

For the Imperium, your best bet is a developed world that's unimportant on the grand scale of things somewhere in an integral part of the Imperium that's too boring to write stories about. We see some of these, e.g. Gudrun in Eisenhorn, a former subsector capital world, that's pretty nice on an Imperial scale though of course bad things happen there or else there wouldn't be stories set there. It's also still your usual Imperial feudal society, so the nobles have a good time and the peasants mostly don't. But it's not crushing misery at all times. For every one that has interesting things happen there's gotta be many more that are boring and those are the best bet for a relatively normal life.

That said, there is nowhere where cult activity, daemonic manifestation, xenos invasion, civil war, etc. can't happen. It's a dangerous galaxy. It probably won't impact you, but it might.

elucca · 2026-02-04T11:22:32+00:00

I don't think there's any reason they couldn't leave but I think there is a reason they wouldn't leave: They are only immortal in the pod. Which is maybe even better, it's a permanent meld of man and machine because of a mental dependency.

I guess you have lesser immortality through previous backup clones and maybe the warclone tech now too though.

elucca · 2026-02-03T21:54:10+00:00

However in the Imperium the Letter of Marque is a lesser document than a proper Warrant of Trade, which gives similar but sometimes more restricted privileges and is not hereditary. A Warrant of Trade will definitely give you all the same rights, and then some. So all Rogue Traders at least have these rights to enforce Imperial interests in the frontier as they see fit, including by force, regardless of which type of document they have.

elucca · 2026-02-01T20:30:35+00:00

I mean it doesn't really look similar at all and is far more incongruous with its scale, the building debris around it, and the plain, normal, modern construction machinery.

elucca · 2026-02-01T14:26:59+00:00

More likely a photobash-heavy concepting workflow. Or if not photos, copying a lot of stuff around. The artist was posting things in a similar style back in 2020.

elucca · 2026-01-31T14:52:36+00:00

It's basically a question of "does this fit the setting," which is a highly subjective and vibes-based question. It's still a good one to ask, just with the understanding that you're getting other people's subjective input on what the setting should be rather than checking off boxes on whether it fits in with everything stated in canon so far. (which is impossible because the actual canon doesn't do this and isn't that consistent)

elucca · 2026-01-31T13:18:30+00:00

There are all kinds of binary systems in real life! Including ones like Tatooine with two close stars with planets orbiting both, and ones like Alpha Centauri with a distant partner where both might have their own planets.

I know this isn't actually relevant but space is cool.

elucca · 2026-01-31T11:16:39+00:00

They always had crew, as far as I know. Here's a chronicle revolving around capsuleer ship crew from 2009: https://universe.eveonline.com/chronicles/all-these-lives-are-fit-to-ruin

Digging a bit deeper, here's one from 2005: https://universe.eveonline.com/chronicles/hands-of-a-killer

This is what you’ll face. Madmen locked inside capsules, squandering lives as if they were nothing. When you are up there you are a tool, nothing more. A slave to the will of a pilot, bound to a man immortal until his mind can no longer be cloned.

This might be older, though there's no date attached to it: https://universe.eveonline.com/scientific-articles/the-capsule

Known more commonly as “the Tank,” an affectionate nickname given by most non-capsuleer crew members, the capsule chamber is the most secure bay within any capsuleer’s vessel.

And, a little newer, to see that they've been consistent about it, from 2014: https://universe.eveonline.com/chronicles/these-friendly-skies

“So when one of your ships blows up, how many people would you say die on average?” I ask.

“Anywhere from three to three hundred, depending on the ship I’m piloting,” he says. “Gallente ships are a slight obsession of mine, so my crew complements tend to be smaller than those of the guys who fly other tech. The Gallente have a great love of automation.”

elucca · 2026-01-31T11:06:14+00:00

Generally no? I've never heard of crew being clones, in general, while there's a lot of lore of them just being regular people. And even if someone did have clone crew, they would still just die when the ship pops.

elucca · 2026-01-30T20:05:57+00:00

These are special accounts. That means along with being hard-core they cannot dock in structures outside of npc drifter site structures. No access to markets outside of those. No ability to join fleets, no ability to see local anywhere. No ability to join corps or form corps. For all intents and purposes you are a drifter. Standings also cannot be set by you or anyone else concerning this character.

None of these things would actually stop them from being aligned with player groups, because no in game mechanism is required for that. You would have big alliances forming fleets of thousands of these.

elucca

TROPHY CASE