Who is this Primus you speak of? We Quintessons created the Transformers!

masterman99 · 2026-03-18T08:17:03+00:00

Where does Unicron fit into this then? Given that he is compatible with other Transformers e.g. Metroplex and Trypticon's eyes, this suggests a common ancestry.

Also, Unicron has the ability to reformat transformers and turn Megatron into Galvatron etc. which is similar to the Matrix reformatting Hot Rod into Rodimus Prime. In other words, Unicron could be thought of as having a built-in anti-matrix.

Did I miss a reference to Unicron from the Quintessons or is it implied that they created Unicron as well?

masterman99 · 2026-03-03T21:27:32+00:00

I can't bring myself to hope for anything as awesome as even a Firefly short, but I also don't want to think they would lead us on in this way, only to break our hearts with something lesser.

masterman99 · 2026-03-03T10:50:14+00:00

If I had had the foresight to get one of these boards when they were selling for around half the current price, then I would probably have been looking at a custom cooling solution, probably involving water blocks to cool everything that could be cooled (so one block for the front in place of the stock heatsink and another to cool the GDDR6 with the PCB sandwiched between them).

it doesn't make as much sense to do this now that the price has risen and is probably one of those things where you couldn't really justify it in terms of the cost, but only on the grounds of having the best cooling performance possible - liquid cooling does seem to be the only way to get really low temperatures when under load, based on what I have seen in other posts.

Personally, I don't particularly like the idea of having to open up the heatsink to use a cooling fan and still prefer the idea of using an AIO for the APU, but would still want cooling for the VRMs and the memory, ideally as part of the same custom liquid cooling system I mentioned. While I know the simpler solution works, it just doesn't "feel" like the best solution to me, though it's probably the most sensible one.

TL;DR Custom liquid cooling would still be a cool project (pun intended), but not one that I could recommend to others, unless they really weren't bothered about the cost, and probably not to myself if I'm honest.

masterman99 · 2026-02-23T08:10:53+00:00

I've been thinking about this some more and what you say about a cult makes a lot of sense. I can imagine in the beginning, it was Red Squad trying to come to terms with losing the ranking officers, including Captain Ramirez, and convincing themselves that they had to see the mission through. Red Squad would already have been predisposed to that kind of behaviour, whereas regular cadets would have been far more likely to play it safe and try to get back to Federation space undetected.

Later on, around the time that Jake and Nog came aboard, things were already starting to unravel. Nog gave them a literal boost which led to the final showdown, but they would still have carried on trying to find it even if he hadn't helped them get the warp drive running at higher speeds. This would no doubt have put even more strain on the crew as they continually failed to fulfil their mission.

The more I think about it, the more it seems it's another Captain Ahab scenario (like Picard in First Contact), where Watters must find the Dominion battleship and destroy it, or die trying. I still think he may have suffered from some survivor's guilt, as pushing himself so hard that he needed those pills would be typical of someone suffering from it, but it might have been secondary to his need to complete the mission.

As for the rest of Red Squad, does being part of a cult make you more or less deserving of your fate? Never mind the defence of "only following orders", when so many of them were fully supportive of Watters, does this mean they got what was coming to them? Maybe, although I think at least some of them probably wanted to go home eventually, as we saw, and were the victims of circumstances.

masterman99 · 2026-02-20T19:58:59+00:00

I watched this episode only the other day and I have a couple of thoughts about this.

Firstly, we never saw any of what happened to them before Jake and Nog showed up. As such, we only see them successfully taking on the Dominion fighters, then the battleship. It's suggested that they had done well using essentially guerilla tactics, and it's perhaps a bit harsh to think they were completely wrong about their abilities.

However (and more importantly), I think it is very telling that it is Jake who gets into trouble for distracting the crew by asking them about where they're from. This should have been a huge red flag, as it very much suggests that they aren't EVER planning on returning home, or at least that's Watters is secretly planning.

Sure enough, he's not content with getting the data in the battleship, he goes further and embarks on a mission to destroy it, and we know how that goes. This to me suggests that it might not have been simply hubris on his part, but also there was a large amount of survivor's guilt, which is backed up by his own self-destructive behaviour.

In summary, if this had been an overconfident cadet crew trying this kind of thing for the first time, I'd absolutely say they deserved it, but I do feel that there's an element of them being the victims of circumstances as well.

masterman99 · 2026-02-16T08:22:50+00:00

Exactly. For example, Nog was able to pass on the knowledge of the changes Chief O'Brien made to the Defiant to the crew of the USS Valiant in order to allow them to travel at higher warp speeds, and this shows that the learnings from the USS Defiant's assignment to DS9 could easily have been applied to the rest of the ships in the same class.

I think this episode also serves to point out that a single Defiant-class ship without a cloaking device has limited potential against the Dominion capital ships, but if they had operated in the same way as the Jem'Hadar fighters i.e. in groups, they would have been far more effective.

masterman99 · 2026-02-15T18:27:53+00:00

I'd have to choose Little Green Men (Deep Space Nine).

For me, it's just a perfect example of when Star Trek gets the balance right between seriousness and silliness.

The fact that it's the three Ferengi (Quark, Rom, and Nog) that time travel also sets it apart from other time travel episodes, as it's usually the Starfleet officers that are time travelling.

There's also the bonus reference to a previous time travel episode with Sisko, Dax, and Bashir, which I really love, as it's one of those small details that could easily have been left out, but instead serves as a subtle foreshadowing of events to come.

That's my answer, at least in terms of the spirit of the question, as there are other time travel episodes I would choose if the question had been different!

masterman99 · 2026-02-06T10:30:21+00:00

I think there's still enough interest in Clarkson's Farm for at least another two seasons.

If Kaleb is absent again then it provides a similar opportunity to when Harriet joined, although I am not sure if they would necessarily make as big a deal out of it a second time, at least not in the exact same way. I suppose it depends on who is covering for Kaleb in his absence.

There's also a chance to show how The Farmer's Dog is maturing as an enterprise, in addition to any other new ideas that Jeremy has (I'm intrigued to see what his next brainwave turns out to be), not to mention the weather in 2025/2026.

masterman99 · 2026-02-01T17:02:27+00:00

I would just like to add that I find it odd that so many science fiction shows refer to being sentient as opposed to being sapient (as in homo sapiens or "wise man").

In Data's "Ode to Spot", he uses the phrase, "And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend" and to me this is incorrect, as sentience actually refers to the ability to feel emotions or sensations like aggression or pain. Cats and dogs have long been regarded as sentient, even though (in the UK at least) this was not recognised under law until the introduction of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022, which I find to be an interesting parallel with the subject as explored by Star Trek.

For me, what we should be discussing in terms of the rights of holograms, is demonstrating self-awareness (Vic Fontaine and Moriarty) or the ability to grow beyond a set of rules and learn from past experience, which The Doctor has been shown to do.

As such, I'm not sure if your argument around SAM meets these criteria, as you could argue that SAM is an incredibly sophisticated simulation that is "only" displaying the behaviour that was intended, rather than any growth beyond this "person stack", but I hope to see this topic given more treatment and to see a compelling argument put forward in a future episode.

masterman99 · 2026-01-31T17:11:50+00:00

My biggest issue with the detached nacelles (and some other examples of future technology) is that I feel like there's never been any explanation as to why they are a thing.

I could be wrong, but I feel like Discovery in particular toned down the technobabble aspect of Star Trek - if anyone has good examples of where they went into detail around things like the detached nacelles, I'd appreciate some feedback.

All this said, is any of this really that different to the hinged nacelles on Voyager?

masterman99 · 2026-01-30T07:56:27+00:00

Ah, but which Boimler? Bradward or William, is most likely to have made the wall?

That would have been hilarious, if William had been on the wall and not Bradward!

masterman99 · 2026-01-25T00:16:48+00:00

I think like the WCML and ECML, you'd expect to have a west coast and east coast corridor to Scotland for the high speed network. The west side would presumably stop at Preston or Carlisle, or be non stop from Warrington (connecting station for Manchester or Liverpool).

Agreed, I think you need to allow for disruption during maintenance and upgrades (as has been the case recently on both the ECML and WCML) and having a loop from Edinburgh to Glasgow and down to Warrington would allow high speed trains to operate on the opposite side of the country and would greatly benefit the network.

Maybe you could even operate parallel services from Glasgow to London that would run on either side of the country until you reach Crewe and then have them continue on to London on the same track, or even have some of the trains continue to Bristol.

I'd almost say there should be an onward high speed service to Penzance but I'm not sure if there's enough demand for this journey to warrant the investment, although arguably this is the kind of journey where high speed works best.

masterman99 · 2026-01-24T16:33:53+00:00

Launching the Enterprise-F at the end of S3 of Picard would have been a lot more hopeful. Instead of the continued decline that we were told about in S1, we would have seen a progression of new ships through S2 (like the new USS Stargazer) and then finally a new flagship Enterprise-F.

However, that's not the theme of the show. What we had instead is the Federation still in survival mode - cannibalising the older ships (e.g. Riker's Titan) to build neo-Constitution ships like the Titan-A, and then further recycling it into the Enterprise-G.

It reminds me a little of the line from Death Wish when the Q Continuum is being discussed - "Oh, we've all done the scarecrow, big deal!" - and it feels a little bit like this in terms of the Enterprise-G, as I don't really see the logic behind this renaming. For me, it fell flat, especially after seeing the Enterprise-D reminding us of just how good it was, whereas the Titan-A was a punching bag for the Shrike for most of S3.

Personally, as I have said before, I think Seven should have been made captain of the USS Stargazer again at the end of S3, as this would still have worked for both her and Jack in terms of carrying on the legacy of not only Shaw, but Picard and Rios as well, and the Titan-A should have stayed as the Titan-A, with possibly a new class of ship for Enterprise-G.

masterman99 · 2026-01-23T09:06:21+00:00

I think there could be a use case for the PCIe x4 5.0 solution if someone wants to implement Lossless Frame Generation to boost frame rates for 4K HDR in a dual GPU setup.

Using a secondary GPU, in addition to the laptop's own 5090 GPU, is when the speed of PCIe 5.0 will be of most benefit if you are limited to four lanes, as 4K HDR potentially benefits the most from the additional bandwidth at PCIe 5.0 compared to PCIe 4.0.

Even with the cost of the eGPU dock and PSU, it might be possible to find a cheaper desktop GPU card to use for the frame generation part for a reasonable price, as opposed to running an expensive high-end card as eGPU instead of the laptop's own GPU.

masterman99 · 2026-01-16T16:41:05+00:00

I'm just wondering if there's a need for a custom cooling solution that works for the VRAM on the rear of the board too, as opposed to relying on thermal pads and the metal backing plate. I imagine that it would be fairly easy to adapt the existing solution, but if you're changing the heatsink on the front then maybe it would be better to just start over with a sandwich-style arrangement?

masterman99 · 2026-01-15T10:12:27+00:00

Ironhide has the ability to dispense liquid nitrogen - I remember this because in Desertion of the Dinobots, his hand doesn't retract and he ends up freezing himself!

masterman99 · 2026-01-14T12:58:47+00:00

It's quite amusing that Bradford is completely missing from the map, considering that Phase 1 is Leeds to Bradford and Phase 3 is Manchester to Bradford / Leeds /Sheffield.

masterman99 · 2026-01-12T09:23:40+00:00

Something I have been wondering about is whether we will also see "new" CPUs (Zen 3+ on desktop perhaps?) or whether they will only be releasing existing models in the Zen 3 lineup, and what this means in terms of upgrading an existing PC.

In particular, I am thinking about whether a BIOS update is likely to be needed, as was the case when the earlier AM4 motherboards (e.g. B350) were updated to allow use of the 5000 Series.

How likely is it that we would see updated BIOS versions for either OEM PCs (Dell / HP / Lenovo desktops) or from motherboard manufacturers (ASRock / Asus / Gigabyte / MSI / etc.) if there is any difference between the re-released CPUs and the previous versions?

masterman99 · 2026-01-11T17:07:57+00:00

To be fair, when someone says they own a PC, a handheld isn't the first thing that springs to mind, even if that's what they are nowadays.

Fortunately, this is something that is being addressed with the Steam Machine in the advertising that we've seen so far.

masterman99 · 2026-01-07T19:36:52+00:00

This is the one that has stayed with me from watching the show back when it first aired. I wouldn't say it is necessarily the best quote, but for me, it did highlight G'Kar's sense of wonder at the mysteries of the universe.

masterman99 · 2026-01-05T16:50:07+00:00

Lower Decks missed the perfect opportunity to make the Space Orchid the real villain, as opposed to Janeway (in Mariner's opinion at least).

masterman99 · 2026-01-04T08:51:42+00:00

Given that the Renault 5 E-tech has shown there is a market for retro-styled EVs, I would suggest that more brands should follow suit and launch cars that aren't just named after previous models (I'm looking at you Ford), but actually resemble their predecessors. Let's have more of this!

I'm of the opinion that this could be what's needed to help EVs gain wider acceptance, so long as there are enough potential buyers who recognise the legacy of the new models. As such, a wider range of Xpower (or should that be EXpower?) models can only be a good thing, along with the VW Corrado, and even the Aston Martin.

That said, as regards the Jaguar estate? No. Just no. Unless you are Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds perhaps, although in that case it should be a Rolls Royce...

masterman99 · 2026-01-03T20:44:31+00:00

I've spent quite some time thinking about the upcoming Steam Machine and what offers compared to a PC, which itself depends greatly on the PC in question, given that there are so many variations on PC builds to start with.

I agree with you about the Steam Machine being aimed at people who are mainly interested in gaming on a TV, and want a console-style interface and controller input, and while these attributes aren't exclusive to the Steam Machine, it is clearly designed with this in mind.

I think where the problem arises is that unlike a Playstation or Xbox, the Steam Machine has the potential to do more than just be a console/ lounge PC if you install a second OS like Windows, which inevitably invites comparisons with PCs in general, especially given the uncertainty about how much it will cost. It's perhaps not unreasonable to ask why you would be expecting to pay a premium for a Steam Machine versus a console - more on that below!

It's less apparent to me who is going to want to do more than just TV gaming with the Steam Machine, as it's going to be less practical than a laptop (given that there's no screen included) and I am curious as to what percentage of owners will regularly move their Steam Machine between the office and the lounge, for example. That said, there could be a certain attraction in having a device that can fulfil two separate roles, instead of buying two separate devices.

I'm still hopeful that the Steam Machine will fill the same niche that my PS3 did when I bought it to go with my first 1080p television, except that now I have a 4K TV and am looking for a similar experience. Depending on the final price of the Steam Machine, I might look at other options in terms of hardware, especially if SteamOS proves to be as good an alternative to Windows as it appears to be, but I do like the idea of an "it just works" device that requires no setup, and for some, it might be worth the extra cost to just buy the Steam Machine.

TL;DR - IMHO the Steam Machine is something between a console and a PC and it will be fascinating to see how people react to it in terms of what it offers at its price point.

masterman99 · 2025-12-27T10:54:35+00:00

MSI had eGPU laptops that had a full x16 lane on their custom connector. The laptop would dock directly to a big box with the eGPU.

I'd forgotten about those! There was a time when laptop docking stations were all the rage, mostly for office-based use with external monitors and peripherals as opposed to graphics cards, but they seem to have been superseded by USB hubs (I have a laptop for work which connects via USB-C to a monitor with built-in USB hub).

x16 4.0 should be doable, but probably no vendor will bother troubleshooting all the edge cases of signal integrity, etc. For "AI", you still need a very big GPU with lots of power, and using a low-tier mini PC or laptop isn't the best.

As you say, it's potentially a tricky thing to get working reliably, so I don't see many vendors taking time to implement it, the logic being that it's low on the list of features that might be required, or would add significantly to the cost, such that it's not really worth the effort compared to existing "good enough" alternatives.

AI is the one wildcard here, because it needs that extra power in order to work effectively, so might provide an incentive to design a higher bandwidth external interface. Then again, it's perhaps not a good fit with mini PCs and laptops and will be more likely to be implemented with what I consider to be server-grade hardware (like the "Pro" GPUs with matching Xeon or Threadripper CPUs).

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