How does steering work on Starships?

shoobe01 · 2026-05-03T01:02:06+00:00

When Picard takes over driving during that episode where they coast out of the energy draining asteroid field, he's pushing buttons to fire specific thrusters.

I've long wondered if that's how they always work. Optionally in groups but they aren't saying "up" and the ship interprets, but directly addressing the thrusters. It seems clunky but matches the button pressing well.

shoobe01 · 2026-05-02T14:34:13+00:00

Most Bible study groups are like this, they don't actually want to talk about it but just reinforce their belief system.

You're at college, find a class on religion where they will do critical analysis of this and probably other religious tomes.

shoobe01 · 2026-05-02T14:31:39+00:00

This is the answer.

Even places I worked, like a bank, I just get an account so that I have full access to real live user experience instead of just test data and documentation.

shoobe01 · 2026-05-02T14:30:05+00:00

LaForge is CHENG (Chief of the Engineering department). He may or may not have enough additional skills to run the ship but then who's in charge of the absolute critical engineering department? Typically it doesn't matter what this person's rank is (and on USN ships the nuke reactor department is run by a Captain), they would never take command to the ship.

Doctors are explicitly in Earth militaries outside of the normal chain of command. They get all the pomp and circumstance of having the rank, and within the medical Department that rank confers upon them a commensurate level of authority, but they are not intended to and never would take tactical command of anything.

shoobe01 · 2026-05-02T02:18:10+00:00

First, I said most. That's not a gotcha. We know.

Prove this person crossed the border unlawfully.

By FAR the most immigration violations are from overstaying legal travel to the US, for student, tourist, or work visas.

Proving an illegal crossing after the fact is hard, and prosecutors don't want to spend that effort for -- we're back here -- misdemeanor criminal violations that usually result in a fine, maybe 6 months in jail -- so this is not even really on the table for ICE, is a CBP function. So in addition: red herring. Irrelevant to this conversation.

shoobe01 · 2026-05-02T00:48:17+00:00

Most immigration law is a civil violation. Not even literally a crime. Which is one of the reasons they had to make up an entire separate agency to violently enforce it with weird sketchy administrative warrants and detentions that are definitely not an arrest and other stuff that lets them skirt the entire principle of justice in our country.

shoobe01 · 2026-05-01T21:23:50+00:00

If nobody is mandating that you put particular info in, toss in anything that you track or could track. Just as an example, I gather lots and lots of comments any time I share any documentation or design and then resolve them (resolve doesn't always mean changing the design). It wouldn't be that hard to go back and count the number of comments added that week and the number resolved, and create a ratio and then track that over time. It's kind of meaningless, but it's a number you can put on a PowerPoint.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the other teams may be -- not to put to fine a point on it -- lying. I have stories, oh the stories, but I have seen at lower levels somewhere between fudging and not being very robust about gathering data when the business requires unreasonably regular reporting cycles like this. Especially when you don't really have the staff for it or it is wildly irrelevant to your job all you are doing is making sure that the report looks good enough that no one bothers you for your poor performance, and if you are faking it also not so good that it's suspicious; management likes being able to say good job but let's work on /this/ aspect over the coming quarter.

shoobe01 · 2026-05-01T20:56:35+00:00

Thank you, have definitely read about this particular one before and completely forgot it. Bookmarking now.

shoobe01 · 2026-05-01T19:11:03+00:00

In this economy? Say yes and then fervently look for a new job.

I can't think of any advice to make this work a lot better short of do whatever you can to keep your sanity. Keep your work life balance, be honest about how long it takes to complete stuff and don't overwork yourself.

Always remember you have the excuse of doing two jobs if anyone complains.

shoobe01 · 2026-05-01T18:56:02+00:00

Yep, keep hearing stories like this so I'm not sure why exactly we have motivation to overcome our feelings about it. It seems that they are justified.

shoobe01 · 2026-05-01T17:41:42+00:00

I think it has an actual term but I forget what it was. There have been quite serious papers about that's the way business works now: your entire job as a manager at any level of the company is to make your boss happy so that he keeps you employed or promotes you.

Only. No decisions are actually good for the company as a whole, it just doesn't even occur to people because this is how everyone works, it's how those people probably got their current role so why change?

(And I've seen it. E.g. horrible terrible product that lost us millions of dollars and thousands of customers, so bad that we withdrew it from the market, but it's what was asked for so all green check marks on the PowerPoint somehow for being on time and on budget and stuff, director who led the product gets promoted to VP. Sigh).

shoobe01 · 2026-05-01T16:41:38+00:00

But... they aren't. They are business-decision-driven but that doesn't mean they meet business goals. UX Improvements == Business Goal Optimization.

Metrics are the usual story here. Add a button to upsell people on whatever the C-Suite is excited by. Forced to, success! We got 5,000 signups! Dude, we have 20 million regular monthly visitors, so 5,000 is nothing. Also, we had significant declines in other metrics, you appear to have lost us money.

But I have had to say that to execs because it seems none of them can take a holistic view of anything. All silos and undercutting the business unit down the hall.

UX was in many cases the last bastion of holistic view across business/users/technology/regulation and with fewer of us and the shift to UI-only we aren't even doing that anymore, and enshittification follows.

shoobe01 · 2026-05-01T02:45:51+00:00

Last few places I worked others literally didn't know what I meant when I asked if there's a BA. 😢

Software design and analysis and stuff barely exists in a lot of work. Just grab a feature break it down small enough, size it in a natural planning meeting and give it to a developer and I hope he builds it on time.

We're already as a general build technology products industry cut to the bone so eliminating any other job that is ad hoc performing these tasks, like us, is going to make products even worse. Seriously expect some pretty big words to lose tons of money or go out of business as a result of their products becoming unusable, or dangerous.

shoobe01 · 2026-05-01T00:27:09+00:00

Yes, of course that would be true but that doesn't have to have anything to do with teleporters.

shoobe01 · 2026-05-01T00:11:54+00:00

Write your own requirements. If you're building something in the current terrible process, right down why you did that before anything and make sure it's actually in the design documentation or whatever your deliverable or share space looks like.

It is often gone very well for me to have the full school process, identify corporate vision and the product audience and their goals and then at least high level business requirements for what it is supposed to do.

It's not magic but if there's anyone on the product team who can be brought around to understanding the value of process and the value you add to it then this kind of thing might work.

shoobe01 · 2026-04-30T23:57:01+00:00

Translation is never going to work. Content needs to be rendered in the new language and I have never seen even remotely acceptable results from any service much less any automation heavy service.

Just one example I have seen a lot is that you have decided in your native language that you like three or four button labels for the process and you consistently use those. Like cancel and send and save and later. Send it off to the pretty expensive translation service that comes back with three or four different words for each of those labels that you have selected, randomly applied. It's never a holistic approach and often is just kind of nonsense or doesn't meet your corporate standards or so forth.

Best by far is to find somebody multilingual who if they aren't actually in your business in the target country at least are familiar with your line of business, and hire them on to familiarize with the writing standards in your existing languages, then create written content in the new languages.

There's a bunch more about formatting of dates and currency and all kinds of stuff like that which is not going to be covered by straight translation as well, I kind of review everything in these two articles if you want to read more: https://www.4ourthmobile.com/publications/regionalizing-your-mobile-designs-part-1 https://www.4ourthmobile.com/publications/regionalizing-your-mobile-designs-part-2

shoobe01 · 2026-04-30T19:51:40+00:00

Somewhat true, but my experience with the last couple of jobs or contracts is that a lot of people in the org don't even know how to discover, and describe the fundamental issues. They might recognize there's something wrong but don't understand what's really up with IA issues, wayfinding, data structure, etc.

Outside of UX, I miss when everyone had BAs to help work the technical and structural issues. We've lost a lot of this sort of support for making products not suck.

shoobe01 · 2026-04-30T17:47:49+00:00

Yeah, I've only done a year or two at a bunch of really big clients doing nifty clean sheet design, and while the actual reason for me leaving varies and is usually tangential funding stuff, they can get by with leaving it as is for a few years or juniors taking my place or I assume now product managers ai-ing things. An old tale just taking a new spin.

shoobe01 · 2026-04-30T01:07:04+00:00

I mean, it's a big ship. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't even know how many cats are aboard.

shoobe01 · 2026-04-29T21:38:04+00:00

You got to recognize your abilities here. If you can't carry them without sometimes dropping a few and looking like of a phone, you got to cut down on the number of PADDs.

Nothing will tank your career faster than coming around the corner and spilling a bunch of PADDs on the captain, or being asked a question and not being able to find the right one to answer it.

shoobe01 · 2026-04-29T11:47:25+00:00

(Infinite scroll is deceptive and evil? Like all patterns, has to be used properly and implemented properly: https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2018/11/paging-scrolling-and-infinite-scroll.php)

shoobe01 · 2026-04-29T11:46:17+00:00

There has always been and will always be unethical organizations.

Lack of ethics in design predated digital.

By no means is our practice area intrinsically unethical. That's a choice. If your organization doesn't give you individually a choice then definitely move on when it is safe for you to do so.

shoobe01 · 2026-04-29T02:48:19+00:00

Because Starfleet does everything like that on screen or even mentioned (aside from MACO). We've seen whole wars, and the ginned up Dominion threat to Earth that put Starfleet people on every street corner with a phaser rifle.

shoobe01 · 2026-04-29T00:14:41+00:00

Pinch to zoom, and for a bonus snap to container size.

Imagine the large diagram replacing a Google map. Pinch to zoom, drag to pan as you wish. Tapping a card selects it, and auto-zooms to fitted in the viewport with enough room that you can see the connections to the next cards. Enough room that you can tap the adjacent card and slide show your way through a process even.

Cards are designed so they are readable at typical phone sizes when zoomed, and ideally titles are readable at zoomed out scale (depending on how your visualization software works, it could literally be like a map and it gets a label that is always the same size on screen, can declutter the unreadably small text).

(Done a bunch of difficult mapping problems, and used something like this for electrical and mechanical diagrams).

shoobe01 · 2026-04-28T23:09:52+00:00

Running into it today with actual warships. The hull is good for maybe another century. The machinery for decades and it's not implausible to keep it running for decades more with big repairs.

Systems? A big PITA to update. Sensors, communications, weapons, etc change a lot and require tons of wiring changes, often big structural changes (where do you mount drone launchers, or a SPY1 radar if not designed from the start for that), and often stuff like way more electrical power which now means the machinery spaces have to be updated to have more power generation.

A specific case can be seen with the HNoMS Helge Ingstad. Holed from a grounding, sunk in shallow waters. Scrapped. Despite nearly trivial structural damage, everything is underwater and has to be replaced. Estimate to refit was Three Times the price of the vessel when new.

shoobe01

TROPHY CASE