Oh vehicle controls are definitely a valid issue to have with the game. They are pretty well designed for controller use. However well designed is not the same as saying they are easy to use. True 6 degrees of freedom controls between orbits are definitely complex.

Sad to have that blocking enjoying the story or more accurately solar system spanning puzzle box.

Have you played it?

Yes those are here.

Being the same company doesn’t help with prices.

I feel like Aldi would do great in Utah but there are none here.

Flip version of 11. The Perl flip.

Hop (2011) from Illumination is exactly that formula but Easter. Also agreed very few outside of the insane number of Christmas ones.

Nightmare before Christmas is also unusual in being directly about saving Christmas but indirectly saving Halloween.

A bunch already here that I like for different reasons but I think my favorite is what they did in the game The Sword of the Stars. Sadly a case of a game with great ideas but only so-so-execution.

My memory on the mechanics might be wrong as I haven’t played it for years but basically as a strategy game the fun twist is that every species has a fundamentally different approach to FTL.

You have a Lizard species with basically Star Trek warp drive with fixed speed above light speed from any point to point of their choosing.

Then you have humans that stumbled across naturally occurring interconnect lines between many stars and can travel faster along those routes by comparison to warp drive but have to travel below light speed off of those lines.

Then an aquatic species that doesn’t do FTL in the normal sense. They developed teleportation but is it only for short distance. However they are able to get the power requirements down very low and rapidly repeat the process and so they flicker across space and the distance of each step gets longer the farther they are from a gravity well so they travel faster around the outside of something like a galactic cluster than in the middle of it. Reversing the normal pattern of where things get colonized.

And last was an insect species that developed ship size star gates but travels sub light to anywhere new but as long as they bring a gate ship travel is basically instant after that.

And the bonus layer is that since the game has direct ship to ship combat also in the mechanics the difference drive types have trade offs as well like the insects having extremely good combat drives since they don’t have ANY FTL systems on their combat ships so it all goes to direction propulsion.

So far it is the only Sci-fi setting I can think of that has so many different ones overlapping not just something like a newer system replacing an older one.

As AAA said in a comment beside me it isn’t so much that I expect it would predate a space elevator. Simply that it is possible with current tech rather than still waiting on additional moderately likely breakthroughs like long chain carbon nanotube tether.

Also there are plenty of options to have the vast majority of the material be from space and not the surface since the core idea is a metal like copper being spun above orbital speed after being made into a full loop then used for the mag lev to keep at ground speed. There are absolutely a lot of astroids that might allow for that.

Constructing an Orbital ring and then using that to get a form of space elevator built.

Totally possible to build with our current technology but the cost if we do it pre space elevator or similar is pretty insane.

Building a ring let’s us basically have a stable space side anchor at low earth orbit instead of geo sync ish like you need for a normal space elevator to match ground speed.

Even more fun is cost for additional rings drops massively and you can build them in different orientations you can get space elevators to rings without having to be on the equator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E

Last and my favorite part is the possibility of having literally trains that go up to a ring cross an ocean and go back down. Wouldn’t be faster than planes but massively better cargo capacity and efficiency as well as comfortable for passengers.

Absolutely disagree on this. There is no fundamental reason software must have bugs. However old systems can be their own technical debt because of things like the hardware no longer being produced and therefore unable to be directly repaired if it breaks from age.

This leaves either reprogramming for a modern device or things like emulation which can create/surface bugs that weren’t present before.

The most extreme example I have heard of (sadly couldn’t quickly find a link for it) was a disorientation simulator for pilot training that had zero software issues in several decades of use and when the hardware failed they replaced it with an FPGA in a modern system that ran all the old code 1 for 1. PDP stuff originally I think.

Additional edit - I’ll add that “bug free” software is insanely rare in reality and nearly but not quite impossible to create in practice. I can’t say the software didn’t technically have bugs but if multiple decades of use didn’t have them show up in practice it is functionally bug free.

I feel this. Both in terms of driver engagement safety and in how much I loathe traditional automatic transmissions. Still stuck owning one in one of the two vehicles I have at the moment but only because it was all I could afford for the second of two vehicles large enough to fit all my kids.

I have had several manual transmission vehicles and the other current one is a PHEV and one of the rare models that is a series hybrid so it drives like a true EV.

While you are most definitely correct his parents wouldn’t do that; schools back then absolutely did enforce that and he clearly did still go through school.

Ok that is one of the most adorable things I have ever seen.

Sadly I don’t but would also like to see it if it is available.

Sounds like we would have to build satellites with shades that would be selectively turned off and on as needed and only for specific parts of the globe like the overheating cities. Might be able to have some interesting effects forcing weather patterns that way.

However as you say none of that helps the ocean acidification and that is terrifying.

Right you are I missed that. So comets at least aren’t workable.

Kinda. The exact quote for it being lowered down without heating up from reentry is “the added ice would cool the water down by only about a millionth of a degree” But yea essentially useless in the big scheme of things.

The ice would be massively better used in space habitats or terraforming other places.

In a strictly technical sense if you source ice in space from something like a comet and bring it down slowly with something like a space elevator it would help a tiny bit. However the amount of effort would be much better spent on either fixing things we are doing or going for one of the crazier but valid options like building satellites that shade something like 1-2% of sunlight etc.

Absolutely agree. Love the movie so much and in a world that loves incredible scales for sci-fi tech I haven’t ever seen anything else like the Titans function in anything else.

Very good list in my opinion and definitely matches my memory from learning about Andrew Jackson in the past.

I agree that Trump is no Hitler. While by some magic the crowds at his events like him he absolutely isn’t the orator Hitler was among a lot of other differences.

However I still say the overall party/political movement he is head of is extremely fascist and incorporating a lot of Nazi elements. The flip to that is that the Nazis got a lot of stuff from the USA and the Nazis loved our racist policies in the 30s and our history of doing things like the westward expansion and what that did to the native people.