“What can the harvest hope for, if not the care of the reaper man?”

Pretty good movies.

But I think that also understates how influential they were to superhero popular culture. It bears remembering that prior to the BatTrilogy, for a decade-ish superhero films had been either the squeezed-dry sequels of B-list characters, comedies, aimed largely at kids, and/or barely resembled their source material. While 90s and early 00s Superhero comics were moving through their edgy antihero phases, films struggling to define themselves.

The Nolan Trilogy brought the idea of Batman as a tortured loner, alienated from his family and allies, into the broader popular culture. Batman allows villains to die, spies on innocents, and eschews sidekicks. There is no Justice League. “You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain” is not the sentiment that pervaded superhero screen media in the years prior to the Nolan trilogy.

Even if you don’t like superhero stuff, they’re worth watching just as an artifact of mid-late 00’s culture, in my opinion.

This. Could I name a few communities I’d like to exist on Lemmy? Sure - but I could just go out and make them. The issue is more I don’t think they’d be sustainable as standalone communities.

Absolutely nothing.

For reference, here’s footage of a 5 Megaton nuclear device being detonated underground. No global eruptions, and hard for humans to even feel further from the epicenter - although, seismic monitoring by precision instruments is a known way of monitoring for secret underground nuclear tests.

For further reference, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake off the coast of Japan - the one that unleashed powerful tsunamis - released a staggering 3.9x10^22 Joules, or around 9.3 million megatons of TNT. While this did cause local devastation, it also failed to meet Project Vulcan’s goal.

You’re basically asking about “Hard” and “Soft” science fiction.

For me, at least, I lean a little bit more towards the “Soft” (what you call ‘Fi’) side of things. But I’ve also always found this a little bit of a false dichotomy; a story can go fully fantastic and explain nothing about its spaceflight, but lean heavily on actual psychology or other social sciences to drive its characters; so is it “Hard” or “Soft” sci-fi? Turns out it doesn’t matter; it’s Sci-fi and if it’s a good story, then it’s good.

I also have to somewhat push back on the idea that Star Wars “doesn’t even try to explain” its tech. A lot of people put a good bit of effort into laying out how the technology worked, up to and including calculating the energy involved in things like Turbolaser bolts (turns out, it’s a metric shitton of energy).

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen small (i.e., handheld-sized) commercial UAVs that fly like this. But as others have pointed out, at any realistic size you start to run into a lot of problems:

• The VTOL rotors will create massive drag when they’re not in use. There’s a reason virtually every aircraft with embedded VTOL jets engineered ways to cover them up during level flight. This cascades into a whole bevy of complexity issues.
• When you’re not using them, you’re lugging around 3 out of your 4 rotors for no reason.
• You’re also sacrificing a lot of internal volume for your lift fans. This isn’t so much a problem in small UAVs, again, but it’s not great if you were hoping to use that capacity for fuel or cargo.

So yeah, like others said as well - now that we have tailsitter drones of moderate size, there’s not really a use for this layout.

Yeah, this question… like, this isn’t even a question. So much stuff I would re-do…

Shoutout to the Kraut Space Magic G11 and its weird, squared-off caseless cartridge. Note that the bullet itself is still circular.

This was supposed to help squeeze more propellant into a magazine by not ‘wasting’ the space unfilled when you stack circular cartridges on top of each other. In practice, the G11 had a number of technical issues, some of which could be traced to the caseless ammunition. It ended up going nowhere.

One could argue that “shock & awe” is a military strategy to specifically terrorize the enemy force, for example a military opponent.

Indeed, and that’s why the definition hinges critically on the intended target (civilian vs. military). One could even argue that if you, as a civilian, see your nation’s military forces march out and get torn to ribbons, and then the next night your city’s sky is alive with enemy aircraft bombing military, government, or materiel targets, you have pretty good reason to be scared. But we wouldn’t call this terrorism, even if there are some civilian casualties, because the primary targets are all legitimate ones intended to hamper your ability to wage war.

This strategy is one performed by an organized military that is … bound by the rules of warfare … Non-state actors (insurgents, terrorist groups) on the other hand are not beholden to any law. To me, this is another relevant distinction

This is another good point. We nominally expect that organized nations will adhere to the laws and customs of war. More critically, non-state actors also tend to not have uniforms, stash materiel among civilian populations (often even on sites protected under said laws and customs), and deliberately introduce ambiguity as to whether a target is military or civilian.

But this logic can also get murky when we consider states not recognizing other governments or arguing they are “occupied” by another, more ephemeral hostile force. It can be advantageous for a state to portray their enemy as an ephemeral, non-state actor, in part because it lets you portray the enemy as not adhering to laws and customs of war.

Nominally:

• A terrorist attack is primarily intended to kill civilians or cause damage to civilian lives in order to cause fear of the attacking group, anger against the victims’ own government, or otherwise cause a change of policy. The deaths of people with no relationship to any ongoing military operation or force is “a feature, not a bug”. Military targets may also be hit, or the goal may even be to selectively target civilians to emphasize that their military cannot protect them.

• A military strike is primarily intended to deteriorate an enemy force’s ability to wage warfare: by killing soldiers or leadership, destroying materiel or supplies being used to fight, or destroying industry or logistics being used to support the war effort. Civilian deaths are an unavoidable side-effect of strikes primarily intended to hamper military warfighting capability.

That’s the theoretical line.

In practice, of course, there are many points of disputation - how many degrees separated from a man holding a gun must a target be before it is “non-military”? If an organization which mainly targets civilians in terrorist attacks carries out an attack on a military target, that still might be referred to as a “terrorist attack”, as in, “an attack by a terrorist organization”. And of course, there’s a degree of publicity shaping involved in this as well. But in concept, the above is your line.

It’s an interesting thought, but according to the article, it’s not even clear that the fungus is absorbing radiation or befitting from radiation. Actual photosynthesis-via-radiation hasn’t been demonstrated; it might simply be taking advantage of the absence of other species due to high radiation, or the radiation is triggering a stress response.

Beyond that, I’m not sure this fungus would have a better protection-per-ton rating than, say, water (which is an astoundingly good radiation shield). But, it might point us towards ways of developing plants which are radiation-tolerant, theoretically opening a path to growing food in orbital or lunar-surface environments.

Hey! Thanks for the rep for !worldbuilding@lemmy.world . We are, admittedly, not as active as Reddit’s equivalent due to Lemmy’s fairly niche nature, but more are always welcome.

This is really it. In some ways early CGI was actually more intensive than traditional setpiece, costume, and effects-making in that it had a very high technical skill floor. Not denigrating the skills of actual physical artists here, but you had to not just have an artistic sense, but be able to navigate (in some cases, program in the first place!) the tools behind it.

Yep. Their heroes, icons, leaders, family… and themselves.

Hell, they’d disbelieve if the glasses detected someone was telling the truth, but they didn’t want to believe that!

People would very, very quickly start to rationalize why the detection couldn’t possibly be right. Look at how many scientifically or historically proven things people already are willing to disregard because it conflicts with their worldview or beliefs!

So they detect “willful” deception? People would just fall back on the “…well, I didn’t know” / “didn’t think XYZ counted” / “didn’t consider ABC” as their excuses. Or if it can be shown that 0.00-near-infinite-zeros-01% of the population has some quirk which makes them detect wrongly, suddenly there’d be most of the population claiming that.

On the one hand, to me, “mobile suits” should feel titanic and weighty, larger than life. So yet another Gundam zipping around like a demented chimpanzee on crack is… I dunno. Fighting space robot aliens is also a choice, since the man-vs-man and political background is a key part of what distinguishes Gundam.

On the other hand, a Gundam game in 2027, by Bandai-Namco, scored by Mick Gordon? That is such incredible levels of hype and I really, really hope that this is good.

I think the life cycle of collaborative projects - small circle to big blowup, drifting from the original spirit or ethos for better or worse - will be accelerated by algorithmically-driven social media. Hell, it’s already happening.

When I look at older collaborative fiction, it’s much more likely to remain centered around a few core creators and their guidelines or approaches. The more content in a project is owned by them, the more they’re able to influence others to not diverge too far from it.

When things blow up massively, that can all change in a heartbeat. Whoever is running the project frequently struggle to maintain those guidelines: Either because they don’t want to seem like controlling jerks, or because the flood of new content genuinely overwhelms their ability to moderate.

The problem is, this accelerated lifecycle can also burn out projects far more rapidly as people become disconnected from what appealed to them in the first place.

A lot of this was built around a world prior to surveillance video being everywhere all the time

Even in a world with surveillance, digital footprints, and advanced forensic evidence techniques, defense attorneys still help keep the system honest: Does the video actually show what the prosecution alleges? Was this digital data obtained with a proper warrant? Is there chain of custody for the forensic evidence, or could it have been tampered?

Demanding integrity is still a key part of the system. The only thing that’s changed is what you’re demanding it of.

I was of the camp that said that even millions was far too small. This is a war spread out over thousands, if not tens of thousands of star systems. Hell, Venators have crews of ~10,000, and we see multiples go down in a single battle. I wouldn’t be surprised if a million clones died on some bad days alone.

Also someone who played through that: I agree.

Nostalgia Rorquals Online have a very rose-tinted view of the time. Sure, there were more ships in space… but a lot of those “ships in space” came in the form of an entire cap fleet landing on your cruiser roam the second you tackled a Rorqual. Fatigue timers and diminishing returns were absolutely needed.

I think the current crop of issues wouldn’t be fixed by just going back; they can be traced to other factors, like Citadels encouraging players crowding together.