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Lemniscate Blue posted:The show made this point in a pretty unsubtle way: which is funny because in the first season or two the goa'uld armor was definitely effective against bullets (sometimes requiring seemingly a whole loving magazine to drop a jaffa) whereas a staff bolt would typically drop them in one hit i feel like someone at some point said "uhhhhh why doesn't the air force capture and reverse-engineer some staff weapons into a more ergonomic shape already??" and the producers were all "gently caress, if we have everyone packing staff weapons we'll blow our loving effects budget... let's just make it so they actually suck instead"
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| # ¿ Jan 17, 2026 15:36 |
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Nemesis was such an aggressively stupid movie "i, the newfound ruler of the romulan star empire, have a terrible illness. i need captain picard's blood to survive." you could probably just say that and he and the feds would be like "okay cool we'll do a series of transfusions to help you out", you don't need to fuckin' vampire his rear end "oh no our phasers are worn out and we've shot all our torpedoes" oh okay cool so he didn't even need the cloaking device to beat you "oh no the transporters are out!" uhh, you've got like two or three shuttlebays full of shuttlecraft that could fly over? "oh no we can't blow up the ship any more" uhh you can't get someone to rig a timebomb together with a few phasers aimed at the antimatter pods or something?? and so many other things christ uhhhh anyway so that this isn't just a "rant about nemesis, again" post, i nominate whatever equipment Babylon 5 used to communicate with the Great Machine, because after the first time it woke up, any time they actually needed that sucker to pitch in for system defense, it was always "nuhhhh we can't get through to Draal". lol fuckin' JMS sticking a huge death laser on that thing and then having to handwave it away again and again. lol. (spoiler tagged in case someone from the thread where they're watching B5 for the first time wanders through)
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Statutory Ape posted:i thought nemesis was great and set the stage perfectly for ST: Picard please don't troll
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Animal-Mother posted:Where is the deflector. I don't think there's any official answer. I'd be curious to know what the designer had in mind. One bit of trivia is that in the mid-late 70s when Paramount was considering doing another series instead of a movie, some of the pre-production designs for the sets included little alcoves for one-person transporter pads; the idea was that one of the upgrades the Enterprise got was a series of waveguides that would permit easy intra-ship beaming. Maybe the designer at ILM was thinking "well of course they can just beam down there if they need to get in!" I'm inclined to think that Grissom/Oberth was intended as a non-combat ship, that as such they were willing to accept a higher degree of automation, and so everything down there is stuff that usually doesn't need to be touched; basically the only time they'd go down there is if something broke and needed to be fixed. And even then it might have sufficient redundancy that if something failed, there'd be a good chance they could just switch to a backup and let it sit until the next time they put in to a starbase. But, yeah, I figure it's fuel/storage tanks and a shitload of sensors down there.
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I still say the idea that the Federation just sends any old failson and weirdo who manages to get a science degree off on a cheap science vessel or distant lab explains so many episodes. i remember elsewhere on the internet some people who thought they were really smart would get all smugface and say "ah hah! this is absurd, scientists do not work by themselves and produce great things, they work in teams at big labs! owned dipshit federation scrubs "but, like, we know there are rear end in a top hat scientists and other academics. why not send the assholes and megalomaniac dickheads out to the rear end end of space so they'll stop bothering people who aren't raging jerks? "next item: Professor Dillweed is applying to be posted to a deep space lab. hot drat, finally! took him long enough to get the hint! approved. i'll call Starfleet right after this meeting and tell them we need another lab on some distant planetoid. make sure they put it really far out this time, the last one was close enough that the latest round of subspace relay upgrades got Doctor Butthead's reception up where he can do visual communications. ugh. i didn't think his hygiene could actually get worse."
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McSpanky posted:The Executor definitely has a "the Yamato's Yamato" feeling to it, it's stupidly huge to the point that it must take half an hour for the thing to pull a U-turn and yet a single fighter took out the bridge by accident and caused it to swan dive into the nearest moon-sized space station. And then the First Order decided to double down but went with the Nazi Amerikabomber instead i'm pretty sure the fighter was only able to crash into the bridge because the Rebel fleet had already been concentrating all their fire on that super star destroyer
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SidneyIsTheKiller posted:
The starship's databanks were altered to phony up the photon torpedo launches, and presumably also to erase the transporter logs of Burke and Samno beaming onto Kronos One and assassinating Gorkon; it's trivial to assume that the flight recorder was tampered with as well.
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Some Goon posted:Well there really isn't anyone fielding a proper army against them. The rebels have a limited supply of rag tag capital ships. As long as they can keep the planets within the empire pacified they don't need to handle capital ship warfare. I touched on this in another thread but I think something that may have varied over the decades is to what extent the Galactic Empire was able to consolidate/monopolize their grasp on military power. Like yeah the modern depiction is that they basically had total, unquestionable dominance, but I'm pretty sure at least some earlier sources suggested that local systems still controlled enough starships that if they all got organized and decided to fight back at once, they could definitely challenge the Imperial Starfleet. Like, there's a reason that the first response to "the Senate has been abolished" is astonishment and trepidation. And there's that guy who spent the time before that announcement saying "uhh these guys are a serious threat and are well-equipped." Tulip posted:So, two things. First, if there's anything we know about Star Wars, it's that everything is very, very close. Basically everything inside the Empire's territory seems to be like, a day trip. For example, Alderaan and Yavin are about 40kly apart, and supposedly that took the Death Star (which is canonically slow) about "a few hours." So really, it's like 12 hours go end-to-end on the galaxy (100-120kly, I'm seeing different numbers). A really narrowly purpose built reactive battleship probably doesn't even need toilets. Having extra-long endurance would be useless for interstellar travel, but would be very useful for planetary blockades.
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SlothfulCobra posted:Well that looks like another case of whoever writes down the stats for sci fi ship size is just talking out of their rear end, because every time they're on the screen at the same time, they're about the same size. To be fair, the Warbird was intended by its designer, Andrew Probert, to be substantially larger than the Enterprise-D. Not his fault that the effects guys had a hard time representing that. ![]() I think this is the closest they ever got to trying to show the Warbird as substantially larger:
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SavageGentleman posted:The general tendency of Starfleet to fill most of its exploration ships with the extended families of their crew is also pretty baffling - but on the other hand they really save on compensation payments to widows and (half-)orphans! ...payments?
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Error 404 posted:...made of poop. the water molecules in your blood were once part of dinosaur piss
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McSpanky posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwx5uB0pyhQ Interesting that he comes up with 8.9 million sqft for the Enterprise-D. Compare against this internal production memo from 1987: ![]() Also interesting that the video brings up the crew comparison with the original Enterprise. It's not authoritative per se but as an insight into at least some of the behind-the-scenes thinking at the time, David Gerrold's novelization of Farpoint suggests that the "operations crew" (presumably excluding the various blue-shirts) of the Enterprise-D is in fact no larger than that of Kirk's Enterprise. galagazombie posted:It also cost them way too much money to film, hence why they use it only like one time after the first season. The Big D had all kinds of neat things it was supposed to do that while filming the first season they realized they in no way could afford, including lotsa lovely pieces of garbage tech. My favorite was "Cetacean Ops" where they were supposed to have a tank full of dolphins who navigated the ship. Because living in the ocean means they understand 3-Dimensional navigation better you see. Man that 90's "Save the Whales/Dolphins" movement was something. Don't get me wrong It's correct to save them, It's just weird how "spiritual" it got portraying them as like these New Age enlightened beings we could learn so much from instead of, you know, dolphins. Solkanar512 posted:Wait, like in SeaQuest DSV? TNG came out in 1987, well before the 90s. If I remember right the idea got floated by Sternbach, who was ripping it off of some anime, because Sternbach is a big anime nerd. There are numerous hidden background references to Dirty Pair throughout TNG... and a couple of really blatant ones too, in the form of two different models that are shaped like the robot Nanmo.
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there are actually two TNG episodes that reference it; there's an overhead page in Yesterday's Enterprise calling someone to Cetacean Ops, and there's a brief line in The Perfect Mate where Geordi asks someone 'hey have you seen the whales yet?'
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Barudak posted:Jet Alone could have killed at least two of the Angels on its own sans any AT field. The main reason it got sabotaged though was because if it worked humanity could have dealt with the reason why the Angels were attacking without putting themselves at risk/letting the background scheme percolate Bolded the big one. JA threatened to draw off funding from the apocalyptic death cult.
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Some Goon posted:Y'all ain't wrong, but as a nonliving being Jet Alone couldn't have done poo poo against an AT field. I mean, sure, if you're going to take the death cult that uses child soldiers at their word ![]() Okay, okay, jokes aside: yes, there's some massive hubris going on with the JA team. That said, I can't help but feel like letting JA get crumped by an Angel and then following up by defeating the Angel with Evas would be an even more effective way to show that JA isn't the way forward, and yet they still resorted to sabotage.
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galagazombie posted:Theoretically all but two maybe three of the angels could have been killed with nukes. It's shown that a single nuke (or equivalent) are strong enough break the AT fields of most and render it disabled and near dead for hours or days at a time. You really just have to be willing to keep dropping nukes after the first until theres nothing left. Sure you might wipe out humanity from the nuclear fallout thus defeating the purpose, but at least you can give a middle finger to the doomsday conspiracy and their magic robots with good ol' nuclear power, the working mans doomsday. Eh, we exploded a shitload of bombs in the 50s and 60s. Cancer rate might go up. That said, it wouldn't surprise me if part of the Evangelion timeline included nuclear disarmament at some point.
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Apparently the writers regretted how that episode ended with basically a standoff and the crew leaving the planet to their fate. Seems especially wasted opportunity given the analogues to the Augments of human history. i'm not sure how else you'd end it. i guess by having a big shootout and a bunch of people getting killed? it's actually a pretty surprising ending for TNG now that i think about it: the episode basically endorsed violent uprising when the government is unjustly imprisoning a whole segment of the population. like yeah the episode ends with the implication that the government will finally sit down and actually try to work out an acceptable solution, but the vets got there by holding the government at gunpoint. though really while the supersoldier thing is the sci-fi conceit, the negative consequences of failing to hold up your end of the bargain with your army is a pretty old story.
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Defiance Industries posted:I think that some concepts are also rooted in the shift of US military doctrine from "we will overwhelm our enemies with the sheer number of tanks and bullets we build" to to one leveraging technological advantage as the main edge. The amount of technological doo-dads that a modern infantryman has access to would probably feel like "devoting disproportionate resources" to someone rooted in older US tactics, but it's more reasonable to us because we've internalized that's how modern first-world infantry look. Maybe part of it is trying to reframe a narrative about war when you are now the overdog, not the underdog; okay so you are technologically way ahead of the other guys, BUT there's not many of you! i don't think it's really a narrative thing. in a way, throwing a shitload of tech at infantry is probably seen as a way of trying to do war on the cheap; it has always cost a lot of money to support troops in the field. you buy a bunch of fancy equipment, yeah you spend a bunch of money up front, but if it saves you from having to deploy double or triple the number of troops it's probably worth it in the long run. but i think the big thing is not racking up a big death count. one of the perceived lessons of the Vietnam War was the body count and the footage of dead soldiers coming home eroding public support. so you spend big - and remember, someone's making those war gizmos, so that's money in someone's constituent's pockets! - and try to minimize that so that people don't get too pissed off about how many Americans are being killed overseas. that said, overwhelming people with tanks was a tech advantage in its own way. or rather, with trucks; reportedly one of the captured Germans at Normandy knew they were hosed when they saw all these mechanized vehicles rolling up the beach and not one goddamn horse. we could drown our logistics problems in oil.
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oh, derp. sorry for misreading you.
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:We have the technology right now to pilot drones remotely, why aren't we using the same technology for tanks and jet fighters what happens if someone starts jamming the radio frequencies used for those remote operations? it's worth remembering that most (all?) of our drone operations have been against nations who don't have the money to really gently caress with us in the air. it's easily plausible that a ~~*~peer competitor~*~~ (e.g. russia, china) could develop a drone whose only purpose is to fly in and just jam the hell out of drone communications. then they roll up and take down our headless drones, either with their drones on a different frequency, or with their human-piloted fighters. and sure, you could say "oh well if the drone loses contact then it could just do something like lob a HARM at whatever's blasting radio noise" (and there's a whole can of worms there too - if a squadron of drones loses comms do they ALL launch at the same target?), but i think by the time you've built up the drone's software sufficiently to be able to handle itself in combat after it loses contact, you're pretty far away from "using the same technology" as what's on current drones
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oh uh anyway another example of poo poo tech: i punished myself last week by watching the Wing Commander movie and apparently the Confederation has no way of authenticating communications or orders because despite being handed an encrypted transmission by a commissioned officer, a carrier's command staff is still willing to write it off as phony orders from the enemy until someone pulls out a ring that shows they personally know the admiral that sent those orders. is there any article that goes into why that movie is so crummy? like i guess there's a quote by one of the actors that the original script he got was great, and then when he showed up he got handed a rewrite that was back-to-back dogshit. i'm sure the answer is "chris roberts" but i'm a sucker for behind-the-scenes drama and bullshit
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GD_American posted:Tangentially, we discovered in a big way early in Iraq 2 that while putting all your eggs in the satcom basket was fine for peacetime, the bandwidth requirements for a fully networked military at war quickly overwhelmed everything the DoD had in space. They leased every bit of available commercial bandwidth, and started digging some old Vietnam-era toys out of the closet like HF radio. yeah i remember reading years ago about bandwidth constraints, and how even before 2003 the satellite network was getting slammed with stuff like dipshit admirals sending multi-hundred-megabyte powerpoint files everywhere some goon once posted an anecdote about how some poor grunt in Afghanistan needed a file ASAP and it was some godawful big file and the Inmarsat link they had would get the transfer done in, like, several days.
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Timby posted:It has been a while since I've read a deep dive on the subject, but from memory: Oof, that's rough. One thing I'll give the production credit for is that, while the interior spaces are still pretty wide open by submarine spaces, it felt like there was at least a token effort to convey a more cramped, naval feel to the ship interiors. I'm doubly impressed if they were navigating that while under the gun on the shooting schedule. Do you know if Roberts had intended to try and swing for getting the Wing Commander 3 and 4 casts for the movie and got overridden, or was it always the plan to go with a younger cast? I do remember thinking while watching the movie "was Malcolm McDowell really that much more expensive than David Warner? "
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jeeves posted:It was consigned to the "things Trek scientists forgot about" along with Spore Drive, easy time travel, cloaking/phasing through poo poo, and more! ehhhhhhh that one's a lot easier to accept though: - top secret project working in isolation in the middle of nowhere - most or all of the data may have been destroyed - even if some data survived, it's tainted by the secret introduction of protomatter - the only extant prototype was destroyed - every scientist but one who worked on it was brutally murdered (and she's probably not at all interested in trying again) - the existence of the project coming to light sparked a huge interstellar shitstorm and destabilized relations with the klingons - the genesis planet exploded within a matter of, what, weeks? - starfleet was having a hell of a time finding candidate planets that fit the parameters of the project without introducing ethical concerns like, it's really easy to imagine that everyone involved looked at it and agreed it was waaaay more trouble than it was worth
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Discovery at least represents more effort than a lot of the ship and fighter designs from the Star Wars sequels
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I feel like commenting on an Impstar being "undergunned" is a bit odd in a setting where the weapons are at least partly energy based. Like, if you doubled the gun count, would the reactor even be able to support firing them all? Is it more effective to increase the number or size of your turbolasers?wdarkk posted:Star Destroyers explicitly replace the old Venator class, which carried about 420 (ha) starfighters on a smaller frame. I assume the tradeoff is in endurance: the Venator goes out, fights, comes back, but the Imperial-class spends a long time on station doing oppression. I think the big thing about Impstars is, as alluded to previously, that they're meant to enforce the Empire's will without having to worry about pesky things like "logistics". If you have to lay siege to a planet for months or years - if a small rebel base on an isolated planet can throw up a strong enough shield to deflect "any bombardment", imagine how hard it'd be to crack into the shields of a heavily industrialized planet - it'd be nice to not have to worry about your supply lines being severed by guerilla attacks, because you've brought all your supplies with you! Similarly, they can go on long patrols or garrison an unfriendly planet or do whatever indefinitely. Some smuggler hides out in an asteroid field? gently caress 'em, we can just park here until they starve to death!
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frogge posted:Forget if it's been said already but that whole dealio with personal shields vs lasers in Dune being instant atomic explosions. Like hell no one wouldn't take advantage of that. It's in-universe consistent at least. I think the issue there is that it breaks too many norms and is too big a gamble. Like at the time of the first book, inter-house warfare is already very narrowly proscribed so as to minimize civilian casualties; setting up a nuke-sized blast, even if it was technically a lasgun-Holtzmann effect, is going to kill a lot of bystanders. Also if a house uses atomics against people they'll have the entire Imperium coming down on them and annihilating them, so there's the possibility of the Landsraad just saying "yup, looks like atomics to us, gently caress 'em!" I think Paul was willing to do it because, well, House Atreides was already pretty much wiped out, and plus he knows nobody's going to do a nuclear carpet bombing of Arrakis. Fantastic Foreskin posted:The only Star destroyer to go down in the entire trilogy is the super star destroyer that gets kamikazed. They never even try to attack them before that battle, they just run from them. Even then they don't expect to do anything to them, they're just trying to stop the death star from firing. We see at least one Impstar exploding in the background in ROTJ:
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As much as I roll my eyes at the pantheon of "star dreadnought" classes derived from what are mostly probably Impstars that were hastily scrawled by a comic book penciler under a deadline, a parade of bullshit one-off ships is extremely in-character for a bunch of space Nazis.
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Foxfire_ posted:Yeah, they have shields that are presumably doing something, but both TIEs and X-wings go down to a well-aimed burst of lasers, so I don't think there's movie support for X-wings being more durable. As far as the movie goes, there's no reason to think TIEs don't also have shields that are only good vs near misses/shrapnel/whatever Yeah there's a shot in ANH when the TIEs are attacking the Falcon that we see what could be shield hits: ![]()
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W.T. Fits posted:Yeah, in recent years, the propensity of Federation technology to default to "fail deadly" instead of "fail safe" has really been a massive I think this really took off with Deep Space Nine. Before then we generally didn't see bridge consoles explode or even spark unless the ship was really getting the poo poo kicked out of it (which is fine for me as a visual dramatic shorthand), but then at some point they basically decided "hey let's just constantly shake the ship and shoot off pyrotechnics every time the ship is hit" which, yeah, I'm not a fan of either.
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Actually that reminds me, the BFG 9000 probably belongs in this thread. So you've got a big loving gun. It charges up, shoots a big green blob, and when the blob hits something it makes a big explosion. Cool. But then! The moment the blob explodes - not when you pull the trigger, not at launch, but when it strikes an object - the gun (not the blob) emits a spread of invisible rays in the direction the gun was facing when it fired, which themselves constitute most of the destructive force released with each trigger pull. Why? Why the heck would UAC design a weapon that behaves like that? Sheer madness. Youtube user decino has a neat video that really dives into the game mechanics, even the underlying source code, of the BFG 9000's behavior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsCqLQJ1EOc
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Phanatic posted:The accident that created Riker's clone also seems entirely replicable. And the fact that it was possible at all means that you can just copy the data anyway, so just by beaming someone somewhere you could simply choose to materialize multiple copies of them in different locations. I've come to prefer reading that episode as that the transporter accidentally grabbed a Riker from a slightly parallel timeline (which we know an unlimited number of them exist thanks to Parallels) and that Data and Geordi simply mis-interpreted the sensor data. The show timeline got an extra Riker, and the timeline he came from just records that Lt Riker's signal was tragically lost while beaming up from the surface.
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Yeah I'm not sure why people are bagging on the "conference room" in the runabout; if you're taking a days-long voyage it seems like it'd be nice to have a multi-purpose space on board that isn't the control room. SlothfulCobra posted:In theory the entire rear half of the Danube is supposed to be modular and can be swapped in and out, and the Enterprise crew is just kinda obsessive about conference rooms. In practice, this is one of many features throughout the franchise that was planned and gets thrown into design documents but never used because they don't tell writers about it, or the writers are too busy with their one plot to worry about showing off franchise elements. Well, part of it also is that the rear area served a specific purpose for TNG; they needed a separate room that would be impacted by the weird space-time anomaly, with a bowl of fruit to visually indicate that something weird is happening. In other circumstances, writer interest aside, there are economic considerations towards using separate rooms on any spacecraft, whether it's a runabout or a Galaxy-class starship or a tacky fascist eyesore. Up-front there's the cost of re-assembling and dressing the set, and then there's the time involved in adding another set change to the script, and then you have to worry about pacing issues as well. Especially when (as happened frequently in DS9) there are only two characters using the whole runabout, why bother having them do a scene in the butt end of the runabout when you can do it just as well up at the cockpit? It's like when TNG would use Main Engineering as a lab area. Yeah, in-universe, it's completely bonkers to be experimenting with phaser rifles of questionable provenance or completely unknown alien devices right in front of the main reactor. But from a series production perspective, it's a big time-saver, which in turn saves a bunch of money too. Cerv posted:This is the real reason that 24th century Earth society has become a utopia. One of the commentary footnotes in the TNG tech manual is that Starfleet's greatest achievement isn't technological, it's cultural: being able to bring together numerous people from different backgrounds and have them work effectively and harmoniously.
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yeah if Starfleet beached people every time they got their brains futzed with by aliens they’d be unable to crew half the fleet within a year
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Splicer posted:Picard got a competency review because he was mind controlled too many times, which implies you get a few freebies and they only care if it's a pattern of behaviour. wait, when was that?
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pixaal posted:Happens every time they use the transporter nobody thinks you're clever for posting this. everyone's heard this worn-out heterodox reading. maybe try finding something novel to well, actually about
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the Falcon reads to me like a space truck/van. you're not hauling huge loads of bulk goods between big docks or transport hubs, you're picking up a load from the bay at Spacely Sprockets and delivering it directly to the landing pad behind Yoyodyne's machine shop. i think technically the inspiration is one of those river runners but space van seems more on point to me. how many trucks/vans are on the road every day delivering poo poo from point to point? like that, but in space. the "front stubs are for use as a tugboat" thing, i dunno, i guess. it feels like a clunky retcon. maybe for, like, a single container? definitely not that goof-rear end train of containers i've seen elsewhere though, you hire a bigger freighter for that.
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The Falcon is probably an odd one given how tiny the cockpit is- hell, that it has a 'cockpit' rather than a 'bridge'- compared to its overall size; pretty sure the cockpit on the rebel freighters seen in ESB and ROTJ is even smaller than the Falcon's
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| # ¿ Jan 17, 2026 15:36 |
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THE BAR posted:Oil? shrooms
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"




moment for me.