by

One of the zillion ideas, or perhaps several of, that have been bouncing around my head of late is: “What if you designed a super carrier, that’s meant to carry its own battle group?”

This kind of got me to thinking. If you designed a super carrier around the idea of several hanger compartments, big enough to pack in 8 ~ 10 capital ships in destroyer or frigate tier sizes, that’s pretty useful. At which point, you may as well design the entire ship around its hangers, engines, and main guns.

We’d be talking about a very large ship. Something in the scale of a Covenant super carrier or an Executor class super stardestroyer–several kilometres of starship. All the more reason to basically build the ship around the guns, the hangers, and the engines, wrap the sucker in all the armour you can muster, and build vital crew services into the ship’s spine.

A follow on idea to this is the notion of a modular destroyer to accompany the super carrier. I mean, literally modular. Swapping out modules could adapt the destroyer from being focused on a point defense screen, or fit smaller Gauss cannons, etc. Swap hanger bays for mine dispensing packages. Need anti-ship torpedoes or the mother of all antimissile batteries? Swap a module. All the better if the aforementioned really big freaking super carrier was equipped to deal with that while underway, but outside of combat; because if you’re going big, bring some spare parts along.

Such a destroyer would go well with a carrier that is so freaking big that you can land the groups destroyers in the carrier, before making with the super duper space travel hijinks. Not to mention, good excuses to have a whole lotta starfighters, support craft, and probably the deck space to supply a planetary assault force or evacuate a small moon worth of people in a pinch.

Thus arriving at another idea that I’ve been putting around with for some years: that Gauss rifles and the like would be far more effective than some kind of damned phaser bank. You wanna knock the shit out of an enemy ship? Blast the fricken’ thing with a solvo of Gauss rifles. Run out of shit to fire out the Gauss rifle? Go mine an asteroid for something ferromagnetic worth processing into a coilgun slug. I imagine that much as cruise missiles took over the world of terrestrial navel combat, starships will rely principally on comparable missiles, and some really big coilguns for piercing uber thick armour is a requirement. Plus who doesn’t like to unleash some kinetic whoop ass?

I kind of picture a long rail of a ship. A quartet of forward firing large calibre Gauss cannons built into the four outer corners of the frame, and a long shaft running several kilometres. The sides of which amount to hanger bay after hanger bay after hanger bay; kind of like the hanger bay death crawls of Covenant ships in the original Halo, where you start wondering whether or not a ship can ever have enough hanger bays or if the engineers ran out of ideas.

by

Ask Ethan: Could Octonions Unlock How Reality Really Works?
https://flip.it/QSQZt7

I’m not sure what’s bothering me more: how interesting I found this article, or that computer graphics is the primary reason quaternions doesn’t  elicit a blank stare rather than curiosity at the idea of octonions.

by

Millennium Plus 20: How Photography Has Changed in The Last Two Decades
https://flip.it/rQPO96

One of the things I find amazing: is how phone cameras became everywhere, and then became so good that they’re up to recording our important memories. Computers and networking helped make sharing what we care about easier: but film isn’t so idiot proof at that, or for most people, that cost effective.

Over the past decade the amount of photos I’ve taken at home has risen, as cameras became everywhere plus better. By contrast, most of my childhood is either on photo prints, or still on rolls of 110mm film.

by

Not quite as simple grandfather’s method of Christmas shopping for family, but I think my dogs will be very happy with this plan:

My grandfather’s way was to basically buy three bottles, tie three bows, and call it success. That’s actually a great idea in a way when you consider him, my grandmother, and my mother has different tastes, it’s something everyone can share, and will probably be consumed before next year, lol.

by

Yay, it looks like iPad OS 13.3 fixed the holy-crap-the-packets-are-gone level of lagosity when combining Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Me thinks this will get some use.

And I’ve yet to cry bugs, bugs, bugs everywhere and not a fix in sight as hard as < 13.2.2~13.2.3. As far as I can tell the only knew issue is the mouse wheel scrolling is broken, and that’s hardly a problem compared to can’t effin’ type ‘it.

by

Well, it has taken a good sweet time but I finally got around to something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now.

Earlier this year, I replaced Centauri’s system drive. Going from the first small SSD I ever bought, to a shiny 1 TB able to replace its hard drive. Since then, I’ve largely migrated all data over from the hard drive.

My plans for the now redundant storage capacity has been to fix the actual thorn in my storage side. Since repurposing my best portable drive to deal with my laptop’s backups, my xbox has had to make due with an old and extremely slow 300G laptop drive for its external drive. One that sucks so much that it actually makes Deathstar One’s internal 500G look sexy, and the original Xbox Ones are not equipped with sexy drives.

Hauling Centauri out was mostly leg work rather than effort. The only real pain in the arse is that the gigabit cable doesn’t have enough extra length for me to “Pull” the tower out, rather I need to connect/disconnect the cable before moving the tower more than an inch or so from final resting place next to the wall. Yeah, bollocks to that.

Of course plugging the drive into one of my spare enclosures is as easy peasy as pulling out the screw driver set; it helps that I kept one spare within quick reach and my second spare in deep storage, last time I redid /dev/closet.

Now the real irksome ribbon was the Xbox. It decided to disavow all knowledge of how to format the sucker. Because Microsoft in all their glory, eventually decided there should be a ~200M magic partition ahead of the NTFS volume. And Xbox, no likely. Enter Linux powered laptop, GNU parted, and cursing at HDMI cables finally falling out the back of Deathstar One (>_<).

In theory, by morning most of the data should now be transferred over to it. Allowing me to decommission the 300G laptop drive to virtually anything but video game storage, and it’ll be nice not running 97+++++ percent full all the frickin’ time.

Even my lazy ass can get around to juggling parts around if you piss me off enough.

by

With MechWarrior 5 finally launching, I find myself torn.

On one hand: a decent MechWarrior game basically guarantees that I’ll pry open my wallet and fork over the cash. And there’s few enough games in the past twenty years that fit that definition for me.

But on the other hand: my policy towards Epic exclusives tend to be No Steam Version Equals No Purchase. Of course, someone had to go and test this resolve by launching the kinda game I’ve been waiting eons for….. bastards.

by

The Lie That Helped Build Nintendo

I’d really like to imagine that the banker must have shit himself when Bergsten bro he’s the topic of the 10,000 units. But I reckon things turned out pretty well for everyone in the end, lol.