Zonetrooper

This. It was a golden age of information and community availability, and it's going to be hard to put that back together. Especially since the prior eras of distributed sites, we had functioning search engines.

And yeah, sure, it can be rebuilt... but there's going to be a long time of awful isolation until it is.

So. Early, early on I did reach out to a couple of them.

Unfortunately, there are some frankly terrible communities on Lemmy who engage in some pretty awful hatred and historical denialism, and they weren't interested in moving to a community that wouldn't dissociate with that, much less one that is actively run by the same people.

And like, we can repeat to the end of time that Lemmy is a distributed community and each instance's choices don't reflect on others. But the reality is that people do look at the largest instances not shutting that crap out, and it does color their perceptions.

I'm aware of it. It suffers from the same issues as WWZ. Max Brooks makes a lot of assertions, some of which are factually wrong (about topics other than zombies, I mean), some of which require the zombies to share the same oddly specific immunities to be true, and some of which is even self-contradictory. (Offhand, the bit that sticks in my mind is he completely contradicts himself about whether zombies can even climb things.)

I mean, the Zombies in WWZ basically run on magic shields to be a threat. They're utterly invulnerable to anything Max Brooks doesn't want them to be killed by.

Like, if I remember correctly, they're immune to shrapnel and bleeding wounds because "the dead don't need blood", and nerve toxins or shockwaves don't harm them because "the dead don't have a nervous system". But somehow removing the head is a 100% infallible method of killing them. What is in the head if not blood and nerves, Max?

These are creatures which casually violate the second law of thermodynamics. If they're playing by real-world physics, chemistry, and biology, they're radically less dangerous.

"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).

Because there's no community driving it to be better.

Way back in ye olden times of Reddit, when enshittification hadn't quite set in yet, there were a lot of AMAs by people who were out there just looking to talk. Sometimes they were famous people who had projects going on, sure, but there still wasn't that sense of 'I am here to talk about nothing but my project'. They might tell funny stories, give actual useful information about getting into their career fields, or answer interesting questions about their project.

Sometimes it was more random. "I am a [specific and unique job]" or "person who had [unique life experience]. AMA". Even with planned and scheduled AMAs, there was a sense it was truly off-the-cuff and spontaneous. In fact, that was the general sense of the site still - a bunch of people there to chat, not just to "raise visibility" for a project of choice.

There are a lot of opinions about why and how this changed, and there are probably a few inflection points that can be named. But the broader answer is that individuals and companies recognized an opportunity to get free advertising, and used it - and nobody was there to stop them. Nobody wanted to step up and say "Hey, we've noticed a lot of AMAs which seem to be purely for advertising purposes. Stop it."

And - I'll stress - this is not a Reddit-unique thing. Any community can die or be coopted if they're not managed. Reddit just happened to have a large enough audience to make it happen.

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...