Zonetrooper

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...

Something weird is going on with that link too. I can't see any comments, even when I try to show all comments.

Hey! So at the time I wrote this, we were at Level 3 (the campaign had started at L2).

It's definitely less of a slog now, partially because of characters having more options and partially because of tweaks I made (such as allowing 5.5e's weapon specializations to help the martial out). That said, some characters do still statistically roll sub-average, and I can tell it frustrates the players at times. Just last session, for instance, one of our casters rolled near-minimum damage on 4 out of the 5 damaging spells he cast.

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.

Hard question, because different characters fit well with different groups.

Some groups appreciate the very flawed characters and chaos gremlins who will throw a spanner into the works when everyone is least expecting it; some get frustrated by that. Some like edgy, anti-social, or anti-authority characters who chafe at any kind of order or social organization. Some groups just want the very different, but ultimately compatible characters who become fire-forged friends along the way and get annoyed by deeper intracharacter incompatibilities.

It also depends on where you fall on the conflict <-> cooperation scale. I've played a sociopathic necromancer who looked down on all the other PCs, but stuck along with the party because he had good reason to. I was careful to never actually obstruct other players' goals or actions, but there was plenty of acerbic banter and sneaking around to be had.

Consider this even moreso if you have a television in the house. "Silly cat, I can't bring the sun and birds back to the porch!" you say, and then turn on the magic window to a realm of sunshine and animals at any hour of the day.

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.