The Glade 4.0

Because the accelerating nature of technological advancement means that our ability to outrun old tech arrives in time to lap our probes. See: "Where No Man Has Gone Before" -- it was covered in the first half dozen TOS episodes, essentially.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Biggest sci fi pet peeve: Ships being in visual range of each other when fighting. Space is fscking HUGE.

Also, whenever a ship "loses" power to maintain life support, yet somehow still has enough energy to generate a gravity field. "Oh noes! We're running out of air, but at least we can walk around on the ship!"

Or how whenever someone goes to a new planet, they are NEVER quarantined afterward, and no one ever gets an infection from anything. There are so many microbes out there that this is, statistically, extremely improbable.

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"I've got twenty ways to tell you shut the f*ck up / nineteen of them are twenty-four bars long / the other one goes: SHUT THE F*CK UP" - Aesop Rock
"There is no God higher than truth." -- Gandhi
Formerly: Tulamian

That's something that Honorverse does really well. Missile warheads detonate at 25,000 kilometers and the biggest ones can be fired from 60 million.



Heh, yeah.. although that may be special effects budgets at work...

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'm always perturbed by non-symmetrical, off-centerline engine arraignments.

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In time, this too shall pass.

You know what else perturbs me?

Mecha

I **** hate mecha. I wouldn't really mind mecha much; they are kind of cool in and of themselves, and I really don't mind power armor; i.e. armored suits that a person wears, rather than flies or drives. They also don't bug me as much in settings like RIFTS where there are all sorts of huge monsters that try to get into melee range with them.

But when the mecha only exist because the other guy has mecha, it's **** absurd. Mecha are hugely impractical; it takes like 3 times as much power to make a robot walk at the same speed as a vehicle of the same weight would drive, they stick way up in the **** air where everyone can see them, and of course 90% of them have some huge rifle-style main gun that they shoot like a rifle.

HELLO!!! RECOIL, YOU ASSHOLES! Why do you think tanks have their main guns on the CENTERLINE! While you're at it, why don't you just ditch the mecha in favor of hovertanks and jet/space fighter planes? Then you could actually put some meaningful armor on them without having to use wanktanium to protect them that mysteriously can't be used to armor tanks in your setting. You also wouldn't need to do they AERODYNAMICS MEAN NOTHING TO ME RARRR!! thing to make them somehow keep up with fighters.

What's worse, people come up with really absurd arguments as to why they'd be uberwanktastic, most of which really come from the fact that A) they just like mecha and B) they work better in Battletech. Well no **** sherlock. Battletech is a game about giant **** robots. The rules make tanks suck so that there's a reason to have the giant robots without having people wonder "hey how come these idiots don't build tanks". That's fine, it's just suspension of disbelief, but it doesn't mean mecha are actually a good idea.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

You've both forgotten V'ger.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

I'm sorry, I've never seen TMP.

Also (? again, it's hard for me to infer the context of your post since I'm only vaguely aware of V'Ger), I took Arathain's post to mean "why isn't our first contact with aliens via one of *their* probes?"

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades