Mechs.

Look, you so much as mention mechs and inevitably there’s someone who pops out of the woodwork with “But muh tank superiority, muh square cube law, muh vulnerable legs-”

No. Stop. Cease. Sometimes stylization beats out absolute realism, and in this case I just happen to really love big ol’ stompy boys.

My sci-fi setting can trace its roots to sketches I used to do years ago in class. (Some of those sketches have been updated into 3D models, and yet more are still ‘canon’ to the present iteration of the setting - if not necessarily released.) I found I could scratch out what was on the board and draw sci-fi equipment at the same time, so I started dragging a sketchbook around to class with me.

But the nature of the setting has radically shifted. It’s gone from a “20 minutes into the future” series featuring a stateless army dedicated to preserving world peace, to a ~200ish years in the future setting featuring conflict between various interstellar states following a bitter war across the solar system and an examination of the ideological differences driving them.

Ultimately, though, it’s just an excuse to make up lots of near sci-fi equipment.

Not sure I fit any?

Like, for one, if anything I’d call myself a Storyless Architect: I’m not building a setting so a story will eventually merge from it, I’m building it because I enjoy creating stuff. It’s a hobby!

For the other setting, I’d say I’m somewhere between the Architect and the Philosopher: The broad concepts and major aspects of the setting were self-emergent, but the grew up in parallel with some key themes I wanted to put out there.

As long as it’s for an original setting of yours, then it’s just fine to post!

Some of it is definitely phrasing. (Just referencing your recent post again, I initially thought it was supposed to be a “prompt” post, where others would be asked to submit their own ideas as well, but after reading it I came away with the impression it was a lore post from your world.)

But some of it is also just… like you say, people love to show off their own stuff! I’ve tried to overcome that impetus by actually reading and trying to provide thoughtful questions on others’ work, though I’ll admit I’m not always the best at it either.

In previous communities, driving engagement (particularly with others’ posts) has always been a tricky thing. What works for some people, doesn’t for others; at one point, we had a user who asked others to provide two responses to others’ ideas for each thing of their own they submitted. Some people liked it, feeling it encouraged engagement; others did not, because they felt it encouraged very simple, low-quality responses to meet the “quota” - or discouraged them from posting their own things at all!

I do actually like some of the ideas you’ve proposed here. Some of them may struggle in what I will call the “content aggregator site” format (i.e., as opposed to forums where you had continuous running threads). But that’s not a knock on the ideas, nor does it mean they’re not worth giving a shot.

All sounds pretty good!

I also kind of imagine you could control the micro mechs from SIM. It’d look really, really strange from the outside - sudden bursts of movement, followed by a long pause as the pilot gives them the next command - but feasible?

Good stuff overall! Usually slow-than-light travel and this kind of exotic tech don’t marry together, but they’re really well done here. It sounds like (from this and your other comments) that the amnions can either subjectively speed up their passenger’s perception - making the trip pass more quickly - or slow it down, effectively letting them think at hyper-speed.

How quickly can a passenger return themselves to a nominal “real-time” experience if the ship, say, detects something notable that is worth slowing down to investigate?

I’ll have to put that on my to-read list. I’ve heard of it, but never looked that far into it.

Funnily enough, I actually liked the Death Star in the “opposite” way - what they did with it in the old EU, as opposed to the Disneyverse. But yeah, it’s very emblematic of the entire setting and has lots of different angles.

I think this is one of my favorite kinds as well. The places that don’t directly monologue their worldbuilding at you but just immerse you neck-deep in it. Some people don’t even seem to realize this is worldbuilding, unless it’s being explicitly framed as such!

But it’s really the best when you come away with an understanding of the strangeness of the world it’s set in, just from ‘journeying’ in it.

Point #1

…ah, race conditions. My old enemy.

What’s impressive (or scary, depending on your point of view) is how much of this rings entirely true to my real-life experiences. “The correct method is a pain in the rear/would require rework, so we’re going to take the fast and dirty method” is something I’ve watched have catastrophic consequences down the line. That, and peeling back the lid on the “new standard” and finding a hodgepodge of old standards, legacy code, and poor decision making is painfully real.

The question I have now is, if they actually tried to rip the bandaid off and replace the whole thing, would it be a political problem?

As an engineer, I have two responses to this. The first is that this is an incredibly cool bit of worldbuilding; you’ve done your work to actually show how such a critical vulnerability might arise and how it works.

The second, of course, is awestruck horror that they would let such a critical system exist without checking or validating inputs. It sounds like if a malformed but non-malicious message was sent, then the pilot would get a rejected dispatch message… but what would happen if a new dispatch needed to be issued mid-flight (e.g., due to weather or airspace disruption)? Would a different system handle that?

Either way, really cool addition.

So, uh… explain to me why we can’t just use invite codes without having the servers closed off? Like yeah, sure, that does make the invite technically redundant, but psychologically it’s still there while retaining openness.

Yeah, I’m going to be in agreement with your friend.

It’s also worth noting that even within “inorganic” species, there might be stark differences in their internal composition (and thus view of themselves). Are these an animate silicon crystal, or a “robot person”? The former might think of themselves as “the solid”, in contrast to liquid-containing non-silicon life.

They might also (in either case) use a name which reflects their local name for whatever the dominant element or feature is their makeup, similar to how we refer to Earthly life as “cellular” life because it’s made of cells. That said, “Mechanoids” as a foreign nickname or slur might be a fun thing.

Look at the number of faiths in the world today. Look at the number of sub-groups under each of those faiths - Sunni, Shia, Sufi and Salafi Muslims. The three branches of Buddhism. The almost innumerable smaller faiths that exist in the shadows of the handful of massive ones. Consider how the implementation and legal rights of those faiths exist between various governments, sometimes even in the same region.

Now advance all that a couple hundred years in the future.

Add several dozen star systems and thousands of space stations, many of which could modestly-sized region on their own. Now think about how many faiths and interpretations there likely are out there.

That is the answer. It’s nigh-impossible to count the views on it. Legally speaking, the UNHA’s view is more that both mysticism and non-mysticism are permitted, so long as it doesn’t prove harmful to onesself or another person. (The definition of “harmful” is, of course, subject to near constant legal interpretation.)

Well, that’s an interesting question.

1. So this is frankly the easiest part. It wouldn’t take much to design a flight suit that fits these requirements. In fact, for bonus points, they could probably put together a flight suit that would protect against supersonic flight and at sub-orbital altitudes. It wouldn’t be much for shimmying down chimneys in, but like, you could get up and walk in it. Most likely flight controls would be primarily by neural interface.

2. Very doable. The stack would have to get stuffed into the sleigh during travel.

3. Now, this much is very doable. It’s going to be somewhat larger than the typically-depicted “Santa sleigh”, and not particularly stable in flight. But with some computer-controlled thrust-vectoring thermal jets - the same propulsion technology used in most VTOL aircraft - a flying “sleigh” could be accomplished.

4. This, on the other hand, is trickier. Reindeer definitely exist, and with some neuroelectronic surgery could even be given implants that’d make them tolerant of flight. But physically, the air velocity, low pressure, and temperature are still going to be very poor for Reindeer, and building each a flight suit with life support would probably make them too heavy. So I’m going to cheat and say, in fact, that they instead produce nine vaguely reindeer-shaped flight pods that are anchored to the sleigh by a high-tensility harness. In this way, various flight systems could be offset into the ‘reindeer’ modules.

5. This is actually pretty easy. Just strap a light to the front of one.

Okay, so we’ve got our sleigh, Santa, and reindeer (kinda). What about bonus stuff?

• Well, ‘Santa’ is a person, so talking to children (and eating cookies and milk!) are pretty easy.

• Getting into the house… well, if he can get out of the flight suit, it’s probably doable.

• With considerable AI assistance, Santa could theoretically institute a digital analysis network that analyzes kids based on all available recorded data. It’d not be foolproof (and also viewed, in-universe, as a huge government overreach and civil rights violation). But it’s doable.

This is actually a pretty big endeavor, as you’re calling in some fairly high-end engineering firms for the flight modules. A lot of it is going to need to be adapted from high-end flight systems. But it is doable.

There’s one big problem though: For all this effort, Santa is still bound to one world… and humanity is firmly an interstellar species in this setting. Getting Santa to go faster-than-light? That’s a whole different question.

This is a big thing killing my interaction with Lemmy as well. I want to like it, but I drop into a discussion thread and the top-engaged/boosted comments are spicy and almost designed to promote maximum anger. And I feel like, “Do I really, really want to spend significant time writing out a deeper comment to engage with this community…?”

Especially the politics on here. I’ve seen some wild takes going completely unquestioned.

It took me a few re-reads to track all the relationships between the proper nouns in this, but I think I’ve got most of the relationships pretty figured out now. With that in mind, a couple questions:

• Did the apparent ‘death’ of the Al’Modian deities have any significant cosmological impact in the world? Beyond the purely social ones you discuss here, I mean. Any major changes in ‘how things worked’?

• As various Al’Modian nobility broke from the empire (either out of personal vendetta or pragmatism), how were they viewed by their newfound allies? Conversely, how did they view their new allies? Did they fear they might be turned on, or was it a fairly ironclad alliance?

Hah, fair enough. I thought it was just a joke about the “Ohio is terrible” memes, but that works too.

Easiest answer: Someone deployed a bioweapon. Maybe a “rabid runner zombie”-style bioweapon, or something that induces psychopathy. They’re not a critical threat, as long as the wall is watched. But with civilization kind of broken down, nobody wants to risk a real outbreak.