Small horses, like small dogs, are herd animals, are utterly convinced they are ten times their actual size, and will show this off at any opportunity.

Whoever said this doesn’t know either setting very well. Borg become resistant, not immune to weapons they encounter. Starships were still perfectly capable of damaging Borg ships with the same weapons years later.

The problem is that the two settings operate on entirely different scales. Individual Turbolaser bolts are something like thousands of 24th century Photon Torpedoes? Even if we assume the Cube can resist 90% of the energy from each bolt, it’s still having a very bad day.

“Blame England” is basically the “Blame Canada!” of history discussions.

I’m wondering if the remaining fuel in the lower segments of the ship gave those sections more momentum, causing the whole hull to pivot around those heavier sections (especially with the loss of thruster capability being discussed).

With the Space Shuttle, this tendency was largely offset by the delta wings also causing greatly increased drag at the rear of the hull, but with fins folded the Starship doesn’t really have this. That plus the seeming loss of control due to thruster malfunction…

Yep. Someone else mentioned something called the “Typhon Pact”, which I didn’t know about but sounds reasonably close to what I was thinking.

I’d be kind of looking at a Cardassian-led counter-federation. Maybe the Gorn, maybe some others.

What would be interesting is if it weren’t an overtly evil “rah, rah, we gonna beat up the UFP and reclaim our glory!” so much as a “with the Klingons firmly Federation allies, the Dominion crushed, and the Romulans devastated, the Federation is unquestionably on top… and that kind of scares us. We’re going to band together because otherwise, the Federation could do whatever it wanted with us.”

It’s called the double ear mutation! It’s a known recessive gene that appears in some cats.

“Mixed” art feels like you’re going to be perpetually having to police how much any given submission has been modified before it becomes acceptable.

Just cut it off, period.

Like the other comment says, concrete is rocks of various sizes (called “aggregate”) mixed with a cement and other additives to change its particular properties.

The cement is the really important point, because once water is added to the cement, it undergoes a chemical reaction which hardens it. Saying cement “dries” isn’t quite correct - yes, it stops being wet, but some of the water actually ends up incorporated into the molecules of the final cement. This is also why cement is really hard to recycle - you have to undo that chemical reaction, as opposed to asphalt which stays the same material.

Fun fact: When concrete is mixed at a big plant, it begins curing immediately. Concrete being carried in those big mixer trucks needs to be delivered before it cures in the truck!

I’m not honestly sure. Asphalt (or, more properly, asphalt and gravel as a mixture, which is what is mostly used as a road surface) and concrete both are pretty ‘hard’ materials.

Specifically talking about asphalt vs. concrete:

• Asphalt is relatively cheap vs. concrete. This is partly because asphalt is a whole lot easier to recycle than concrete, which is almost un-recyclable, but also because asphalt is a relatively “simple” material - it’s mostly petroleum byproducts and gravel.

• Concrete doesn’t grip very well, compared to the relatively textured surface of asphalt. Especially when wet! This is why you often see concrete formed with “ridges” or “bumps” cast into it. However…

• This also makes concrete noisier and bumpier to drive over, making drivers less happy. It’s why it’s often used for short, low-speed uses like driveways, parking lots, or side streets.

Just about the only thing concrete has going for it is it’s endurance, which it definitely wins handily.

Every few years another engineered road solution is conceived - I’ve seen variations that would use glass which could be ‘re-fused’, concepts for recycling plastic waste, and many more. Most of these run into the issue that they’re either less ‘grippy’, or that they simply cost more even accounting for the longer lifespan.

This is the cool stuff I come here to read. Very interesting!

Definitely enjoyed the first one, didn’t notice any problems with it myself. What was remarkable to me, is that he manages to make the three-dimensional combat easily follow-able, something I see a lot of authors struggle with.

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

Here’s a picture of a to-scale model to emphasize what the other comment is saying - Ingenuity isn’t that small, and also remember that Mars’ surface gravity is only about 40% of Earth’s.

So by all means correct me if I’m wrong, but is this really that bad?

Like, people always freak out about “turning one falling object into many” because they would still share the same collective kinetic energy, but smaller objects are far more likely to burn up high in the atmosphere rather than penetrate for a destructive impact.

The article describes 37 boulders, each with a ~15kT kinetic energy. We have record of meteor events in this magnitude, and they aren’t terribly destructive. Nor is it more than a footnote in terms of Earth’s daily total energy budget; the Earth isn’t going to be cooked by a meteor-swarm of this scale.

It’d seem to me that the biggest risk would actually be peppering Earth’s orbital region with far smaller objects that could still damage satellites, no?

c/worldbuilding

Thanks for the shoutout! It’s going to be a slow climb up, but I’m looking forwards to growing this place as well.