darthgently

I think it is quite a bit different than the V-22. More powerplant redundancy, and appears a lot more aerodynamic with more wing/lift area in forward mode than the V-22. Also, I think the torsional loads may be more spread out with possibly less focused gyroscopic inertia during mode change. I really like the way the aft end of the motor nacelles become landing legs. Finally, the four smaller props vs two large V-22 props give better ground, tree, and powerline clearance. Admittedly, I'm thinking "flying car" more than "cargo/troop hauler"

Maybe you are thinking too much based on too little actual information. There is so much we do not know. The problem with the logical left hemisphere is that it tries to fill in what it doesn't know with something that "makes sense". This is fine if these gaps are labeled internally with "maybe", "guessing", "hypothesis" etc, but if left unlabeled they end up feeling like logically implied facts, which they are not. I am constantly backtracking in my thoughts making sure to properly label unknowns as unknowns to keep me out of trouble. I learned the hard way, lol, it's been a long road

Hopefully they follow up with the latest in a short sequel. I'm just going by the trailer being a year old. It does look excellent. Most of the Gravitas vid are on YouTube, going to look for it... Full documentary on premium:

You previously defined living things as "unnatural". Which implies possibly the most interesting definitions of both "living" and "natural" I've come upon in the handful of decades I've been literate

So obvious once you see it done. Technical ecstasy here

I don't think that accounts for the necessity of innovation and commitment that will be required. A micromanaged society is very brittle. An internalized ethic of team effort will emerge the more survival is paramount, but squashing the individual is the last thing you want to do in that situation as it is from that freedom that solutions emerge A young child too young to have the cognitive capacity to deeply empathize is not the same as a sociopath. Way to broad a brush. And I've seen empathy emerge in children much younger than the norm. Individual differences

Piaget would point out that it is not through maliciousness that younger children are egotistical. They simply do not have the cognitive capacity to be otherwise at that point. Being able to imagine another's pov is cognitively demanding. It is important that during their younger years that they are treated ethically as that modeling will click once they are able to understand Interesting theories. Something about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence comes to mind. Smells like hermeticism wherein the world is viewed as a prison to be escaped from. I cannot see it that way. I'm grateful to exist. What a time to be alive!

Much more complicated than I realized. Woolly sheet. So apparently they are executing the chip code on another processor now with lots of new jumps to the scattered code chunks. Extremely impressive given the constraints Much more complex than switching SCE to AUX

I thought you meant what jurisdiction for a second. Bad comedians don't have venues, just dad jokes and puns

Well, there is a lot of electron exchange in a thermite reaction (and many other reactions!), but yeah. Reminds me of the translation of "ball-point pen" being "atomic pen" in China (not sure if still true)

Yes, but if executable code ends up in a bad location and executed or a branch occurs based on garbled conditional arguments it could maybe brick or get stuck in a reboot loop. I'm sure they thought about all this, I'm just curious if they were able to do anything more long term than hardcoding around this specific region given the unique constraints

On Android also. I'm a bad comedian, sue me

Or, we could admit we really don't know how all this works and not try to micromanage existence itself from an ivory tower. This isn't a single player game of Sim-Earth. Solutions will emerge regardless of central planning's wet fever dreams

Huzzah! I don't know how much elbow room they have but it would be great if the firmware could automatically detect emerging bad locations and add them to a list with no need to hardcode in firmware and update when this inevitably happens again. Depending on the location affected they could be locked out next time

Wow, how long did it take to find that crane emoji? Points for effort and attention to detail!

This just makes my point. These gymnastics make the premise a big yawn for me. I'm weary of deus ex machina alien tech and such just to support a "cool idea". Good sci-fi runs at a deeper level for most readers and movie watchers. The formula that goes "someone or group gets super powerful tech somehow but to keep it from being too easy here are some arbitrary limitations on the tech" is worn out for me. I am admittedly a hard sci-fi fan where the tech is 99% believable or plausible in the nearer future and the main driver of the story is not the tech but rather what has always driven good stories from ancient times to the present. I just don't find "can control gravity" and "turbo fans" a plausible combination. But I'm operating from the premise that you pose these topics to get feedback for something you are working on and providing what I hope is useful feedback. Maybe my premise is completely wrong in which case I'll tone it down

Ha ha. Wind wasn't really a consideration. I'm thinking a winch on one side jamming, or a cable snapping, or the remaining fuel sloshing in resonance to whatever motion, or the surface the whole apparatus resides on deforming suddenly and unevenly, or even the Kraken! They should definitely avoid time warp for that last one

I still see a civ capable of controlling gravity, and the implied power available to do so, as playing with fans as being like grown ups using LEGOs for their custom car air intake or steering wheel. Just doesn't click. If I was reading a sci fi book I'd probably put it down at that point

This is perfect response of the month here.

Yeah, that is the line of thought I went down basically. For a lunar base, where the craft stays on the surface, horizontal makes a lot more sense. For cargo, personnel, stability. I imagine if those crane cables get swinging for whatever reason, it could get interesting with a heavy load and mostly empty tanks. Horizontal removes need for crane, big engines can be removed and RMA'd (ha), tanks converted to useful space etc. Given the huge lack of urban crowding on the Moon vertical architecture seems very premature if not required. Just saying

What if lunar starship landed horizontally?

Don't forget thermal depolymerization where one converts waste plastic to fuel with enough to spare to run the process and get plenty of usable "diesel" to run most diesels enough. There is a group on some island in the Caribbean running their generators on washed up plastic from the sea (the currents are right to gather a bunched dumped from central and south America or something like that). There is a YouTube vid on it, will try to find... Can't find specific vid, but searching on YouTube for "plastic to fuel" returns a véritable plethora of results

But much steeper

I'll just put this here instead of picking an existing topic because crewed Mars is its own topic really

Everyone wondered what happened to Blockbuster. They got a big dark government contract and are doing just fine. Though most of their margin in that contract is late fees