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...

Okay so, part of this is knowing your group.

Are they the kind of people okay with a relatively straightforward plot (see bad thing -> stop bad thing) or do they want more agency in approaching situations? Are they interested in being the collaborative team of friends & allies, or are they the kind of people who like chaos gremlins who'll throw wrenches into things? Do they chase side quests like catnip, or get frustrated if anything takes them away from the central plot? Are they typically suspicious of NPCs, or will they leeroy into things?

A lot of this is things that will develop in Session 0; despite the name, it doesn't need to be one session. Other bits are things you will learn over time. For example, I've learned that for my group, if I want an NPC to survive a fight to reappear later, they need to either leave early or I have to throw something really big at them to make them back off - otherwise, they will move heaven and earth to ensure everything dies. My players have learned too: Our chaos gremlins have learned to moderate their gremlin-ness so they can have fun, without frustrating others.

These are pretty independent of themes or setting, so you can figure them out regardless of what kind of campaign you run!

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.

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.

Hey! Thanks for the rep for !worldbuilding@lemmy.world . We are, admittedly, not as active as Reddit's equivalent due to Lemmy's fairly niche nature, but more are always welcome.