this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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chapotraphouse
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No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
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Also touchscreens are worse than tactile buttons for almost all purposes
They're good at sheer versatility in a small form factor, so I don't mind it on a phone that I use for a bunch of different shit.
Putting them in cars should be completely unironically a capital offense though.
Yeah I drive a 10 year old Toyota Hilux. It has a touch screen but only for the music selection, which I'm fine with. But the AC, the volume knob, hi-range, etc, it's all satisfying toggles.
you had me at "Musk's head gets put through a lunette"
Especially in cars, jfc
Trying to memorize the exact series of areas to poke at to open the window while driving without looking at the screen and crashing into a wall
I know right. Imagine trying to control galaxy class starship in the middle of a fight, inertial dampeners on the fritz, and all you want is a fucking solid warp button you can press to bug out of there.
Star Trek was good, but it gave generations of nerd boys the wrong ideas about so much shit
Oh don't worry, in anything resembling a real space fight everything will happen either so slow there will be time for everything or so fast no human will be able to react anyway. Most likely both, at different phases - space is fucking big and everything move really fast.
I know right? Try doing high g evasive manoeuvres whilst an enemy ship peppers you with hypervelocity kinetics from 10,000 klicks away.
Lost Fleet series have many interesting fleet encounters where everyone moves with 10-20% c and protagonist who commands entire fleet of something over 200 ships just going to nap or pray or eat (or all three) in the hours between few milisecond long encounters in the same battle.
That sounds great.
Iain M Banks had great ship battles. I really enjoyed the battle with the needle ships in the Algebraist.
All the ships are at 99% c and two fleets are converging on one and other. The whole battle hinges on predicting what the other fleet will do and spraying smart munitions everywhere to do the actual killing.
Everyone is swaddled in shock gel and there are no buttons whatsoever.
Basically the same in Lost Fleet, they try to predict opponent moves and react to them in the shortest possible term before battle to concentrate fire where the enemy is weakest and remove their own ships from places where enemy is about to concentrate fire. Weapons being pretty primitive compared to Culture, some particle beams, missiles and swarms of ordinary steel balls (for depleting shields).
Also, while protagonists are usual murican-like corrupted-but-lesser-evil shitlibs, opponents are surprisingly not any proxy for China/DPRK/Russia/USSR, but Real Ancaps, which means they have worst traits of military junta, gigacorpo-turned-state stage of monopoly and mafia in one package.
Story itself is a sci-fi take on classic Xenophon' Anabasis, with protagonist being essentially isekaied war hero from century ago.
That's why Paris designed the Delta flyer with old school switches, he's a knob-head.