Join us! It’s a nice group. Chill and comradely. Good people.

For Trek i generally do recommend starting with TNG and not TOS cause the original is 60s as fuck

Absolutely seconded. It’s the best entry point into Trek.

I blame Joss Whedon.

The Enterprise finale is… not good. If you’re a big Tucker fan like I am, it will really piss you off. Frankly I think it’s worth skipping entirely, something I wouldn’t say about any other Trek finale except of course for TOS’ “Turnabout Intruder” (which wasn’t intended as a grand finale but sadly ended up as one). The first half-ish of season 4 was actually pretty good, which just made the latter half feel even worse than if it had been all bad from the start. “Chef” in the series turns out to be Commander Riker reliving the historical events on the holodeck while stationed on the Enterprise D. He’s cosplaying as the NX-01’s chef so he can interact with the historical characters.

Sometimes I think about doing a fan edit of the entirety of Enterprise to whittle it down to a good miniseries on the birth of the Federation. There’s enough in there that one could probably get a solid 12 episodes from the series. It’d jettison the entirety of the temporal cold war of course. I’d focus only on selected scenes from the better character-building episodes, keep much of the Vulcan stuff, and keep the events surrounding the nascent Human/Vulcan/Tellarite/Andorian alliance and a hopeful-tone ending.

And you can be damn sure that I’d keep as much Shran as I could. Jeffrey Combs is one of the best damn things to happen to Trek and I wouldn’t dare disrespect his love of the franchise or his work ethic.

Tell it that it should get EMP’d.

Why do you think that 100 mile number was chosen in the first place?

But yeah the hydrogen tech for vehicles very much feels like they just don’t like the idea of people plugging their cars in at home instead of going to their lil fill-up stations where they can get a cut of the pie.

Definitely. Basically all commercial hydrogen comes from a process called methane steam reforming (so-called “grey hydrogen”). You take high-temperature steam and use it to crack natural gas (mostly methane) into carbon and hydrogen, usually heated by way of just burning the natural gas since you already have a supply of it. A big problem is that the oxygen from the water and the carbon from the methane likes to get together into CO2, which is just vented into the atmosphere. Fossil fuel companies are deeply involved in hydrogen production and spewing out the most famous greenhouse gas as a side effect.

Sometimes they make a show of trying to capture the CO2. The marketing calls the hydrogen recovered this way “blue hydrogen”, but it’s very uncommon. “Green hydrogen” is from electrolysis which has no CO2 emissions, but nobody uses that industrially, it’s just a PR gimmick to try to convince people that all hydrogen is clean. The power requirements are absolutely ridiculous for the amount of fuel you get from it.

Ironically, one of the few truly green portable fuels is synthetic methane using something called the Sabatier process. The short version is that you combine electricity, water, and CO2 over a catalyst. The output is oxygen and methane. If the CO2 comes from the atmosphere it’s carbon-neutral. This is what most practical Mars exploration missions are planned to do. Mars is still close enough to the Sun for solar power to be practical. Combine solar power with subsurface ice (which is proven to be everywhere on Mars) and Mars’ almost-entirely-CO2 atmosphere, and you can manufacture as much methane and oxygen as you want. The stored methane and oxygen could also work to power methane fuel cells in case of dust storms that would block solar power, and of course the oxygen would also be used for breathing.

NASA’s Perseverance rover actually has an experiment on board, a small-scale Sabatier machine tech demo that worked perfectly. Human Mars exploration has a whole heap of technical challenges left to be solved but at least manufacturing fuel and oxygen isn’t one of them.

Even space agencies hate dealing with hydrogen despite the extremely high fuel efficiency, because it’s a nightmare to handle and requires ridiculous design compromises in rockets. Hydrogen-fueled rockets have a limited number of times they can be loaded and unloaded (for example, scrubbed launches due to bad weather) before the hydrogen embrittlement makes fuel tanks too compromised to use safely.

The Columbia disaster happened because foam insulation (needed to keep the hydrogen a liquid in warm Florida weather) came detached from the big orange propellant tank and smashed heat shield tiles. That kind of insulation just isn’t needed with propellants that stay liquid at higher temperatures, such as kerosene (very common) or methane (more recent but gaining popularity). The whole space shuttle design was wildly unsafe for numerous reasons and it’s a miracle that more astronauts didn’t die in them.

I fondly remember bringing an extended-family thanksgiving dinner conversation on current events to a screeching halt a few years back. Lots of Canadian MSNBC-addicted libs talking about how the glorious Winter War where the brave smol bean Finnish soldiers repelled the mean old Russkies. I immediately piped in with “Why are you celebrating Nazi Finland fighting against our allies in the Soviet Union in WW2?”

I haven’t gotten any invitations back from that side of the family in years. Thankfully.

I’m starting to wonder if we’re in a more 1900-1910 type of situation.

For some reason, lots of Japanese companies are in love with hydrogen despite it being the dumbest possible solution for compact mobile energy storage. The auto companies in particular keep trying to push it. I’ve been wondering if it’s a combination of trying desperately to recoup some R&D spending before the patents expire, the Japanese corporate culture of “the boss is always right”, and senior leaders who won’t risk the personal embarrassment of having backed the wrong horse for their entire senior management career and admitting that hydrogen fuel is a dumb idea.

Now watch the US government go the extra mile in cruelty and force that kid into the foster system rather than leave them with the stepmom.

I’ve been to several bathhouses with a group trough arrangement.

Thank you!

What is Anna’s Archive? What’s the context here?

Oh yeah. This is PNAC v2 for sure.

Oddly enough I don’t feel as worried about it all this time around. The PNAC crowd were certainly as brutal as Trump&co, but they were also unified by a competent cabal, and facing a non-unified world with dramatically inferior military capabilities. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bolton and the rest had a single vision and had practical plans to try to accomplish it.

Trump&co are just winging it. No plan, just vibes. They’re also facing off against a less dis-unified world that’s also in far better shape to oppose the United States.

Make sure to start using the phrase “Venezuela has the right to defend itself” IRL in the coming days.

Reddit seems to be trying to kill this story. It’s huge, yet seems absent from the bigger gaming and technology subreddits.