#WarhammerFest2023 is live! And so are my reactions to it in this 🧵. So far my main takeaway is that I wish I got more sleep. But the event has just started...
God damn! The Tyranids got their hands/gestation pools on more Eldar DNA it looks like. This rules big time.
This is mostly wrong, but it's wrong for some pretty interesting reasons. A 🧵⤵️
Modern navies favor multirole vessels and fewer classes, but this is a (mostly) recent development stemming from post-Cold War spending. Even so, the US Navy for example is bigger than you think.
Right now, the US Navy has somewhere around 25 classes of warship.
Include non-commissioned ships (auxiliary, cargo, etc) that number rises to closer to 50.
Add in the weird shit (barracks ships, crane ships), and the reserve fleet, and now we're probably well past 150.
Generally, the larger the Navy, the more classes of ships they can afford to field, even within a single ship type. (cruiser, frigate etc).
Bigger military budgets make it easier to handle the logistics and associated headaches of managing multiple designs.
Modern #StarTrek is weird. It's far from a disaster, but it also feels like nobody in the writer's room cares about the same details I do. Not that that's necessary for a good episode, there's been plenty of those, but so many little details in the background make me cringe.
The whole refit/retrofit thing with the Titan was an annoying example. Words were tossed into a script without a great understanding of what they mean (refit and retrofit are different things guys!) and then we got a bunch of tortured worldbuilding to try and explain it all.
"Frontier Day" is probably going to be another one. The way it is described in the show is so completely ridiculous (the entire fleet assembled in one place) that I figured it had to be hyperbole or something but characters go out of their way to repeat this detail over and over
Oh my god I figured it out and I have to tell everyone before they erase me from the timeline.
SECTION 31 CONTROLS THE UNIFORMS
That’s how they’re funded. That’s how they maintain their power.
Every few years, boom, introduce a new uniform and skim money off the top .
There probably hasn't been a real Starfleet Clothing and Personal Issue Equipment Department in centuries. They took it over long ago. And you know it's all a sick game to them, they want to see how many times in a decade they can get away with introducing a new uniform.
And the final insult, just to rub salt in the wound, Section 31 just uses a boring black uniform for themselves. The ultimate power move.
I recognize this might sound counterintuitive, but the “Alien” universe is big enough that not every story needs to revolve around the Xenomorph.
There’s an interstellar cold war, powerful megacorporations, synthetics (sorry, "artificial people") and more.
Here's some ideas:⬇️
"Deadwood" style drama about a company town on the frontier developing from a measly outpost to a fully fledged colony. Settlers have to deal with the perils of a "shake and bake" colony, corrupt company execs, issues with the terraformers and encroaching hostile nations.
Spiritual successor to "Firefly" following the "space trucker" crew of a run down merchant vessel plying the space-lanes of the Network looking for work wherever they can find it. Unfortunately much of that work involves hunting down artifacts and information for Weyland-Yutani.