The Year is 2022.

Soviet colonies in Tau Cetai are being contested by the Crawlers. American patrol boats putter along the endless rivers of Keppler B while their oil derricks pump crude oil for shipping back home.

Welcome to Deep Blue Sky. The invention of the Hab-Calibrated Quantum Portal (HCQP) in the 1970s on the tail end of the space race altered history permanently. A portal device requires vast amounts of waste heat to be discharged when activated, and works best when scaled up to a sufficient size.

If I was writing Discovery, the Star Trek show, well...firstly, I wouldn't. It's a terrible idea, conceptually. Prequels are bad.

But if I was writing it, I'd definitely try and make the future different. The Discovery arrives in the 34th century to discover that teleporters are so long ranged now that spaceships are as obsolete as horse cavalry are today.

So, how complicated IS Fallout PNP's combat?

Lets take the most complex possible event: A crit fishing bitch with a bozar antitank rifle versus five very unlucky slavers.

The slavers are level 3, have 40 HP each, and are clad in metal armor. Our heroine is level 4! She has 41 HP and has a total 100% in Big Guns. So, she spends 2 of her 10 AP to drop prone, then 6 AP to fire a burst of 10 rounds at the five bastards. They have 15 AC so she has a 85% chance to hit (100-15) and 4/30 DT/R. Being prone bumps her up by 20%, so she's at 105%!

I have this theory called the humanity of deathclaws theory and basically, if you don't get *why* talking deathclaws are rad and cool, you don't deserve fallout, and yes, I'm talking about you, CHRIS One of the core themes of Fallout is dealing with the ramifications and consequences of humanity's actions - the whole game world is completely shaped by humanity's choices in a way other settings...aren't. There's a supremacy of man over nature in Fallout.

I'm sorry, I'm thinking about how amazingly perfect a metaphor the house elves are in Harry Potter? When you're young and rich and live in the imperial core, you think all the things you can buy at the grocery store ~just got there~, like magic? but then you grow up! Oops! All slavery!

Sci-fi authors know that each kind of space drive has a sexuality and listen, buddy, orion drives will fuck you, and it'll feel good, but orion drives only see you as meat Ion drives are meek, fusion drives are sleek and rich and kinda arrogant, fission drives will eat you out

See, 40k has the problem where, while the Imperium creates many of its own problems, a lot of the shit isn't their fault. Chaos IS real and IS evil, the Tyranids don't care, the Necrons, the Orks...they're all reasons to have a massive war machine unrelated to humanity's actions So, there's plenty of room for fashy fans to go, "Well, see, the Imperium HAD to do that!" because of the extremis of the situation.

Gears doesn't have that problem. The COG *made* the Locust, then proceeded to fail fighting them for years, blew up the world, continued to fail!

ok, actually, a superhero narrative running from the 1930s to the modern day with unbroken continuity and irreversible death, with the ramifications of altering tonalities (increasing Blue levels, basically) being a part of the story That's a big ass project, lol

The Warrior's Apprentice has, by far, one of my favorite examples of an sci-fi war: It's between the Felicians and the Pellians! Who are the Felicians and the Pellians? Are they two planets? Two STAR EMPIRES!?

They're two nation-states on one planet in one solar system. And there are neutral powers on their homeworld!

Basically, it's like...imagine if the war between Russia and the Ukraine was also being fought in the asteroid belt AND involved blockading the wormhole exit to our solar system.

My favorite thing in Progenitor is it has a surprisingly huge roster of, like, AWFUL villains, horrible slimey monsters. Look at this guy! Fuck this guy! But the funniest thing is all these horrible criminals who do awful things with their amazing powers?

They...uh...they don't actually change history. At all. Because it turns out supervillains are kind of irrelevant to the real world!

The thing that drives me absolutely fucking wild is that some of the more enduring complaints about The Last Jedi are all things that were actually in The Force Awakens, not the Last Jedi.

Big example?

Finn's a janitor! Wanna get mad at how Star Wars took Finn and made him into a joke character? Maybe don't get mad at the series where he has a character arc, a cool battle scene against his nemesis, declares himself a rebel, and generally is DOING THINGS?

Reading the Homeworld rules, how to bring about certain situations: Lots of interceptors slowly killing an isolated capital ship!

Scale differences mean that shooting it is diff 0. If the interceptors are just average (I.E, not PC hotshots), then they brute force it. There are ten interceptors. They take 9 diff 0 shots, meaning that each hits, doing 1d damage, with automatic +2 momentum (meaning they can do 2-4 damage per shot!)

So, you roll 10d, look for the twos - each of those does 1 damage! In one round, you've done 2 damage!

i hate how every single fucking nerd who doesn't like SNW doesn't like it for the worst, silliest reason imaginable, and not for my correct ones Here's my list, in no particular order

1) The gorn characterization is the most right wing shit since Carpenter Street the episode that said it's okay to torture people, you know, if things are important. UTOPIAN FUTURE!!!!

this youtube video is looking into the mind of a madman and a villain (gary guygax) DO NOT LOOK!!!!!!!! diseased mind...wickedness overflows from the skull

So, there's a ship building engine for Homeworld! Lets put it through the paces!

It's ten years after Landfall and Kiith Somtaaw technicians are looking to build a strike craft to protect their mining interests in the dangerous out-systems around Hiigara. We start with the chassis - the Acolyte is a heavy fighter.

COM: 8 | COMP: 8 | ENG: 8 | SEN: 8 | STR: 7 | WEP: 8

Now, we can add 5 points. They're tough, hard hitting little fighters, a bit sluggish...so!

COM: 8 | COMP: 8 | ENG: 8 | SEN: 8 | STR: 10 | WEP: 10

I've already started coming up with additional/alternative rules and Modipheus is so fucking lucky that the discord link they e-mailed me doesn't work or I'd be bothering them SO MUCH The thing I think is really missing is squadrons, for fighters. It's a huge important thing in Homeworld 1 that strike fighters work *as groups.*

Now, all PC fighters is great, because you're a squad of hotshots who can absolutely W R E C K S H I T

I promised a show, lets give you a show!

GREAT WASTELANDS
KSD 1216 (GSY 9510)

The Khar-Braajik - a brand new Vengeance class assault frigate designed for Fleet Research after examining captured Taiidani ships - is on long patrol for enemy resourcing convoys. Her captain is the recently decanted Brevet-Commander Daakita Somtaaw, of the family Kalim. A genius level tactician in simulations and wargames, he was put into the cold storage bays...the idea being that any capital ships would be built on arrival. That assumption was wrong.

So, friends, family, loved ones...I am about to head to work in, uh, 20 minutes.

But this thread is going to be my SCREAMING because, for the past 23 years, I have been obsessed with Homeworld, an RTS from 1999.

...that just got a TTRPG adaptation

It looks like The Perverse Approach has won my patreon poll, so I wanna talk about the absurd amount of mental work I've put into this PROFOUNDLY SILLY FTL SYSTEM. Like, why did I do all this work, no one will care!? So, the basic idea is there's an engine that shunts a certain amount of mass in a radius into "Subspace" (hehe.) First, the radius and the mass limits are inversely proportional. So, a small radius means larger mass - thus, small, dense ships can be yanked into subspace!

people keep telling me that Fallout 4's shooting is better than Fallout New Vegas which, one, install mods, there are lots of mods that fine tune and improve NV's shooting and, secondly, it could be the smoothest, funnest FPS since Half Life 2 and I still wouldn't give a shit The enjoyment of New Vegas shooting combat is 50% the visceral feeling of gun, bullets, loot, exploding gore, and 50% the context - exploring, questing, caring about characters, being with characters like Veronica or Boone, being in a world that is coherent and narratively rich

So, in the Homeworld setting, the main focus is on the Kushan, who are a species of peeps who are exiled to the distant desert world of Kharak 2,000 years before the game begins, and the story is all about their slow journey home! Homeworld Cataclysm is the sequel expansion that then answers the immediate questions of "okay, what now?"

cause in HW, Kharak is destroyed, the Kushan return to their long lost homeworld of Hiigara (hence, uh, the name of the game) and have smashed apart the galactic Empire.