Recent content by tomBitonti

Isn’t this a matter of materials technology? An obsidian toothed sword does vicious cuts on unarmored and lightly armored targets. The teeth shatter when a “hard” armor is struck. A big issue for swords is the tradeoff between hardness and flexibility. Hence forging which has different...

New to the thread. Apologies if this has been covered. Considerations: Relative hardness should matter. Striking a golem with the a weapon of an unsuitable material should have a chance of breaking the weapon. Skill should matter. A weapons master should know how to defect blows with a...

The title says nearly all of it. Is the bottom banner ad no longer closable? I can’t find a close control on it. Thanks! TomB

It seemed that she was aware of it, but still has episodes. TomB

That’s the thing. This doesn’t seem, to me, to be a hard decision. The actions were necessary to save the lives of millions of people. Maybe not humans, but I don’t see how that matters. On a quasi-military vessel, the decision seems simple, and not very hard. One should have sympathy for...

I really liked Murderbot and Andor. S1 Foundation was good, but I couldn’t get into season 2. SNW is mostly great. I feel like S3 isn’t quite as good as S2, but still mostly good. S3E1 seemed very rushed. I did not like the twist at the end of the latest episode. And don’t understand the...

I thought that Earth geostationary orbits were quite high. Something like 37000 miles. Satellites in low orbits whip around every few hours or less, way too fast to be stationary. TomB

There are stationary orbits around every planet. I guess “geo” might be off, but the rest is fine. A low “orbit” could be stationary, except it would require constant acceleration and might not qualify as an “orbit” in normal usage. It would be a circular path that maintained the same...

The sequencing needs the ensign to leave after finding the bodies before the doors seal. TomB

I guess I’m confused: Torsion experiments do prove something about gravity. Double slit experiments prove something about the character of light. Attaching two springs and comparing that to the individual springs proves something about springs. Would you not consider particle deflection...

We used to do simultaneous resolution (lo, decades ago) with initiative used to declare actions. The GM was responsible for figuring out what happened, and for giving players an opportunity to adjust their actions according to things happening. I really miss this style of play. The whole...

I’m thinking it’s more complicated than this. Don’t we need to take into account the surface area of the star? Which is a function of the radius. Also, the radius of the planet’s orbit will matter. TomB

Yeah. See my edit. Thanks! TomB

While I have nearly 100% in agreement with your posts, to date, I have at least one disagreement with the above post. One big use of AI is to predict protein folding. I would argue that that is a scientific application, one which has huge commercial applications. TomB Edit: We should...

Curious. But, a little more than simple slots. What is a “story driven” slot machine? TomB