Search results

Did they use Maggi onion soup for the dip, though?

Durian is pretty much a love or hate thing. I tried it in Indonesia but the effect was like a sort of onion-flavoured custard, and didn't do a lot for me. It was only the one cultivar, though. No weapons, flammable liquids or durians allowed on the train.

Yes, I remember the great NZ marmite shortage. My folks live just outside Christchurch but I was living in Blighty by then. I went back to visit around 2013/2014 and large chunks of it were still looking quite post-apocalyptic. They also nearly got burned out in the 2006 grass fires. I seem...

I could see it working. In related news, I found Vegemite at Asda a few days ago, so I bought a couple of jars. Supply here in Blighty is pretty hit-and-miss these days, and the local heathens eat some other stuff called Marmite.

Not sure where you'd go about getting Rendang in Dunedin, mostly what you would get in an Indonesian restaurant is Kalio, which is part-cooked Rendang, just down to about the consistency of an Indian curry. Rendang is not all that hard to make, though, just time-consuming.

You might or might not like Rendang then - it uses a lot of coconut milk. Coconut milk is used all over south east asian food and seems to be a love or hate thing.

Rendang starts out with a lot of coconut milk in the recipe - about two cans per kg of beef - and you have to boil it down to quite a dry consistency without burning it. The last few hours consist of simmering it over a very low heat and stirring it every 10 minutes or so until it's dry enough...

Rendang - my better half is from Indonesia. This is just a stock photo, but it's fabulous. Trouble is that you have to boil it down at a very low heat, so it takes about 6 or 8 hours to make. https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/world-best-foods-readers-choice/index.html Bonus Rendang...

Still very much a thing here on Pom Rock, but the local fish and chips are way too fatty for me by and large.

I do wonder about the point of portals. Mechanically, they define certain routes that can be taken, so you can control sandbox movement. From that perspective, it helps with the logistics of a sandbox. If you have a galactic empire with ships that can warp anywhere then you have a logistics...

Making telepathic capabilities detectable and shieldable is definitely a start. You could also have critters like the Yoli that makes an appearance in Schmitz's Company Planet that can act as a psionic guard. You can make capabilities like reading thoughts not 100% reliable. It might only get...

I was more thinking of designing exploitable loopholes out of the rules so you don't have to use lazy tropes like omnisicent psi-cop services to keep munchkin players in line. You could certainly have psi cops, or even just ordinary cops with psi shields. A psi spook service or psi branch, or...

It's not necessary to have all possible psi-effects matched by technology; it just doesn't introduce balance issues if it does. Once you have capabilities unique to psionics then you have to start applying the munchkin test. Think of the most annoying, entitled powergamer you've ever played...

That's wrong to begin with. The term doesn't make any representation about the technology used; you can do a burn with ion thrusters, for example. You're still pulling up straw man arguments and trying to put words in my mouth. I've never stated any assumption of using chemical rockets. A...

My rule of thumb about psionic or similar abilities is that if that they are equivalent in power to mundane things then there should be no balance issues. For example, if a psionic attack is as powerful as a mundane weapon then the equivalent capability can be achieved with an armed NPC. If...

Funny you should say that. I think the hardest part of 3D star maps is visualising. Having a 3D tool would help immensely, to the point of making it practical, although you'd then make your game reliant on it, which means you would need to be able to support desktop and mobile platforms. The...

All it needs is a tug that can impart a few m/sec of delta-v to it early enough and it will miss its target. If the tech exists to accelerate it by multiple km/sec or more then the tech exists to nudge it by less than 1/1000 of the delta-V you needed in the first place. Although that's back to...

That's reasonable and passes a basic smell test. In the Star Trek canon (TOS at least), a Constitution class cruiser like the Enterprise has enough firepower to trash everything on the surface of a planet. If you assume that you can make a battlefleet capable of attacking a planet, then all...

I think that's the point. You're designing setting conceits. If you want to answer "Why don't folks use dinosaur killers on a regular basis?" then you just tweak the capabilities of the societies so they can't. I just used some basic physics to show a few lines of argument that could be used...

The question I put was more along the lines of "Is it cheaper to do it some other way?" There's a lot of handwavium involved in the assumption that you can accelerate an asteroid to relativistic speeds in the first place. One could do the maths, but it will come up with a very large number for...