Too nerdy for me. Instantly falls for the biggest nerd SM chapter. Eh, could be worse, could have gone in for the Mechanicus.

I suspect you’re right. But there really is never a good way to tell with these kinds of experimental techs. It could be a runaway chain of improvement. Or it is probably even odds that there is a visible and clear decline before it peters out, or just suddenly slams into a beick wall with no warning.

We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. The adaptability alone would probably be very handy for them, instead of having to deal with whatever random species’ drones they have laying around, they could specialize much more efficiently. They were interested in 8472 for exactly that reason IIRC. And it’s not like it is a hassle to add the implants, they have all kinds of nanite delivery systems. If the eggs were produced from an assimilated source then they would presumably already be implanted before being laid. But it wouldn’t be surprising to see them produce some kind of industrial hatchery that automatically implanted them if they had to come from unassimilated hosts for whatever reason.

Makes sense, it’s basically just a Bing wrapper.

Pretty hard to detect. But… probably easier than finding the petunias I guess.

There is an argument, but I don’t think it’s convincing. The single best way to cripple their most deadly foe (so far) is to be less evil and make everyone’s lives less shit. They could hamstring chaos by simply ceasing their eternal crusade and focusing on improving the average peon’s life. The Imperium as a state only exists because of a “well-intentioned” checks notes… galactic crusade of conquest and omnicide against any non-human. In pretty much any other media they are unambiguously the bad guys, having other bad guys to fight doesn’t change that. They are literally a characture of every evil space empire. We just get fed so much propaganda that it starts to work a little.

To be fair, the timeline fuckery all only started because that tome cop tried to prevent it. He’s the reason she’s a temporal disaster to begin with.

Remake it from the ground up instead of using the busted Gearbox port, and I may be interested.

I just popped a pimple that’s been bothering me for weeks on my penis FOR THE GLORY OF THE EMPIRE!

The hippocratic oath, in this case. Medicine is all about risk management, the worse the “disease,” the more tolerant we are of side effects for the cure. Pregnancy and birth are still pretty traumatic events that, while much safer than they used to be, are still dangerous. Female BC just has to be less risky than that. Male BC on the other hand, has to be as low the risk for a man impregnating a woman, which is to say, almost zero. Pretty much any negative side effect is worse than that, so it’s very difficult to pass. I would gladly take one with comparable side effects to female BC, but sometimes unflinching ethics are inconvenient. Better than the alternative, but still.

33 here, but honestly, TNG, VOY, and DS9 are definitely older Trek. They were the second gen, but still all felt like a close iteration from TOS. It was when I saw Enterprise that I went all…

I agree, but it isn’t so clear cut. Where is the cutoff on complexity required? As it stands, both our brains and most complex AI are pretty much black boxes. It’s impossible to say this system we know vanishingly little about is/isn’t dundamentally the same as this system we know vanishingly little about, just on a differentscale. The first AGI will likely still have most people saying the same things about it, “it isn’t complex enough to approach a human brain.” But it doesn’t need to equal a brain to still be intelligent.

They have outright said that bug fixing has been difficult because they are dead set on keeping the promised warbond schedule. That definitely implies the two compete for resources, even if it isn’t a complete overlap. That said, I’m not sure how delaying this warbond, which is presumably just about finished, will help that but I would prefer a delayed warbond or two if it helped clean up the issues.

Agreed, but at the same time if feels wrong intuitively for that to do more damage than a direct hit. Feel like there should be a system to let the round actually penetrate a small bit before the shrapnel goes off if you hit the target in a weak spot.

I think so long as you maintain consciousness that issue is fairly null in this particular circumstance. There’s lots of tolerance for changes in thought while maintaining the same self, see many brain damage victims. So long as there is minimal change in personality, there are lots of other circumstances that have a stronger case for killing one person and having a new person replace them due to change of consciousness, imo, I don’t think most people would consider a brain damaged person killed and replaced by a new consciousness, or a drug addiction with radically altered brain chemistry, etc.

I don’t see an issue with that. A prolonged brain surgery that meticulously replaces each part with a mechanical equivalent in sequence. Could probably remain conscious the whole time.

Couldn’t find a sexy crab so just went with a sexy squid, huh?

Yes, the energy of the explosion is a function of the total energy between the output of the laser and the shield, specifically the shield energy being pointed at the laser origin. That’s why they randomly hid some maximum powered, monodirectional shields facing up when they fled the attack. So that even the relatively weak personal shields would still have a large impact. In general use, the shield energy is being projected in all directions, so the amount facing the laser origin is very small. IIRC, an average powered lasgun hitting a personal shield creates an explosion that can range between roughly an HE hand grenade and an HE naval shell. They only went up like nukes because the Harkonen were using the lasguns at max energy, and the shields were tweaked abnormally. And as another comment says, the actual point of the explosion is at a random point along the beam.

Arguably, patches started even earlier. It wasn’t uncommon to release another whole title that was basically a bug/balance patch. See Japanese Pokemon Blue, and all the various Street Fighter 2 versions.

Never made sense in the EU. You get yanked out of hyperspace way before you need to account for that kind of gravity. My headcanon was always that it’s just some spacer jargon we don’t have the context to parse. Like how a 12 second car is fast, even though time is not a unit of speed.