Looks so cool!

Ah, but they gave him back story and motivation.

Spoiler warning: He wasn’t purely evil for evil"s sake, he just tried to rebuild society for the scions of humanity, and had already discarded the normies (can’t remember the term they used) as primitive, albeit barbaric, creatures.

The genius of Bester is that he was so self assured and uncontested, making him almost cartoonishly evil, but also that he was so essentially human. Driving home the major themes of the series: the dangers of unchecked power, the human drive to self determination, and that wielding power over others perpetuates a cycle of violence.

I have no experience with your particular printer, but I’ve had an issue where the bed was very sensitive due to being the edge of the adjustment range.

The bed screws on the Ultimaker 2 are manual screws with springs, and you can level the bed throughout most of the screw length. Having it at one end means the spring is quite loose, and things like weight and nozzle pressure affected the flatness of the bed.

So if you have an elastic tensioner for your bed, maybe set it at higher tension for a more robust flatness?

If you’re always adjusting in the same direction though, it’s not that, and is probably a software error where something doesn’t count Z-position right. Unless of course your printer is somehow getting longer?

Theoretically you can put any amount of energy into a laser, as long as you can redirect and synchronise waves. And as several stars and black holes have gravities and stuff that can affect the starships, it seems evident you should be able to charge a laser enough to damage any USS starship.

And as the phase cannons seem to output 80-500 GJ, you should be able to match that fairly easily with 10 grams of matter annihilation or a second of about 10e-15 of the energy output of a sun type star.

Interestingly enough, phase modulation of a laser weapon makes more sense than of a particle beam (which the phaser weapons are), and also you don’t suffer from recoil like from phasers.

Maybe the last bit is disgusting, much like certain earth beverages, and the cup is to protect you from the dregs?