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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Fuses don’t dissipate electricity. They pass electricity and then blow when exceeded. Blowing is either flipping off (like your breaker) or breaking (like replaceable fuses). The point of a fuse is to be the weakest link so if a surge occurs it doesn’t damage equipment or wiring.

    In the case you described, they were looking for a load (where energy is used or dissipated to do work) to absorb that much energy at once. There might be a fuse that could withstand that kind of load; there was wiring that could afterall. But if the shield system could absorb the full power of an overloaded warp core, it might not have needed one if there was no downside to overcharging it.


  • The Bajoran economy is not post-scarcity

    So I understand the above items (latinum being the most important and fungible) being non-replicatable. But at the point where Starfleet is permanently on your station and has easy access to both replicators and infinite energy, why aren’t the Bajorans also post-scarcity? You’d think that tech, while powerful, is a far more important thing to trade for and Starfleet has an incentive to uplift societies it isn’t at war with to prevent scarcity wars and instability.








  • Neato@kbin.socialtoRisa@startrek.website🤔...
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    1 year ago

    Battlestar Galactica also had a good idea: the bridge where they commanded battles from was deep inside the ship. Unlike in Star Trek and Star Wars where the bridge is at the front top, Battlestar’s bridge is nearly impossible to target from other ships. This is especially baffling for Star Trek because they used screens, not windows.



  • We don’t really understand consciousness well. Current theory is that it’s the weird self-awareness that comes from a human brain. Even sleeping our brains don’t really stop. It just stops conscious thought. Which is a confusion of terms, really. So we don’t really know.

    Here’s a more terrifying question: every time you lose and regain consciousness, is it you coming back? Or is it a new version of you with the same memories? What if every time you went to sleep, you effectively died but you’d never know it because the only version of you that you can actually be certain exists is the one right now?

    To put the lie to the transporter-consciousness debate: a clone in the transporter either works one of two ways: 1. it creates a new consciousness with the exact same memories and there is no way to tell the 2 apart from the outside but they are clearly different consciousnesses i.e. different people, or 2. transporters kill and remake people constantly birthing new consciousnesses every time and a clone is not that remarkable as it’s just creating 2 instead of 1 this time.


  • I haven’t seen that episode. But it kind of defeats the traditional explanation of how transporters work. Unless we go with the “we can exist as beings made of energy” which is always a popular type of alien or alternate being in Star Trek. And the classic transporter accidents don’t make sense, then. When a transporter clones someone, who is the real one and how would you figure it out? Most of the accidents only make sense if you treat a transporter as a digital device that moves data.


  • Neato@kbin.socialtoRisa@startrek.websiteAm I? Who knows
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    1 year ago

    Not quite. You’re describing our brains as a ship of Theseus, which is fairly accurate. But our consciousness is always on while alive. Even asleep and in near-death or temporarily dead our brains don’t fully stop or die. Though our brains don’t actually replace neurons quite like they replace all other cells. When neurons are damaged, those pathways are lost. Our brain is redundant enough that rarely manifests as a total loss of ability. And when it does, our brains can eventually route new pathways. If enough of these are damaged at once, it can totally change a person’s personality.

    But transporters turn matter into energy, those patterns are transmitted elsewhere, and energy (or different energy if stored in a pattern buffer) is reassembled very much like replicators. In this case the entire brain and body is stopped, destroyed and re-created. This is, for all intents and purposes, death and cloning. People have trouble with this because to anyone NOT transported, it looks identical. But the person absolutely stopped being alive and a new one was borne that thinks it has always existed.

    And Star Trek backs it up. The classic transporter accident that makes a clone of someone? If the transported person is still the same consciousness, what is the clone? Clearly that person isn’t controlling 2 bodies with 1 consciousness. Which is the “real” McCoy? The answer is whichever wasn’t disintegrated, or neither if they both were as part of the transporter process.


  • Neato@kbin.socialtoRisa@startrek.websiteAm I? Who knows
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    1 year ago

    Transporter accidents prove transporters work this way and are murder machines. To an outside observer a perfect clone is the same person, impossible to differentiate. But to the individual’s experience, they die every time they are disintegrated in a transporter. It’s a new consciousness being created when reassembled that thinks it’s continuous. It’s hand-waved away because it’s how it’s always been and transporters are a key part of the Star Trek setting.



  • They’d be insane to not make it backwards compatible. It doesn’t seem like they are drastically changing the form factor and they made a lot of games work with both Switch and WiiU so it would make sense for Switch2 to work with all Switch games.

    If it’s NOT backwards compatible, people will only buy it for Switch 2 games. If it is backwards compatible, people may buy it just go get a better Switch for playing Switch 1 games and older games in better quality. I.e. a Switch upgrade.