cerebrate

cerebrate, 14 days ago

@nyrath @Dandelion

I hope there'll be a transcript.

cerebrate, 26 days ago

@nyrath @JeremyMallin

Theory: aerodynamic-appearing is strongly correlated with "visually attractive".

It's visual language for "we can spend money on excitingly curved hull plates and unnecessary fairings, etc., just so we don't have to look at a starship that looks like a boiler factory had a terrible accident when attempting to mate with a steamroller".

(Which in turn is symbolic language for "we are rich and have a high culture, unlike you primitive savages from beyond the Marches".)

cerebrate, 26 days ago

@nyrath @JeremyMallin

Today, for example, we put curved, as anti-industrial/functional-as-possible-looking cases on all manner of things that aren't intended to ever move, because good-looking can sell a million units.

Apple spent decades beating the entire market and turning Everything Is An iPod In The Future into a trope by turning "humans are basically magpies where sleek, shiny things are concerned" into their core marketing strategy.

cerebrate, 26 days ago

@nyrath @JeremyMallin

Side note: one factor in naval architecture is trying to minimize the number of curved hull plates needed, because they're more expensive than flat, and increasing the number of curve dimensions increases the cost disproportionately.

In the #eldraeverse, the IN uses sweepingly curved hulls and elaborate brightwork to make a deliberate statement of "If we had budget to spare for this, just imagine what the working parts are like."

Naked frames and greebles look cheap.

cerebrate, 26 days ago

@SkipHuffman @nyrath @JeremyMallin

Same with steel ships. I believe the current standard is to try to keep the percentage of curved hull plates required down to 15% of the total or less; and within that percentage, to strongly prefer simple curves (i.e., those which can be made through line heating and rolling) over complex, multi-dimensional curves, which are much harder technically to achieve.

cerebrate, 26 days ago

@SkipHuffman @nyrath @JeremyMallin

(Sadly for those of us who prefer spheres to cylinders in spaceship designs. Teardrops are right out!)

cerebrate, 26 days ago

@SkipHuffman @nyrath @JeremyMallin

On the one hand, in the near-future with current-type drives, that's certainly true; on the other hand, as drives get more and more SFnal, it becomes less of a consideration.

On the gripping hand, though, I observe that even though painting an airliner imposes real additional fuel costs to operations, airlines don't choose to save money by flying naked hulls. Even freight-only lines like Amazon Air. Evidently branding gains outweigh fuel costs.

cerebrate, 26 days ago

@SkipHuffman @nyrath @JeremyMallin

So I wouldn't be at all surprised to see that not-all-that-far-into-the-future Interplanetary Express will happily eat the resulting fuel costs of shaping their Whipple shields into a fastest-rocket-in-space look and painting racing stripes on them if it makes them stand out to people looking out hab windows, standing in boarding galleries, shipspotters, people looking at their brag sheets, etc., etc.

Branders gonna brand.

cerebrate, 1 month ago

@nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja

Being who I am, I’m increasingly inclined to write the IES article on social failure modes of space habitats: to wit, that the meme which states they require tight social control to function basically makes them catnip for all the authoritarian personality types in the area.

cerebrate, 1 month ago

@nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja

Apart from the, ah, joyful societies authoritarian leaders usually create, of course, the real social failure mode is when the guy in charge of the strict social control comes up with the space version of the Four Pests Campaign or making steel in backyard furnaces and the population are unable to tell him he's full of crap before everyone's dead.

("Complaining about the smell of the air is unmutual, citizen!")

cerebrate, 1 month ago

@isaackuo @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja

Well, then, just to grind my axe in a less expected direction, let me take a moment to point out that we can see exactly the same failure modes in corporations with the equivalent strict "social" control, too.

(In this particular area my politics is that "any system isomorphic to sticking your hands over your eyes and fingers in your ears when confronted with feedback is a very bad system indeed" 😊.)

cerebrate, 1 month ago

@60sRefugee @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja

Once in a much earlier iteration of this topic, I opined that the problem was the assumption of single-provider life support such that any violation of strict discipline could theoretically take it out - which is not only bad social design, but really terrible engineering design.

cerebrate, 1 month ago

@60sRefugee @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja

Say what you will about anarchic space cossacks, but it's really hard to screw up the air terminally in a space city with three to five commercial life support companies and dozens if not hundreds of belter rednecks with their own algae banks gurgling away.

cerebrate, 1 month ago

@isaackuo @60sRefugee @sudnadja @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch

That said, it's nice to have a backup. Not practical for smaller habitats, but when we're talking cities in space, it would be awfully nice to have life support systems that are not only redundant, but where the redundant elements work on different principles, such that issues that affect one can't affect the others.

cerebrate, 1 month ago

@nyrath @Hcobb @isaackuo @MeiLin

Applying the same principles to growth-obsessed societies/peoples suggest to me that GFGS civs are acutely vulnerable to breaking down into civil resource wars - and, if you're using relativistic transports, probably the kind of civil resource wars that leave nothing behind except the Cancer Emulation Is Not A Viable Strategy Memorial Stellar Graveyard of 3162.

cerebrate, 1 month ago

@nyrath @Hcobb @isaackuo @MeiLin

(You can patch this with some notions like "every colony sends out n expeditions of its own then suddenly gets permabored with the whole idea of expansion", but like you say, it only takes one defector to blow up the whole thing.)

cerebrate, 1 month ago

@Hcobb @isaackuo

Comms density. Heading off to another star means being isolated by years of light-lag from within delta of everything interesting in the universe, and subject to permanent unfashionability.

(h/t to @cstross for this notion, or at least where I ran across it)