queenoflasers

Hells yeah, Mariners. I've been following this team for 10 years and I can't tell you how excited I am about this season. Wish I could watch the games, but somehow I'm in-market but Root isn't carried here, so I have to settle for the internet radio re-broadcast.

I bought Battlecruiser 3000AD. From a store. I was so excited, because the game promised all this awesome stuff you could do. I figured out pretty soon that the awful control scheme was simply masking the totally non-existent gameplay. My dreams of buying and selling contraband cigarettes (yes, that was in the manual) were dashed. It was re-released in a supposedly fixed version a couple years later, and being an idiot, I tried it again. Though that time I got Software, Etc. to take it back.

Mantis! Hot damn I loved the setting & background fiction as a kid, but I couldn't figure out how to fly that ship to save my life. Every time I warped into a combat mission, I would just sit still and fire missiles at anything that came close to me.

I played a premade Warforged in a 4th ed. one-off once. The only thing I remember about it is failing an acrobatics check and falling through a table.

@rethla: Sure, but it doesn't make sense to refuel at the Moon in that case. Why not do it in orbit? You're using fuel to land fuel on the lunar surface, which you then use more of to get out of the lunar gravity well.

The relevant quantity with regards to where you want to land at/launch from is usually measured as delta V, which tells you roughly how much fuel the trip takes. As it turns out, landing (which requires fuel when you don't have an atmosphere to brake in) and taking off again from the moon uses up a great deal of delta V for really no advantage. IIRC, the delta V from the Earth's surface to the lunar surface is pretty much the same as it is to the surface of Mars. (The fuel you used to land on the Moon is instead expended in the interplanetary transfer.) This means that refueling at the Moon doesn't really make it easier (unless we're making rocket fuel there).

@aetheldod: Launching from orbit would be theoretically easy, and there's no problems with doing it nearby the ISS (except that if something goes wrong you wouldn't really want to endanger the station). But we haven't done a whole lot with assembling vehicles in orbit to go elsewhere (partially since we don't really go elsewhere anymore). The Apollo missions were single launches but the two modules were detached and reassembled in a different configuration in orbit, which I think is as close as we've gotten. (At least, I can't think of other examples?)

This is a super interesting review, thanks. I'm always a little baffled to hear that other people (including Jeff in podcasts, IIRC) were interested in the way the modern stuff was going to unfold. I couldn't make heads or tails of the solar flare bit, and Desmond Miles struck me as a pretty dull character (even when we were getting scenes with his father), but without the benefit of the interesting settings the historical protagonists get. But I'm a giant history nerd, and am largely interested in the games for that reason, so I suppose I'm a niche case.

@l4wd0g: Yeah, it's super that you have that line about Nathan Drake ready to go, but you should probably click the link first?