Thrawn

Oh vehicle controls are definitely a valid issue to have with the game. They are pretty well designed for controller use. However well designed is not the same as saying they are easy to use. True 6 degrees of freedom controls between orbits are definitely complex.

Sad to have that blocking enjoying the story or more accurately solar system spanning puzzle box.

Have you played it?

Guards! Guards! By Terry Pratchett

Part of a recent habit of reading to my wife in the evening while she plays Luanti to relax before bed.

Flip version of 11. The Perl flip.

A bunch already here that I like for different reasons but I think my favorite is what they did in the game The Sword of the Stars. Sadly a case of a game with great ideas but only so-so-execution.

My memory on the mechanics might be wrong as I haven't played it for years but basically as a strategy game the fun twist is that every species has a fundamentally different approach to FTL.

You have a Lizard species with basically Star Trek warp drive with fixed speed above light speed from any point to point of their choosing.

Then you have humans that stumbled across naturally occurring interconnect lines between many stars and can travel faster along those routes by comparison to warp drive but have to travel below light speed off of those lines.

Then an aquatic species that doesn't do FTL in the normal sense. They developed teleportation but is it only for short distance. However they are able to get the power requirements down very low and rapidly repeat the process and so they flicker across space and the distance of each step gets longer the farther they are from a gravity well so they travel faster around the outside of something like a galactic cluster than in the middle of it. Reversing the normal pattern of where things get colonized.

And last was an insect species that developed ship size star gates but travels sub light to anywhere new but as long as they bring a gate ship travel is basically instant after that.

And the bonus layer is that since the game has direct ship to ship combat also in the mechanics the difference drive types have trade offs as well like the insects having extremely good combat drives since they don't have ANY FTL systems on their combat ships so it all goes to direction propulsion.

So far it is the only Sci-fi setting I can think of that has so many different ones overlapping not just something like a newer system replacing an older one.

Wouldn't be a problem. G includes the West Indies places like Trinidad which has plenty of food that originated in India. So not the full list of all Indian food but it is perfectly real and not some crappy fusion restaurant knock off.

Results of the British colonial era bringing a lot of people from India after ending the official slave trade and still wanting people to work plantations. So they switched from literally slavery to the not quite but still awful indentured service. The British would get the lowest social groups in India that functionally couldn't own property in India to sign contracts for many years of work in exchange for a 1 room shack and a micro plot of land of their own.

As AAA said in a comment beside me it isn't so much that I expect it would predate a space elevator. Simply that it is possible with current tech rather than still waiting on additional moderately likely breakthroughs like long chain carbon nanotube tether.

Also there are plenty of options to have the vast majority of the material be from space and not the surface since the core idea is a metal like copper being spun above orbital speed after being made into a full loop then used for the mag lev to keep at ground speed. There are absolutely a lot of astroids that might allow for that.

Constructing an Orbital ring and then using that to get a form of space elevator built.

Totally possible to build with our current technology but the cost if we do it pre space elevator or similar is pretty insane.

Building a ring let's us basically have a stable space side anchor at low earth orbit instead of geo sync ish like you need for a normal space elevator to match ground speed.

Even more fun is cost for additional rings drops massively and you can build them in different orientations you can get space elevators to rings without having to be on the equator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E

Last and my favorite part is the possibility of having literally trains that go up to a ring cross an ocean and go back down. Wouldn't be faster than planes but massively better cargo capacity and efficiency as well as comfortable for passengers.

While you are most definitely correct his parents wouldn't do that; schools back then absolutely did enforce that and he clearly did still go through school.

Sadly I don't but would also like to see it if it is available.

Sounds like we would have to build satellites with shades that would be selectively turned off and on as needed and only for specific parts of the globe like the overheating cities. Might be able to have some interesting effects forcing weather patterns that way.

However as you say none of that helps the ocean acidification and that is terrifying.

Right you are I missed that. So comets at least aren't workable.