StarDestroyer.Net BBS

It's behind them in that shot, but they appear to have leveled out by the time they're making their run over the dreadnought. Worth noting that as the bombers get destroyed, each starts trailing debris and falling screen-down, confirming that they a) had not achieved orbital velocity and b) were be...

That's if the bombers were in orbit , which they aren't. They're over a planet, but they aren't orbiting the planet. The physics of objects released from such a craft are essentially identical to those governing bombs falling out of a bomber at any altitude. All that is necessary is that some of th...

I don't think you've done any sort of math to back that assertion about the strength of planetary gravity. Assuming an Earth-like planet, the gravitational force at 2,000 km above the surface is still ~60% of the force at the surface. Earth's moon orbits at nearly 400,000 km, and is still quite secu...

The dice were hanging in the Falcon's cockpit since ANH. They were never pointed out as super important, but they were absolutely there all along. Also, I don't understand the complaints about the gravity bombs "in space". They were over a planet, remember, not in deep space, and under th...

End of the Jedi We literally see the Jedi texts in the Falcon - Thus Yoda lightning stuck a tree for nothing which makes Luke and Yoda look like idiots. All to somehow establish they want to get rid of the old but... they keep the old books anyway ? - Obvious attempt to leave a backdoor kinda under...

The dice were hanging in the Falcon's cockpit since ANH. They were never pointed out as super important, but they were absolutely there all along. Also, I don't understand the complaints about the gravity bombs "in space". They were over a planet, remember, not in deep space, and under thr...

I quite enjoyed it. Rey, Kylo, Luke, and Poe all have real character arcs where they learn and grow something important. Finn and Rose's subplot with the casino planet and Benicio del Toro's character was a bit of a far tangent that dragged on more than I'd've liked, but it wasn't enough to ruin the...

Complicating this issue is that there's an anecdotally documented effect where close genetic relatives (e.g. siblings) find themselves overwhelmingly attracted to one another on meeting as adults. It's called genetic sexual attraction, and appears to be largely defused by a psychological effect call...

Rocket, no, because you still need reaction mass to shove out the back end. It's theoretically possible to make a jet that operates off of electricity, though I can't think of any electrical mechanism that can heat air fast enough to push a plane into the air.

I teach community college in a part of the SF Bay Area that has large Muslim populations and enclaves, and I have a substantial number of Muslim students. The majority of them are drastically westernized compared even to their parents. It really doesn't take much in the way of media and peer group i...

As an atheist, you find it awful that Muslims are moving into a bunch of countries that are majority Christian? That seems pretty suspect.

From the New York Times: Mr. Corker had pushed to scale back the tax cuts in the Senate bill in the wakae of a report from the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation that projected the bill would add $1 trillion to deficits over the course of a decade, even after accounting for economic growth. ...

Is it even possible to resurrect Durkon? Laurin seemed to imply that when Nale killed Malack that resurrecting Malack would be impossible, justifying disintegrating Nale's body as eye for an eye. On the other hand, Resurrection explicitly says you can resurrect an undead that has been destroyed and ...

It is worth noting that the shamans of the Garou are desperately held back in WoD by the fact that the sacred spaces and ley lines which allow them to perform rituals, create fetishes, and so on are largely corrupt where they haven't been destroyed totally. To an extent, all Garou can be shamans, to...

There's another big problem you omit, which is that modern student tests are designed to assess student subject-matter competence, but are being used to measure educator competence and school effectiveness. That's not what they're designed to do. It's like measuring car safety design by looking at s...

As far as I can tell, it was almost entirely the wing of Twitter that waits for Trump to do something embarrassing leaping into action. In fairness to that wing, he does such things frequently, and they are rarely wrong.

Abe emptied his food box first, in fact.

The shooter was a white male, so of course it's a "mental health" issue. Of more concern to me are emerging reports that the shooter lied on his background check form when buying a firearm, saying he had no disqualifying criminal history when he absolutely did. Is...is that it? Does the ba...

The more I follow this story, the more I realize that, despite getting less fanfare initially (because it was kept under wraps by the investigation), the Papdopolous story is indeed the bigger news here. First, because while Manafort and Gates have only been indicted, Papdopolous has actually pled ...

PSA: do not rub ammonium spirits (the usual contents of "smelling salts") on your nether region.

I have to say, as "big, yuge" smoke screens go, releasing the JFK files is a pretty good choice. It's something no one can criticize on political grounds (one of the few things I've ever heard of President Trump doing I didn't oppose). And it gets a lot of people talking about something o...

Interesting note, this Forcecage looks to be ~20ft square. The spell rules for 3.0 and 3.5 allow a 20ft cube of half-inch spaced bars, or a 10ft solid one, so it seems like OOTS-verse uses a slightly different version of the spell. Otherwise picking the spawn off through the barrier would be fairly...

Holy shit they completely ripped off that game designer. No, they used a similar idea. A complete rip off would include the 20,000 year old civilization. And in DSC, tartigrades aren't actually required for it. It's a similar idea, but you cannot copyright ideas. He has no leg to stand on. Are you ...

Turning in 3.5E does have a d20 roll to see how powerful (in hit dice vs. cleric's level) the turned undead may be, but a 20 isn't "automatic success", in the sense you're thinking, Ralin. The problem is that the table ranges from cleric's level - 4 HD (at a roll of 0 or lower) to cleric's...

I would've thought the vampire spawn's attack would apply a negative level to Vaarsuvius, so it'd cost them a spell slot rather than just reducing max HP.